Non-duality of Essence and Form
Question Ten:
Some have said: Do not concern yourself about birth-and-death.
There is a way to promptly rid yourself of birth-and-death.
It is by grasping the reason for the eternal immutability of the ‘mind-nature.’
The gist of it is this: although once the body is born it proceeds inevitably to death, the mind-nature never perishes.
Once you can realize that the mind-nature, which does not transmigrate in birth-and-death, exists in your own body, you make it your fundamental nature.
Hence the body, being only a temporary form, dies here and is reborn there without end, yet the mind is immutable, unchanging throughout past, present, and future.
To know this is to be free from birth-and-death.
By realizing this truth, you put a final end to the trans-migratory cycle in which you have been turning. When your body dies, you enter the ocean of the original nature.
When you return to your origin in this ocean, you become endowed with the wondrous virtue of the Buddha-patriarchs.
But even if you are able to grasp this in your present life,
because your present physical existence embodies erroneous karma from prior lives, you are not the same as the sages.
“Those who fail to grasp this truth are destined to turn forever in the cycle of birth-and-death.
What is necessary, then, is simply to know without delay the meaning of the mind-nature’s immutability.
What can you expect to gain from idling your entire life away in purposeless sitting?”
What do you think of this statement? Is it essentially in accord with the Way of the Buddhas and patriarchs?
Answer 10:
You have just expounded the view of the Senika heresy. It is certainly not the Buddha Dharma.
According to this heresy, there is in the body a spiritual intelligence.
As occasions arise this intelligence readily discriminates likes and dislikes and pros and cons, feels pain and irritation, and experiences suffering and pleasure – it is all owing to this spiritual intelligence.
But when the body perishes, this spiritual intelligence separates from the body and is reborn in another place.
While it seems to perish here, it has life elsewhere, and thus is immutable and imperishable.
Such is the standpoint of the Senika heresy.
But to learn this view and try to pass it off as the Buddha Dharma is more foolish than clutching a piece of broken roof tile supposing it to be a golden jewel.
Nothing could compare with such a foolish, lamentable delusion.
Hui-chung of the T’ang dynasty warned strongly against it.
Is it not senseless to take this false view – that the mind abides and the form perishes – and equate it to the wondrous Dharma of the Buddhas;
to think, while thus creating the fundamental cause of birth-and-death, that you are freed from birth-and-death?
How deplorable! Just know it for a false, non-Buddhist view, and do not lend a ear to it.
I am compelled by the nature of the matter, and more by a sense of compassion, to try to deliver you from this false view.
You must know that the Buddha Dharma preaches as a matter of course that body and mind are one and the same, that the essence and the form are not two.
This is understood both in India and in China, so there can be no doubt about it.
Need I add that the Buddhist doctrine of immutability teaches that all things are immutable, without any differentiation between body and mind.
The Buddhist teaching of mutability states that all things are mutable, without any differentiation between essence and form.
In view of this, how can anyone state that the body perishes and the mind abides? It would be contrary to the true Dharma.
Beyond this, you must also come to fully realize that birth-and-death is in and of itself nirvana.
Buddhism never speaks of nirvana apart from birth-and-death.
Indeed, when someone thinks that the mind, apart from the body, is immutable, not only does he mistake it for Buddha-wisdom,
which is free from birth-and-death, but the very mind that makes such a discrimination is not immutable, is in fact even then turning in birth-and-death.
A hopeless situation, is it not?
You should ponder this deeply: since the Buddha Dharma has always maintained the oneness of body and mind, why, if the body is born and perishes, would the mind alone, separated from the body, not be born and die as well?
If at one time body and mind were one, and at another time not one, the preaching of the Buddha would be empty and untrue.
Moreover, in thinking that birth-and-death is something we should turn from, you make the mistake of rejecting the Buddha Dharma itself. You must guard against such thinking.
Understand that what Buddhists call the Buddhist doctrine of the mind-nature, the great and universal aspect encompassing all phenomena, embraces the entire universe, without differentiating between essence and form, or concerning itself with birth or death.
There is nothing – enlightenment and nirvana included – that is not the mind-nature.
All dharmas, the “myriad forms dense and close” of the universe – are alike in being this one Mind.
All are included without exception. All those dharmas, which serves as “gates” or entrances to the Way, are the same as one Mind.
For a Buddhist to preach that there is no disparity between these dharma-gates indicates that he understands the mind-nature.
In this one Dharma [one Mind], how could there be any differentiate between body and mind, any separation of birth-and-death and nirvana?
We are all originally children of the Buddha, we should not listen to madmen who spout non-Buddhist views.
