Wake-up Sermon, part 4
If you’re looking for the Way, the Way won’t appear until your body disappears. It’s like stripping bark from a tree. This karmic body undergoes constant change. It has no fixed reality. Practice according to your thoughts. Don’t hate life and death or love life and death. Keep your every thought free of delusion, and in life you’ll witness the beginning of nirvana and in death you’ll experience the assurance of no rebirth.
Looking for the Way of the Buddhas through corporal means is a foolhardy endeavor and will only end in great frustration. It’s like trying to discover the Dharma-mind through Karmic-coated-kaleidoscope-like lens where everything is in a state of constant change and flux. Mind Recollecting Mind alone opens the Dharma-gate to the Stillpoint of Deathless Suchness. The Way is a thought-free enterprise wherein the Mind focuses on no-thing whatsoever but Its own Nirvanic kingdom of Self—the Dharmakaya—impermeable to the icy-sting of death and the stench of ignoble re-birth.
To see form but not be corrupted by form or to hear sound but not to be corrupted by sound is liberation. Eyes that aren’t attached to form are the Gates of Zen. Ears that aren’t attached to sound are also the Gates of Zen. In short, those who perceive the existence and nature of phenomena and remain unattached are liberated. Those who perceive the external appearance of phenomena are at their mercy. Not to be subject to afflictions is what’s meant by liberation. There’s no other liberation. When you know how to look at form, form doesn’t give rise to mind and mind doesn’t give rise to form. Form and mind are both pure.
Liberation consists in no longer being subjugated to defiled aggregated existence. The eyes and ears of Bodhi are not akin to their skandhic counterparts that are attached and bewitched by the sights and sounds of samsara; rather, theirs is an imageless affair that partakes in the rich primordial pool of the Sugatagarbha. As Bodhidharma states, those who perceive external phenomena are held spellbound by what they perceive; whereas remaining unattached and no longer subjected to phenomenal-apparent existence assures quietude of Mind and a Blessed-Liberated Spirit. Essentially, when looking at the phenomenal through the imageless eyes of the Bodhichild one becomes attuned to all that is pure and thus prior to anything that gives rise to suggestive appearance and the ensuing perceptional apparatus within the clouded mind. There’s no other Liberation other than the transformative power of Bodhi that awakens the dormant Dharma-child.
When delusions are absent, the mind is the land of Buddhas. When delusions are present, the mind is hell. Mortals create delusions. And by using the mind to give birth to mind they always find themselves in hell. Bodhisattvas see through delusions. And by not using the mind to give birth to mind they always find themselves in the land of Buddhas. If you don’t use your mind to create mind, every state of mind is empty and every thought is still. You go from one buddhaland to another. If you use your mind to create mind, every state of mind is disturbed and every thought is in motion. You go from one hell to the next. When a thought arises, there’s good karma and bad karma, heaven and hell. When no thought arises, there’s no good karma or bad karma, no heaven or hell.
The children of Bodhi travel through innumerable and inconceivable Buddha-fields unhindered. They are no longer plagued with incessant mind-constructs that are useless and self-empty tools in the Land of Bodhi. When the dormant bodhi-seed is not activated one remains entrapped in the perpetual wheel of Re-genesis—endlessly creating both good and bad karma, heavens and hells through endless kalpas; when the gotra is activated, ALL karmas and places of ill-conceived bliss and self-torture are no longer relevantly realized and cease to trouble the Liberated Spirit.