二見不住     Do not dwell in dual views

慎莫追尋     Be careful not to pursue them

纔有是非     The slightest trace of right and wrong

紛然失心     And mind is lost in confusion

 

二由一有     The two exist because of the One

一亦莫守     But likewise do not cling to the One

一心不生     When the mind is one, nothing disturbs it

萬法無咎     The myriad things are harmless

 

無咎無法     No harm, no things

不生不心     No disturbance, no mind

能隨境滅     The subject vanishes with the object

境逐能沈     The object gone, the subject submerges

境由能境     The object exists because of the subject

能由境能     The subject exists because of the object

 

欲知兩段     If you want to understand the two sides

元是一空     Their origin is the one emptiness

一空同兩     In the one emptiness both are the same

齊含萬象     Undifferentiated emptiness contains the myriad things

 

All things have no reality in themselves; they rise from thought and laws of origination. When that which is thought of vanishes, the thinker himself vanishes. – Pratyutpannasamadhi Sutra (Suzuki 1953, p. 183)

Form is not different from emptiness; emptiness is not different from form. Form itself is emptiness; emptiness itself is form. – Prajna-paramita-hridaya Sutra (Heart Sutra BTTS)

To those who see clearly and properly, the separation between the mind that perceives and that which it perceives ceases; there is no such external world as is discriminated by the ignorant. – The Lankavatara Sutra, p. 285

His students said to him: When will the kingdom come?
Yeshua said: Watching for it will not bring it.
No one will announce, Look, here it is, or Look, there it is.
The father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth
and people do not see it. – Gospel of Thomas (Meyer)

What liberates man is that there is no one to be saved. . . . There is no ego-soul, no man. Empty, nothing to be attached to—this is nirvana. Seng-fu, Hui-yin San-mei Ching (Jorgensen, 163-164)

 

Hui-neng: (Mahaprajnaparamita)

What is maha? Maha is ‘great’. The capacity of the mind is vast and far-reaching, like the vast sky.  Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness; if you do you will fall into a vacant kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars and planets, the great Earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, good and bad men, good things and bad things, heaven and hell—they are all within emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.

Self-nature contains the ten thousand things—this is ‘great’. The ten thousand things are all in Self-nature. Although you see all men and other creatures, good and evil, good things and evil things, you must not reject them, nor must you cling to them, nor must you accumulate karma because of them; rather you must regard them as being just like the empty sky. This is what is meant by ‘great’. This is the practice of maha. (Yampolsky, 1967)

The Lankavatara Sutra:

False imagination (parikalpita) teaches that such things as light and shade, long and short, black and white, differ and are to be discriminated from each other. But they are not independent of each other: they are only different aspects of the same thing. They are terms of relation and not of reality. Conditions of existence are not of a mutually exclusive character; in essence things are not two, but one. Even nirvana and samsara are aspects of the same thing, for there is no nirvana except where there is samsara, and no samsara except where there is nirvana. All duality is falsely imagined. (Goddard and Suzuki, 1932, Chapter 2)

Adi Shankara: “Self-Realization”

134. The aspirants after Brahman should not spend a single moment without the thought of Brahman.
135. The nature of the cause (the mind) inheres in the effect (the phenomenal world) and not vice versa; so through reasoning it is found that with the vanishing of the effect, the cause itself also disappears.
136. Then that pure reality which is beyond speech alone remains. This should be understood again and again verily through the illustration of clay and the pot. (clay represents potential matter)
137. In this way alone there arises in the pure-minded a state of awareness, which is afterwards merged into Brahman.
138. One should first look for the cause by the negative method (my mind is not my Self) and then find it by the positive method, as being ever inherent in the effect (my mind is projecting the world).
139. One should verily see the cause in the effect, and then dismiss the effect altogether as not real. What then remains, the sage himself becomes.

Lester Levenson: (1993)

Eliminate all objectivity and the mind resolves. Then there is only subjectivity. The mind must be eliminated permanently by realizing that it is not real but only an apparency, an illusion, that has its source in your Self. Where there is only subject and no object, there the Self is. (Session 10: The Mind)

Bodhidharma:

The perfect awakening of all buddhas of the past, present and future are only the memories and discriminations of sentient beings: therefore I call them dreams. If the conscious mind is quiescent and has no place for the stirring of a single thought, this is called perfect awakening. Anything in which the mind and consciousness are not extinguished is a dream.

Question: What is the wisest method to cultivate the Way and cut off delusion?
Answer: One uses the wise method of expedient devices.
Question: What is this expedient device?
Answer: It is contemplating and knowing that from the beginning delusion has no place from which to arise. With this expedient device one can cut off delusions, so it is called wise.

Question: What delusion is cut off by the mind that is in accord with the Dharma?
Answer: The delusion that ordinary men, heretics, sravakas, solitary buddhas, bodhisattva and so forth attain liberation. (Bodhidharma’s Method For Quieting the Mind)

The Buddha:

Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling at Savatthi in Jeta’s Grove, Anathapindika’s Park. There the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus thus: “Bhikkhus!”
“Venerable sir!” those bhikkhus replied.
The Blessed One said this: “Bhikkhus, I will teach you dependent origination. Listen and attend closely; I will speak.”
“Yes, venerable sir,” those bhikkhus replied.

The Blessed One said this: “And what, bhikkhus, is dependent origination? With ignorance as condition, samskara (expectations); with samskara as condition, vijnana (consciousness of worldly things); with vijnana as condition, name-and-form; with name-and-form as condition, the six sense-domains; with the six sense-domains as condition, contact; with contact as condition, feeling; with feeling as condition, craving; with craving as condition, clinging; with clinging as condition, existence; with existence as condition, birth; with birth as condition, aging and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair come to be. Such is the origin of this whole mass of suffering. This, bhikkhus, is called dependent origination.” (SN 12.1 Paṭiccasamuppāda Sutta: Dependent Origination)

 

Goddard, Dwight and Suzuki, D. T. (1932). A Buddhist Bible (First Edition). (http://zen-ua.org/wp-content/uploads/lankavatara_sutra_english.pdf)

Levenson, Lester (1993). Keys to the Ultimate Freedom: Thoughts and Talks on Personal Transformation. Phoenix, Arizona: Sedona Institute. ISBN 0-915721-03-1 (download)

Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro (1953). Essays in Zen Buddhism (Second Series). London: Rider and Company.

Suzuki, D. T. (1932). The Lankavatara Sutra: A Mahayana Text. (Based upon the Sanskrit edition of Bunyu Nanjo) London. (http://lirs.ru/do/lanka_eng/lanka-nondiacritical.htm)

M. O’C. Walshe (1987). Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises Volume II. UK: Element Books Limited.

Yampolsky, Philip B. (1967). The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. (The text of the Tun-Huang manuscript with translation, introduction and notes by Philip B. Yampolsky) New York: Columbia University Press. (download)