Subscriber Access Required
This teaching is reserved for active UnbornMind.com subscribers.
To continue reading, please subscribe using the link below:
Already a subscriber?
Log in here.
If you have completed your PayPal subscription but were not automatically redirected,
please create your account here:
“It is also a good example of what is called falling into fixed views. It deceives a great many of the foolish and ignorant of the world. It’s an ancient dwelling place of evil spirits, an old badger’s den, a pitfall that traps people and buries them alive. Although you kept treasuring and defending it till the end of time, it would still be just a fragment from an old coin. It also goes by the name of “dark cave of the eighth Alaya consciousness.” The ancients suffered through a great many hardships as they wandered in arduous pursuit of the truth. It was all for the sole purpose of getting themselves free of just such old nests as these.
Once a person is able to achieve true singlemindedness in his practice and smash apart the old nest of Alaya consciousness into which he has settled, the Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom immediately appears, the other three great Wisdoms start to function, and the all-discerning Fivefold Eye opens wide.
If, on the other hand, he allows himself to be seduced by these latter-day devils into hunkering down inside an old nest and making himself at home there, turning it into a private treasure chamber and spending all his time dusting it, polishing it, sweeping and brushing it clean, what can he hope to achieve? Absolutely nothing. Basically, it is a piece of the eighth consciousness, the same eighth consciousness which enters the womb of a donkey and enters the belly of a horse. So I urgently exhort you to do everything you can, strive with all your strength, to strike down into that dark cave and destroy it.” (Hakuin)
The quote relates to:
“4. The ultimate illness is emptiness itself—the belief of emptiness which is of itself, self-empty. Thus, the Void is devoid of Void.”
I currently have this illness.
Huang Po expounds upon this further:
“To say that the real Dharmakaya of the Buddha resembles the Void is another way of saying that the Dharmakaya is the Void and that the Void is the Dharmakaya. People often claim that the Dharmakaya is in the Void and that the Void contains the Dharmakaya, not realizing that they are one and the same. But if you define the Void as something existing, then it is not the Dharmakaya; and if you define the Dharmakaya as something existing, then it is not the Void. Only refrain from any objective conception of the Void; then it is the Dharmakaya: and, if only you refrain from any objective conception of the Dharmakaya, why, then it is the Void.”
And further:
“Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma.”
Helpful, thank you.