It's been two months since I came to study at Dharma Realm Buddhist University. Every day, I feel grateful, knowing that many things that happen here will take a long time to really sink in within me. Though I'm not ready to share my experience here in more details, I'd like to share some writing exercises from a class. These exercises consist of my thoughts-in-progress, but the prompts may inspire you to write your own reflections. :)

Prompt 1: What “authorities and tools” do you rely on and use to decide whether something is true or false, to be accepted or rejected, to be believed or doubted?

How do I know if the source, from which I receive information, is “legitimate” or not? Habitually, I tended to accept things that made sense to me with the knowledge that I’d gained through my formal education. But this is no longer my main channel of learning. Nowadays. I find it more and more difficult to trust easily many scientific and academic studies. I would have many questions. Who funded those studies? What motivated them to select certain areas to study, but not others? Who did those studies and what methods did they use? Are there publication biases that lean more towards publishing positive or popular results? In the past, I tended to trust the studies provided by well-regarded academia and scientific institutes, simply based on my assumption that some well-trained people must have studied those areas intensively and extensively with high integrity and capability. But is this always true?

With limited human minds and tools, how can humans reach the ultimate truth, even with our best intention and serious integrity? How do I relate to the studies or teachings, which could deepen and broaden my understanding of life, but at the same time, are probably not the complete truth? For example, a river is polluted, and later we find out some factory did it. Yes, it is good to have that knowledge and to stop that factory from continuing to pollute the river. But it could be dangerous to focus only on that linear thinking that the factory alone is the problem, while ignoring the multi-linear and multi-layered causes and conditions that give rise to the behavior of that factory.

Although my past education was mostly logical and scientific, I’ll say that I now learn to absorb things through my intuition. But what is intuition? Where does it come from?

If the source of studying is from the ancient texts that have withstood the test of time and been certified by respectable teachers, I tend to trust it with a curious mind. But that tendency still comes out of my logical evaluation. In terms of intuition, I’d say that I could feel it in my body when I read or hear something that sounds truthful to me, as if a wave of peaceful vibrations run through my entire body. I could feel that it was good and wise knowledge. Similarly, have you ever experienced hearing a truth-revealing story together and something clicks in our collective consciousness? We all feel that sudden silence in the room, and something larger than us breathtakingly present....

Prompt 2: “Let your mind be unattached, clinging to nothing.” Upon hearing this line, the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, “experienced a profound awakening, and understood that the inherent nature embraces the ten thousand things.” But what does awakening mean and feel like?

Awakening, I suppose, must feel like sudden lightening of the loads on our mind, which tend to be constantly loaded with worries (no matter how subtle) about the uncertain future, stress about how to choose among infinite choices, fear of missing out opportunities to advance faster on whatever the path that one is on, or unstoppable defensive arguments against foreseeable or imagined blame that might come one’s way for certain things one did or did not do....

Through the cultivation of mindfulness and meditation, part of the mind might get a momentary or longer rest as we focus our attention on breathing or chanting. But even while I’m meditating, my mind still keeps going back to my habitual mental loads. I have never experienced how it feels when all the mental noises subside and then completely disappear for a sustained period of time... What a relief that must be without the mental loads!

Imagine after several days, even eons, hiking through the wilderness under the scorching sun during the day and enduring freezing coldness at night with heavy baggage on one’s back, one finally reaches an open grassland with tiny flowers of all colors popping out spontaneously in the midst of the vast landscape, a giant canopy of a tree lovingly waving in the near distance, gentle breeze brushing the skin, the refreshing smell permeating the air. One walks toward the tree with great joy. Paaahhh! The heavy baggage is off one’s back. What a relief! One sits down, crosses legs, and gently closes eyes... Peace! I imagine. One must experience tremendous peace after unloading the heavy baggage, physically and mentally. No worries. No stress. No fear. No arguments...

