'THAT art thou': 'Behold but One in all things'—God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.
The Mind is no other than the Buddha, and Buddha is no other than sentient being. When Mind assumes the form of a sentient being, it has suffered no decrease; when it has become a Buddha, it has added nothing to itself.
All creatures have existed eternally in the divine essence, as in their exemplar. So far as they conform to the divine idea, all beings were, before their creation, one thing with the essence of God. (God creates into time what was and is in eternity.) Eternally, all creatures are God in God.... So far as they are in God, they are the same life, the same essence, the same power, the same One, and nothing less.
The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life. Our created essence and our life are attached to it without mediation as to their eternal cause.
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When is a man in mere understanding? I answer, 'When a man sees one thing separated from another.' And when is a man above mere understanding? That I can tell you: 'When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding.'
There are four kinds of Dhyana (spiritual disciplines). What are these four? They are,
- first, the Dhyana practised by the ignorant;
- second, the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning;
- third, the Dhyana with Suchness for its object;
- fourth, the Dhyana of the Tathagatas (Buddhas).
What is meant by the Dhyana practised by the ignorant?
What then is the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning? It is the one practised by those who, having gone beyond the egolessness of things, beyond individuality and generality, beyond the untenability of such ideas as 'self,' 'other' and 'both,' which are held by the philosophers, proceed to examine and follow up the meaning of the various aspects of Bodhisattvahood. This is the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning.
When followers of Zen fail to go beyond the world of their senses and thoughts, all their doings and movements are of no significance. But when the senses and thoughts are annihilated, all the passages to Universal Mind are blocked, and no entrance then becomes possible. The original Mind is to be recognized along with the working of the senses and thoughts—only it does not belong to them, nor yet is it independent of them. Do not build up your views upon your senses and thoughts, do not base your understanding upon your senses and thoughts; but at the same time do not seek the Mmci away from your senses and thoughts, do not try to grasp Reality by rejecting your senses and thoughts. When you are neither attached to, nor detached from, them, then you enjoy your perfect unobstructed freedom, then you have your seat of enlightenment.
Every individual being, from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds, may be thought of, in René Guénon's phrase, as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's creative energy.
- rational beings can come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground,
- non-rational and inanimate beings may reveal to rational beings the fullness of God's presence within their material forms.
create, as it were, an enduring vortex in the psychic medium,
The workmen still in doubt what course to take,
Whether I'd best a saint or hog-trough make,
After debate resolved me for a saint;And so famed Loyola I represent.
The all too Protestant satirist forgot that God is in the hog-trough no less than in the conventionally sacred image.
The Sravaka (literally 'hearer,' the name given by Mahayana Buddhists to con templatives of the Hinayana school) fails to perceive that Mind, as it is in itself, has no stages, no causation.
Disciplining himself in the cause, he has attained the result and abides in the samadhi (contemplation) of Emptiness for ever so many aeons.
However enlightened in this way, the Sravaka is not at all on the right track. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva, this is like suffering the torture of hell. The Sravaka has buried himself in Emptiness and does not know how to get out of his quiet contemplation, for he has no insight into the Buddha-nature itself.
When Enlightenment is perfected, a Bodhisattva is free from the bondage of things, but does not seek to be delivered from things. Samsara (the world of becoming) is not hated by him, nor is Nirvana loved. When perfect Enlightenment shines, it is neither bondage nor deliverance.
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The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its full-ness—to its heights we can always reach—when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing,' says the Upanishad, whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe.
'To its heights we can always come.' For those of us who are still splashing about in the lower ooze, the phrase has a rather ironical ring. Nevertheless, in the light of even the most distant acquaintance with the heights and the fullness, it is possible to understand what its author means.
It is in the literature of Mahayana and especially of Zen Buddhism that we find the best account of the psychology of the man for whom samsara and nirvana, time and eternity, are one and the same.[ 75]
'Blind, deaf, dumb!Infinitely beyond the reach of imaginative contrivances!'
