- Things known as defiled or as pure are like hair-nets [that is, wrongly perceived by the dim-eyed]; they [really] have nothing to do with such notions as birth, abiding, and disappearance, or as eternity and non-eternity.
Hair-nets (keśoṇḍukam): a sling or knot of hair, such is the nature of the hair-net—in actuality little knots all tied together to form one whole. It’s a visual-distortion, such do the dim-witted perceive the apparent conceptions of birth, ect; all these phenomenal notions unravel (like knots of hair) in time betraying their impermanent nature.
81 & 82 [Cleary]: Just as the world sees an idol as something gold whereas there’s no gold there, but gilded earth, so too do the ignorant corrupted by beginningless thoughts and mental states grasp illusory mirage-like existence as real.
Hence the old adage, all that glitters is not gold. The Lanka reiterates again and again that all phenonmenalizations are likened unto a fata-morgana, they are not truly present but just appear to be real provisionally.
- One seed and no-seed are of the same stamp, and one seed and all seed also; and in one mind you see multiplicity.
The notion of seed(s) in this context has to do with consciousness and the mind-games the One Mind plays when in pluralized mode. For instance, if a seed is planted, then the eventual result will be an emerging sprout; yet when no seed is planted, yea when the seed is non-existent, the sprout will never emerge. By the same token, when certain seeds (bijas) become activated within the Mind-set, then the One becomes Many due to its function of multiplicity. When this function ceases or never becomes activated, then it becomes a matter of seedless reality.
- When one seed is made pure, there is a turning into a state of no-seed; the sameness comes from non-discrimination; from superabundance there is birth and general confusion from which there grows a multitude of seeds, hence the designation all-seed.
Thomas Cleary sums this all up as “When one seed is pure, it ceases to be seed.” When the One Mind remains pure (within Itself), then it is once again (as stated in #83) a matter of seedless reality. In terms of consciousness, Patañjali termed it as “Seedless Contemplation”:
Seedless Contemplation is when the yogin is so totally AT-ONE with the Unborn that there is no longer any maturation of discursive thought patterns; it is the ultimate prajñā that is Self-Realized without any outflows of intellectual interference. In effect, all becomes sublimated within the Amala-consciousness of the Tathagatas.
What remains is what has always been the supreme consciousness, the amala-vijñāna, or the [seedless] state of consciousness. For the Yogin, this has to do with entering into the “Samadhi of Suchness”.
- [Cleary]: Nothing originates therein by conditions, nor passes away; even the conditions occurring and passing away are imagined.
Conditionality in itself is an imagined construct. “All-about” is the result of contingency, or being wedged in a mutual interdependent imagined world. Incidentally, Stephen Batchelor would be classified today as one of the Lanka’s philosophers; he does not want one to Recollect the Unconditioned Principle, for him it is just all about staying in the conditioned-mind—or forever staying stuck in contingency-mode.
- (Chapter III verse 52) The triple world is no more than thought construction (prajnapti), there is no reality in its self-nature; by means of this thought-constructed reality, logicians go on discriminating.
Covered in #34 & #71
- [Cleary]: Wanting to know the nature of things does not prevent confusion; seeing the non-origination of the nature of things, one is liberated.
It’s one thing to apparently know about the nature of something, yet it is quite another to know that non-origination, or no-birth, is the Real-Nature behind apparent thingness; this realization is quite liberating.