The Notebook (Mahayana Buddhist Version)

     Here’s the thing: As I mentioned in the previous post, I have been feeling icky due to what is evidently the omicron variant of the artificially engineered and leaked Wuhan coronavirus. A week later I am feeling rather better, but still am not functioning at 100%. Consequently my head is still not clear enough to write original content at my own standard of acceptability. And so I am falling back on a subject that I have considered for several years, and that subject is a certain notebook that I have kept since I was a minimalist junior monk.

     For years when I would read a book that I did not own, and when I would come across thought-provoking or otherwise intriguing statements, I would write them down in a little paper notebook. What follows are some of the quotes from Buddhist books (generally Mahayana) that I considered to be worth keeping and re-reading.

     The first series of quotes is extracted from a strange book called the Buddhist Bible, from a section containing an English translation of The Awakening of Faith. This text is supposed by tradition to be a translation of the Mahayana Shraddhotpada Shastra, supposedly by ven. Ashvaghosha; although modern scholars claim that the book was originally composed in Chinese and disguised (forged) to look like an Indian text. I have read that the only Sanskrit version of this text known to scholars is evidently a translation from the Chinese version. Furthermore the translation from the Buddhist Bible is a very free one anyhow, and not literally exact. But the ideas are interesting, and really do convey a fundamental strand of Mahayana Buddhist thought, so I include them here.

     I will add that the following attempts to reify the Absolute are about as far as I could go with regard to any sort of self-view in Buddhism. The text also puts forth one Mahayanist idea that I can appreciate, pretty much, but which many devout Theravada Buddhists consider to be the rankest heresy: namely the idea that Nirvana and Samsara are ultimately THE SAME.

     The Dharma is the mind of all sentient beings.

     If the mind can be kept free from false imaginations there can be no conceivable meaning to the term, “emptiness.”

     The pure essence of mind is neither unity nor plurality….

     …if any sentient being is able to keep free from all discriminative thinking, he has attained to the wisdom of a Buddha.

     In the foregoing we have referred to the rising of conscious and discriminative thoughts, but speaking truly, there is no rising of thoughts of any kind, for conscious thinking is wholly subjective and imaginary. 

     In the outward activities of the discriminating mind, karma is the record of its habit-energy urging it on to further differentiation, but in the inconceivable integrating activities of Intuitional Purity, karma is the record of its unifying attractions reducing multiplicities to unities and resulting in all manner of transcendental syntheses and mysterious wonders….

…true Essential Mind yields to no contaminations that can possibly contaminate it, and even its reflected contaminated conceptions have no effect upon it.

     …a conception of activity…is called, karma.

     All sentient beings are ever abiding in Nirvana. Nevertheless, the thing called Enlightenment is nothing that can be attained by practising, nor can it be created by human hands; it is intangible and ungraspable, having no form that can be seen or nature that can be described.

     Because the mind does not realize the perfect purity of the all-embracing wholeness it falls into the habit of imagining differences where there are no differences, and thus the mind, being inharmonious with itself, becomes the puppet of Ignorance.

     As Ignorance is discarded the rising of all thoughts of individuation and discrimination are brought to an end. Because of the ceasing of all such thoughts there are no more conceptions of external things and conditions to appeal to one through the senses. Accordingly as conditions and discriminations come to an end, all the mental phenomena cease to disturb the mind and it becomes empty and tranquil. The dying down of all disturbance is the attainment of Nirvana, the state of perfect freedom.

     The self-substance of Mind-Essence is inconceivably pure and, therefore, all sentient beings, common people, disciples, Pratekyabuddhas, Arhats, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas are, in their essential nature of the same purity. In not one is it deficient, in not one is it in excess; nor has it any source of arising, nor time of disappearing; it is ever abiding, a permanent, unchangeable Reality.

     The purpose of the Lord Tathagata is to emancipate sentient beings from the bondage of their thinking by means of their thinking, and to bring them back to their origin in Mind-Essence. But to let the mind dwell upon and grasp words and concepts only entangles the mind the more in the cycle of deaths and rebirths, and hinders it from merging into its true nature of Wisdom.

