All born things are subject to entropy. Nothing created can ever escape the critical point of its own decay and final dissolution.
This axiom is not only valid for all things around you and within your body,but also your ideas, your memories, your pain and your joys, and all your desires.
All this, you perceive through your filtered present consciousness, are but positions of the Mind, your true Mind. This verse, within and outside what you presently deem as self, is possible at any given moment because of your true Mind´s suprapositional nature which is a boundlessly dynamic essence, or light, of sheer productiveness.
Without the compassionate presence of this essence of your True Mind, your body cannot take a single step, or breath, create a single thought and much less open your eyes in the morning as easy as its shuts them by nights sleep.
To one who has awakened to this light of noble wisdom, we say in Chan that Mind has awakened to its true self, its true nature.
This awakening process in its first instance is followed instantly by a gradual process and is also known as the sudden and gradual states of Bodhicitta.
The awakened mind now seeing its true self-nature (skt. svabhava), also realizes its nature to be a pure imageless light of infinite dynamic properties able to create and handle countless functions in all ten directions by sheer will and thought.
The awakened Mind realizes now the latter to be Spirit, or heart (ch. Hsin) which guides the Essence, the absolute reality behind all creation, or instant productiveness (animation). What is Unborn, realizes its inseparability from the born, or created, though where the one is real, the other is unreal and merely a formation of willed conditions on a Spatio-temporal continuum.
This partial, or gradual, realization and implementation of the Minds noble wisdom, is the gradual process of producing bodhicitta which increases in strength the more is produced. Thus one enlightenment is turned into ten enlightenments, hundred, ten thousand and so on. Which each stage, a new bhumi is entered for the bodhisattva (the carrier of bodhicitta). With each stage so is the spiritual energy attained to deconstruct the very illusion of Samsara, the sizeless and countless realities of Mara.
When all things are realized as purely a configuration of Mind Only, they are no more carriers of assumed self reality and thus the full imageless essence of Mind Only emerges in the Bodhisattvas heart/Spirit (hsin) as the sole true reality and body. This final awakening is known as anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, or Supreme, perfect enlightenment, where the mind of the Bodhisattva becomes fully One with the Unborn Mind.
Beyond this, a single true word cannot be spoken or uttered in any way. There is only light or, only Mind.
There is no assumed birth, life, or death.
If you ask the residual illusion of an awakened Mind before you eyes, viewed as a Zen Master about the reality of such an awakening, the body before you, might shout, hit your body, raise its hand, pick up an ink brush and paint a black circle on a white paper.and so on. You cannot deem it a He, or she, or even it. WHAT IS, JUST IS.
All these apparent actions, in the dynamic light of Mind Only, are sufficient proof to you, as the student of the way, to realize your own minds inseparability from the very same field, and very same functions as a proof of your own amassed, and regeneratively (by vast amounts of habit energy) produced conditions in this existence you deem life, at play in the vast kingdom of your own true Mind.
Tozen