With the coming of atheism comes also Marxism which has zero toleration for the religious mind. By the religious mind I mean direct, first-person knowledge of ultimate reality. In other words, ultimate reality cannot be apprehended by the intellect which Marx was biased towards..
If you want to call ultimate reality God that's okay but keep in mind that God is a word that points beyond words to direct experience of the absolute. Spirit and God are synonymous terms in Christianity. Spirit and pure Mind or the One Mind are synonymous terms in Buddhism. In many respects, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism are cut from the same cloth.
In Buddhism, our thoughts are nothing more than congealed spirit or pure Mind. Enlightenment is the transcendence of thought (congealed spirit) and a return to spirit or pure Mind. We detect this in the words of Zen master Huang-Po who said: “
“This pure Mind, the source of everything, shines on all with the brilliance of its own perfection, but the people of the world do not awake to it, regard only that which sees, hears, feels, and knows as mind. Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of the source-substance. If they would only eliminate all conceptual thought in the flash, that source-substance would magnify itself like the sun ascending through the void and illuminating the whole universe without hindrance or bounds.”
Key in understanding these words is to grasp the fact that Zen master Huang-Po is talking about “conceptual thought” which is little more than congealed pure Mind. For the Zen student they must transcend congealed spirit, i.e., thought—not becoming deluded in the process of gaining enlightenment.
Looked at from another perspective all congealed spirit is Mumon's barrier 関. A specific example of this barrier is Jōshū’s Mu 無. A student once asked Jōshū “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature or not?” Jōshū said Mu. Unfortunately, neither scholars nor students of Buddhism understand Jōshū’s reply which implicitly asks us to go beyond the congealed spirit of Mu—a mere thought. How else might we learn what Buddha-nature is which is uncongealed spirit?
We cannot expect to behold, intuitively, Zen master Huang-Po’s pure Mind while looking for it through the spectacles of congealed spirit or thought which filters out pure Mind which is also our Buddha-nature. We have to take off these spectacles. But how can we do it by being so attached to our congealing spectacles? Maybe a slap across the face by a good Zen master might knock off these spectacles. What then might we see as a result?
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