The Ten-Thousand Things

One who dwells in dualism,
will be pursued by the ten-thousand things.
Even the most negligible sniff of right and wrong,
and Mind is forever lost in the stench of self-abashment.

One will give-birth to the Two,
be careful to not cling even to this one.
With the Unborn Mind there is no defiling dust,
thus the ten-thousand things have no-thing to desecrate.

The greatest curse is the discriminatory, dualistic-infested mind-set. Divorced from the Root-Source, what Zen Master Ejo describes as the Treasury of Light, all manner of the ten-thousand things will come home to roost; like today’s accompanying  scorpion image, they all harbor a potentially poisonous and fatal sting. Another metaphor is that which occurred at the end of the remake of The Mummy (circa 1999); when the door to the hidden chamber slams-shut and in the darkness one hears the scurrying of the ten-thousand scarabs consuming a villainous character.  Yes, as the flame of the Treasury of Light is extinguished, the bodhi-mind becomes infested with all manner of defiled-garbha. Even engaging in dualistic notions of right vs. wrong, one becomes entrapped between those indelible Iron Mountains that once hemmed-in the greatest Bodhisattva of them all, Mañjūshrī. In contrast to the dark-villain of dualism is the Luminous Light Warrior, never succumbing to the poison of dualism by remaining eternally-vigilant with the omniscient Eye of the Nirvanic Element of Truth.

Seng-ts’an had enough bodhi-sense to realize that even the concept of “one” would eventually metastasize with some-thing “other”, its own “two-ness”. This is a crucial insight because many times an adept will get lost trying to merge in meditation with this some-thing “other”—to enter into some form of union; this union implies some kind of duality is afoot: an encounter between two separate entities. Hence even “one-ness” is a discriminatory factor that hinders Mind’s Self-Recollection of Its own unadulterated Suchness; Suchness IS AS SUCH, with no defiling-other.