The point here seems to be that the use of the senses for pleasure is
an abuse and distracts one from the illusion of the world, which itself
obscures our mind from us. The ideal man he describes in terms of one
who can remain passive even when confronted by a manifestation of good
or of evil. He commends the person who has the character to remain
aloof, even when in the Buddhist heaven or the Buddhist hell:
_If he should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to
welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestation, he
would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of
horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would
just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the
Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditioned being.22
_
Truth is elusive. It is impossible to find it by looking for it. And
the world of the senses and the conceptual thought it engenders are
actually impediments to discovering real truth. He provides an analogy
in the story of a man who searches abroad for something that he had all
along.
_Suppose a warrior, forgetting that he was already wearing his pearl on
his forehead, were to seek for it elsewhere, he could
travel the whole world without finding it. But if someone who knew what
was wrong were to point it out to him, the warrior would immediately
realize that the pearl had been there all the time.23
_He concludes that the warrior's finding his pearl had nothing to do
with his searching for it, just as the final realization of intuitive
wisdom has nothing to do with the graduated practice of the traditional
Buddhists.
_So, if you students of the Way are mistaken about your own real Mind .
. . you will indulge in various achievements and practices and expect
to attain realization by such graduated practices. But, even after
aeons of diligent searching, you will not be able to attain to the Way.
These methods cannot be compared to the sudden elimination of
conceptual thought, the certain knowledge that there is nothing at all
which has absolute existence, nothing on which to lay hold, nothing on
which to rely, nothing in which to abide, nothing subjective or
objective. It is by preventing the rise of conceptual thought that you
will realize Bodhi (enlightenment); and, when you do, you will just be
realizing the Buddha who has always existed in your own Mind!24
_
The traditional practices neither help nor hinder finding the way,
since they are unrelated to the final flash of sudden enlightenment--
which is in your mind from the beginning, ready to be released.
What then did he teach, if there is nothing to be taught? The answer
seems to be to stop seeking, for only then does wisdom come.
Furthermore, to study a doctrine of nonattachment puts you in the
compromising position of becoming attached to nonattachment itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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