Another Way of Knowing

Faith in Mind

(by Seng Ts’an, the Third Patriarch of Ch’an Buddhism)

The Supreme Way is not difficult
If only you do not pick and choose.
Neither love nor hate,
And you will clearly understand.
Be off by a hair,
And you are as far apart as heaven from earth.
If you want it to appear,
Be neither for nor against.
For and against opposing each other –
This is the mind’s disease.
Without recognising the mysterious principle
It is useless to practice quietude.

The Way is perfect like great space,
Without lack, without excess.
Because of grasping and rejecting,
You cannot attain it.
Do not pursue conditioned existence;¹
Do not abide in acceptance of emptiness²
In oneness and equality,
Confusion vanishes of itself.
Stop activity and return to stillness,
And that stillness will be even more active.
Only stagnating in duality,
How can you recognise oneness?

If you fail to penetrate oneness,
Both places lose their function.
Banish existence and you fall into existence;
Follow emptiness and you turn your back on it.
Excessive talking and thinking
Turn you from harmony with the Way.
Cut off talking and thinking,
And there is nowhere you cannot penetrate.
Return to the root and attain the principle;
Pursue illumination and you lose it.
One moment of reversing the light
Is greater than the previous emptiness.
The previous emptiness is transformed;
It was all a product of deluded views.
No need to seek the real;
Just extinguish your views.

Do not abide in dualistic views;
Take care not to seek after them.
As soon as there is right and wrong
The mind is scattered and lost.
Two comes from one,
Yet do not even keep the one.
When one mind does not arise,
Myriad dharmas are without defect.³
Without defect, without dharmas,
No arising, no mind.
The subject is extinguished with the object.
The object sinks away with the subject.
Object is object because of the subject;
Subject is subject because of the object.
Know that the two
Are originally one emptiness.
In one emptiness the two are the same,
Containing all phenomena.
Not seeing fine or coarse,
How can there be any bias?

The Great Way is broad,
Neither easy nor difficult.
With narrow views and doubts,
Haste will slow you down.
Attach to it and you lose the measure;
The mind will enter a deviant path.
Let it go and be spontaneous,
Experience no going or staying.

Accord with your nature, unite with the Way,
Wander at ease, without vexation.
Bound by thoughts, you depart from the real;
And sinking into a stupor is as bad.
It is not good to weary the spirit.
Why alternate between aversion and affection?

If you wish to enter the one vehicle,
Do not be repelled by the sense realm.
With no aversion to the sense realm,
You become one with true enlightenment.
The wise have no motives;
Fools put themselves in bondage.
One dharma is not different from another.
The deluded mind clings to whatever it desires.
Using mind to cultivate mind –
Is this not a great mistake?

The erring mind begets tranquillity and confusion;
In enlightenment there are no likes or dislikes.
The duality of all things
Issues from false discriminations.
A dream, an illusion, a flower in the sky –
How could they be worth grasping?
Gain and loss, right and wrong –
Discard them all at once.

If the eyes do not close in sleep,
All dreams will cease of themselves.
If the mind does not discriminate,
All dharmas are of one suchness.⁴
The essence of one suchness is profound;
Unmoving, conditioned things are forgotten.
Contemplate all dharmas⁵ as equal,
And you return to things as they are.
When the subject disappears,
There can be no measuring or comparing.

Stop activity and there is no activity;
When activity stops, there is no rest.
Since two cannot be established,
How can there be one?
In the very ultimate,
Rules and standards do not exist.

Develop a mind of equanimity,
And all deeds are put to rest.
Anxious doubts are completely cleared.
Right faith is made upright.
Nothing lingers behind,
Nothing can be remembered.
Bright and empty, functioning naturally,
The mind does not exert itself.
It is not a place of thinking,
Difficult for reason and emotion to fathom.
In the Dharma Realm of true suchness,
There is no other, no self.

To accord with it is vitally important;
Only refer to “not-two.”
In not-two all things are in unity;
Nothing is not included.
The wise throughout the ten directions
All enter this principle.
This principle is neither hurried nor slow –
One thought for ten thousand years.

Abiding nowhere yet everywhere,
The ten directions are right before you.
The smallest is the same as the largest
In the realm where delusion is cut off.
The largest is the same as the smallest;
No boundaries are visible.
Existence is precisely emptiness;
Emptiness is precisely existence.
If it is not like this,
Then you must not preserve it.

One is everything;
Everything is one.
If you can be like this,
Why worry about not finishing?
Faith and mind are not two;
Non-duality is faith in mind.

The path of words is cut off;
There is no past, no future, no present.

Notes

¹ Conditioned things are things that are dependent on certain conditions for their existence; when the necessary conditions change or disappear, so do the things that are dependent upon them. Just about everything we experience in daily life is conditioned, for example, our happiness at being with someone we love vanishes when they leave. Buddhism says that the root of suffering is trying to cling to things that are conditional and therefore inevitably subject to change.

² Emptiness is a difficult concept to briefly describe, but it basically refers to the understanding that conditioned things lack independent existence, that is, they do not exist in and of themselves but are dependent on other things and conditions for their existence. Being conditional, most things, including ourselves, are therefore empty of independent existence. A related concept is that of no self - although we may experience ourselves as solid and independently existing, that is a delusion, because in fact we are as conditional as a cloud in the sky and so there is actually no independent, self-existant ’self’. Buddhist meditation and other practices are aimed at actually experiencing emptiness and no self, not just intellectually understanding them.

³ When not capitalized, dharma refers to phenomena or things (the rain, mountains, an apple, etc.). When capitalized, Dharma refers to teachings of the Buddha, Buddhist doctrine, etc.

⁴ Suchness is another Buddhist term that is difficult to describe with words. I think it basically refers to reality experienced as it really is, not as we name [parts of] it, or colored by our reactions, or compared or measured to something else. That is, a flower is experienced simply a flower, not as a symbol of love or beauty, a cloud is experienced simply a cloud, not as a symbol of impermanence, and so on.