In Mahayana Buddhism it is said the true Mind is empty which means it is absent of disturbances or oscillations. In contrast to this Mind, the mind we are ordinarily familiar with is adventitious. It is not the original or essential Mind (ekacitta). Mahayana Buddhism also describes the true Mind to be like empty space in which nothing determinate is present but is real, nevertheless. This is extremely difficult for Westerners to understand who expect to see Mind as something determinate; who believe an indeterminate absolute is nonsense.
The typical habit, especially on the part of Western Buddhists, is to take true Mind as something determinate. This creates a huge impasse. Such a impasse is certainly demonstrated by the enigmatic koan. When Western Buddhists attempt to unravel a koan they are always expecting the answer to lie somewhere in the world of determinate being. But it doesn’t.
Making the task even more difficult is the problem Western Buddhist have with understanding that for Buddhism, Mind is causal, never caused. Mind, in other words, doesn’t spring from biological matter. The difficulty of thinking this way is partly due to Western science’s influence which is mechanistic and atomistic; which champions materialism. For Western science, the universe cannot be the appearance and expression of a mind substance. It has even closed its mind off to the possibility that it could be seriously wrong. Nevertheless the West has had it own share of unsung heroes like the English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) who wrote:
“The universe, then, consists entirely of mind-stuff. Some of this is woven into the complex form of human minds containing imperfect representations of the mind-stuff outside of them, and of themselves also, as a mirror reflects its own image in another mirror, ad infinitum. Such an imperfect representation is called a material universe. It is a picture in man's mind of the real universe of mind-stuff.”
For me, it is much easier to see the world as a representation of mind-stuff. When I had my first awakening to Mind I was thoroughly amazed that something so pure and invisible could express itself as a world with all of its complexity beauty and terror. But it did.
Thank you for pointing the finger.
Posted by: Mistaken Moon | May 22, 2012 at 01:22 PM