Purification Of The Buddha Mind and Pure Land
Purification of mind is understood in the Buddha’s teaching is the sustained endeavor to cleanse the mind of defilement, those dark unwholesome mental forces which run in the surface stream of consciousness active in our thinking, values, attitudes, and actions. The first among the defilement s are the three that the Buddha has termed the “roots of evil” — greed, hatred, and delusion — from which emerge their numerous offshoots and variants: anger and cruelty, avarice and envy, conceit and arrogance, hypocrisy and narcissism, the multitude of erroneous views. Contemporary attitudes do not look favorably upon such notions as defilement and purity, and on first encounter they may strike us as outdated morality, valid perhaps in an era when prudery and taboo were dominant, but having no claims upon us emancipated torchbearers of modernity. Admittedly, we do not all wallow in the mire of gross materialism and many among us seek our enlightenment and spiritual highs, but we want them on our own terms, and as heirs of the new freedom we believe they are to be won through an unbridled quest for experience without any special need for introspection, personal change, or self-control. However, in the Buddha’s teaching the criterion of genuine enlightenment lies precisely in purity of mind. The purpose of all insight and enlightened understanding is to liberate the mind from the defilement s, and Nirvana itself, the goal of the teaching, is defined quite clearly as freedom from greed, hatred, and delusion. From the perspective of the Dhamma defilement and purity are not mere postulates of a rigid authoritarian morality but real and solid facts essential to a correct understanding of the human situation in the world. Since all defiled states of consciousness are born from ignorance, the most deeply embedded defilement, the final and ultimate purification of mind is to be accomplished through the instrumentality of wisdom, the knowledge and vision of things as they really are. Wisdom, however, does not arise through chance or random good intentions, but only in a purified mind. Thus in order for wisdom to come forth and accomplish the ultimate purification through the eradication of defilements, we first have to create a space for it by developing a provisional purification of mind — a purification which, though temporary and vulnerable, is still indispensable as a foundation for the emergence of all liberative insight. Enlightenment is the state of pure mind. It is non-dualistic knowing and is called primordial wisdom. Its experiences are authentic; that is, they are without illusion. Pure mind is free and endowed with numerous qualities.
Illusion is the state of impure mind. Its mode of knowledge is dichotomous or dualistic; it is the “conditioned consciousness.” Its experiences are tainted by illusions. Impure mind is conditioned and endowed with much suffering.
Ordinary beings experience this state of impure, deluded mind as their habitual state. Pure, enlightened mind is a state in which mind realizes its own nature as free of habitual conditions and the suffering associated with them. This is the enlightened state of a Buddha.
In Jodo Shin Shu True Faith (Shinjin) leads to The Pure Land. The Pure Land is synonymous with Pure Mind. Through faith alone we recitative the merit of the Amida Buddha and obtain Buddha Mind. Transformation into Nirvana ean cleansing the Buddha fields, in which we obtain Bodhi Mind and illuminate our mind into Nirvana and Buddha-hood. Buddha Sakyamuni taught:
Buddha nature is present in all beings, But shrouded by adventitious illusions. Purified, they are truly Buddha.
The distance between the ordinary state and the “enlightened” state is what separates ignorance from knowledge of this pure nature of mind. In the ordinary state, it is unknown. In the enlightened state, it is fully realized. The situation in which mind is ignorant of its actual nature is what we call fundamental ignorance. In realizing its profound nature, mind is liberated from this ignorance, from the illusions and conditioning that ignorance creates, and so enters the unconditioned enlightened state called liberation.
All Bodhidharma and its practices involve purifying, “dis-disillusioning” this mind, and proceeding from a tainted to an untainted state, from illusion to enlightenment.