When the Sixth Patriarch heard “Let your mind be unattached, clinging to nothing,” he must have completely unloaded all his baggage and attachments off his mind. No more fear. No more seeking. At that moment, he wouldn’t be worrying about getting the robe or not from the Fifth Patriarch, or fearing how other sangha members would treat him. Nothing needs to be held onto. Let all go. Attach to none.

Many scholars and cultivators in ancient China used the metaphor of a lotus flower that comes out of silt or sludge and remains its purity and beauty, no dirt attached. Awakening doesn’t mean going to a pure land, but could happen anywhere in our messy world, like the lotus flower growing out of the silt, or the Sixth Patriarch, who was awakened in the midst of poverty, despite the chaos and danger around him.

“Ordinary people are themselves Buddhas and afflictions itself is bodhi. In one past moment of confused thought, you are just an ordinary person. If the very next thought is awakened, you are a Buddha.” The Sixth Patriarch points out that we, the ordinary people, all have the potential to be a Buddha here and now! How unexpected, each spontaneous moment has Buddha potential! Imagine we are working with radio, trying to catch the right signal of our “original frequency.” But the distracting signals, such as our mental noises or digital devices, make it extremely difficult for us to get it. Our practice boils down to finding a way to eliminate or quiet down the distracting signals so that we could be on the right channel for a brief moment, or for good!

Prompt 3: What does the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, mean by 'emptiness'? What does he not mean by emptiness? You could also explore some of our conventional understanding and assumptions of the term “emptiness,” and how these might help or hinder our understanding of Huineng’s meaning. For example, how could emptiness be a positive goal of cultivation and something worth pursuing? If there is nothing to get, why attend to anything at all?

In the English dictionary, emptiness means 1) the state of containing nothing; 2) the quality of lacking meaning or sincerity; meaninglessness. What does Huineng mean by “emptiness?”

Does he mean “the state of containing nothing?” From the text, “the emptiness of the physical universe can embrace the shapes and forms of the myriad things: the sun, moon, and starts; the mountains, rivers....empty space contains them all,” (24) it seems that “emptiness” in Huineng’s teaching means the opposite; it contains all things. And such emptiness is undefinable in any dualistic terms, as stated in the text, “The capacity of the mind is vast and far-reaching; like empty space, it has no boundaries. It is neither square nor round, large nor small. Nor is it blue, yellow, red, or white. It has no above or below, no long or short. Moreover, it has no anger or joy, right or wrong, good or evil, beginning or end.”

Thus, Huineng’s “emptiness” doesn’t mean containing nothing, but containing all things that are not dualistically defined. But if such emptiness doesn’t have any specific or fixed qualities in and of itself, does it mean that it carries a sense of “sameness?” If everything everywhere is the “same,” then what is the meaning of anything? This can refer to the second meaning of emptiness in the modern dictionary, “lacking meaning or sincerity,” or “meaninglessness.” But is that so?

In the text, it says “If you can view all dharmas with an unattached mind...The mind is everywhere engaged but is nowhere attached.” As it goes on, “Just purify your original mind so that the six consciousnesses go out the six [sensory] ‘gates,’ yet remain undefiled and do not intermix with the six ‘dust’ [sensory objects], coming and going freely, penetrating without obstruction.” It seems that such “emptiness” is not stagnantly void, but constantly moving within fullness; and yet, it flows without being obstructed by any specific sensory object. In that sense, all sensory objects are the same as the original mind. Then what does it mean?

It means the ultimate liberation from the entanglement of the six senses and all the external objects. But could there be wholesome entanglements and unwholesome ones? If we completely shake off all the entanglements, how could we engage in without attaching to activities or things? Is it possible?

I think I have already partially answered my own question, because “engage” is different from “entangle.” The word “entangle” indicates a sense of being trapped, while “engage” has a sense of free choice-making aspect. But is it worth cultivating that “emptiness?” And for whom? What’s the role of the self, with which we were born to identify? If, ultimately, there is no self, then why should I set my mind on the cultivation for nothing and for no one? Are Buddhas all the same? If they are, how could they have different names with different strengths?

Source:
The Sixth Patriarch's Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra (六祖大師法寶壇經)