A perfect teaching cannot ever be spoken, yet the great Buddha, once awakened fully [to the principle], while holding a firm position within the luminous root of bodhi, moved his mouth and smiled, offering us direct entrance into this marvelous principle of right knowledge and right release, available still today, twenty-five hundred years after his unparalleled enlightenment.
The practitioner of Zen is identical with the Buddha at every stage of the path, yet with every such stage, Mara, the great beast of countless births and deaths, is watching and whispering, so as to confuse the practitioner on matters of identity. For Mara, confusion on identity is all that is needed. From this confusion all errors arise to bring down the deathless dharma child into the loathsome dominions of demons and gods.
To the practitioner, the body of truth is the sun that by its own playful effortlessness brings light and wisdom to him. The body of birth and death, is the body of half-truths and direct lies, much like the full moon that in its inability to produce the light of truth, merely carries the illustrious ability to reflect it as many, that once beheld without the power of reason, reveals a myriad paths, filling them all with countless imaginary good and evil ghosts of the three times.
On account of deluded thinking, erroneous views and attachments the dharma child keeps worshiping the dim paths of the moon and hence its Mind keeps producing a thousand positions of birth and decay leading it nowhere but on muddy paths of further temptation and distress. When it becomes free from deluded thinking, the all-comprehending wisdom of the true, the spontaneous wisdom of the true and the unobstructed wisdom of the true, will then be manifest before it as its own real body of truth, ever available since beginningless time.
Here we need, to heed, the Buddha’s warning as to protect ourselves from the great fall. This warning implies the necessity of patience and remembrance that while awakening from delusion might come as a swift and sudden flash…
The transformation of the awakened from its former body of ignorance into the real body of
truth is a gradual one…
IT cannot be hastened by any means.