     While one may at first think of his breathing, it is not wise to continue it very long, nor to let the mind rest on any particular appearances or sights, or conceptions arising from the senses…nor to let it rest on any of the lower mind’s perceptions, particularizations, discriminations, moods or emotions. All kinds of ideation are to be discarded as fast as they arise, even the notions of controlling and discarding are to be gotten rid of. One’s mind should become like a mirror, reflecting things but not judging them nor retaining them…. Conceptions arising from the senses and lower mind, will not take form of themselves, unless they are grasped by the attention, but if they are ignored there will be no appearing and no disappearing.

     There may be some disciples whose root of merit is not matured, whose control of mind is weak and whose power of application is limited, and yet who are sincere in their purpose to seek Enlightenment; these, for a time, may be beset and bewildered by maras and evil influences who are seeking to break down their good purpose. Such disciples, seeing seductive sights, attractive girls, strong young men, must constantly remind themselves that all such tempting and alluring things are mind-made, and if they do this, their tempting power will disappear and they will no longer be annoyed. Or, if they have visions of heavenly gods and Bodhisattvas and Tathagatas surrounded by celestial glories, they should remind themselves that they, too, are mind-made and unreal.

Well, enough of The Awakening of Faith. Now follow some random Buddhist ideas, still primarily of a Mahayanist nature. The next one is from venerable Dharmottara, a Yogacara logician, whom I learned of in Tsherbatsky’s Buddhist Logic.

     Pure sensation without any perceptual judgement is as though it did not exist at all.

I consider that to be profound, and also true. Next come a few exceprts from Nagarjuna’s Philosophy by K. Venkata Ramanan. The book is essentially a commentary on the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Shastra, which is not really by the famous philosopher Nagarjuna, but may be by a disciple of same with the same name. Anyway:

     The world around us is a reflection of the condition of our mind; we do deeds that build the world for us exactly in the way we interpret to ourselves the reality of things.

     The sense of “I” implying by contrast the sense of “not-I” naturally belongs to the world of the determinate. But the uniqueness of self-consciousness is that there is immanent in it the awareness of the unconditioned reality as its ultimate nature. The self-conscious intellect, having differentiated the undifferentiated, identifies itself with the specific complex entity, the body-mind. And in this identification, the intellect, owing to the operation of ignorance, wrongfully transfers its sense of unconditionedness which is its ultimate nature to itself in its mundane nature. The sense of self is due to self-conscious intellection, but the falsity of the false sense of self is due to ignorance. The sense of self or the sense of “I”…is the reflection of the unconditioned reality in the conditioned self-conscious intellect; it is the sense of the real in man.

     The indeterminate nature is the true nature of all things. Determinations and divisions are the constructions of imagination. 

     Everything is true; nothing is true; everything is both true and not true; everything is neither true nor not true. This is the teaching of the Buddha.

Next comes a wise little teaching from John Blofeld, who may have written this while drunk:

     The term Tao (Way) was for some two millennia at least used by Chinese of all religious and philosophical persuasions to mean whatever they individually regarded as “the highest good,” “ultimate truth,” “the absolute,” “the goal of existence,” etc. To those familiar with Taoist teaching, it meant the invisible, formless matrix that gives rise to the endless succession of forms which are no more apart from or different from the matrix than waves are apart or different from the sea. To Chinese Buddhists the Tao was synonymous with the One Mind or Pure Consciousness, which they held to be not only the impersonal creator, but the very substance (or rather “non-substance”) of the entire universe. The use of a term meaning “way” to describe the vast, unfathomable reality of which every form is but a transient manifestation has very subtle implications, pointing to the non-dual nature of reality; for, if reality is in fact non-dual, then the source, the way to the goal, the wayfarer, and the goal are all indivisible from each other.

     A monk asked Jōshu, “When the body crumbles all to pieces and returns to the dust, there eternally abides one thing. Of this I have been told, but where does this one thing abide?” The master replied, “It is windy again this morning.”

Finally, a quote from Tokusan, and another from Yen-kuan Ch’i-an.

     All our understanding of the abstractions of philosophy is like a single hair in the vastness of space.

     Deliberate thinking and discursive understanding amount to nothing; they belong to the household of ghosts; they are like a lamp in the broad daylight; nothing shines out of them.

(I may continue from more quotes at some other time, maybe western philosophers next time. I dunno.)