In these lines Seccho has swept everything away for you—what you see together with what you do not see, what you hear together with what you do not hear, and what you talk about together with what you cannot talk about.
All these are completely brushed off, and you attain the life of the blind, deaf and dumb. Here all your imaginations, contrivances and calculations are once and for all put an end to; they are no more made use of. This is where lies the highest point of Zen, this is where we have true blindness, true deafness and true dumbness, each in its artless and effecfless aspect.
Seccho - The great Tang Dynasty Zen Master
Above the heavens and below the heavens!
How ludicrous, how disheartening!'Here Seccho lifts up with one hand and with the other puts down. Tell me what he finds to be ludicrous, what he finds to be disheartening. It is ludicrous that this dumb person is not dumb after all, that this deaf person is not after all deaf; it is disheartening that the one who is not at all blind is blind for all that, and that the one who is not at all deaf is deaf for all that.
'Li-lou does not know how to discriminate right colour.' Li-lou lived in the reign of the Emperor Huang. He is said to have been able to distinguish the point of a soft hair at a distance of one hundred paces. His eyesight was extraordinary. When the Emperor Huang took a pleasure cruise on the River Ch'ih, he dropped his precious jewel in the water and made Li fetch it up.
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But he failed. The Emperor made Ch'ih-kou search for it; but he also failed to find it. Later Hsiang-wang was ordered to get it, and he got it. Hence,
'When Hsiang-wang goes down, the precious gem shines most brilliantly;
But where Li-lou walks about, the waves rise even to the sky.'
When we come to these higher spheres, even the eyes of Li-lou are incapable of discriminating the right colour.
'How can Shih-kuang recognize the mysterious tune?' Shih-kuang was the son of Ching-kuang of Chin in the province of Chiang under the Chou dynasty. His other name was Tzu-yeh. He could thoroughly distinguish the five sounds and the six notes; he could even hear the ants fighting on the other side of a hill. When Chin and Ch'u were at war, Shih-kuang could tell, just by softly fingering the strings of his lute, that the engagement would surely be unfavourable for Ch'u. In spite of his extraordinary sensitiveness Seccho declares that he is unable to recognize the mysterious tune. After all, one who is not at all deaf is really deaf. The most exquisite note in the higher spheres is beyond the hearing of Shih-kuang. Says Seccho, I am not going to be a Li-lou, nor a Shih-kuang; for
'What life can compare with this? Sitting quietly by the window,
I watch the leaves fall and the flowers bloom, as the seasons come and go.'
When one reaches this stage of realization, seeing is no-seeing, hearing is no-hearing, preaching is no-preaching. When hungry one eats, when tired one sleeps. Let the leaves fall, let the flowers bloom as they like. When the leaves fall, I know it is the autumn; when the flowers bloom, I know it is the spring.
Having swept everything clean before you, Seccho now opens a passage-way, saying:
'Do you understand, or not?
An iron bar without a hole!'
He has done all he could for you; he is exhausted—only able to turn round and present you with this iron bar without a hole. It [77] is a most significant expression. Look and see with your own eyes! If you hesitate, you miss the mark for ever.
Yengo (the author of this commentary) now raised his staff and said, 'Do you see?' He then struck his chair and said, 'Do you hear?' Coming down from the chair, he said, 'Was anything talked about?'
What precisely is the significance of that iron bar without a hole? I do not pretend to know. Zen has always specialized in nonsense as a means of stimulating the mind to go forward to that which is beyond sense; so perhaps the point of the bar resides precisely in its pointlessness and in our disturbed, bewildered reaction to that pointlessness.
In the root divine Wisdom is all-Brahman; in the stem she is all-Illusion; in the flower she is all-World; and in the fruit, all-Liberation.
The Sravakas and the Pratyekabuddhas, when they reach the eighth stage of the Bodhisattva's discipline, become so intoxicated with the bliss of mental tranquillity that they fail to realize that the visible world is nothing but the Mind. They are still in the realm of individuation; their insight is not yet pure. The Bodhisattvas, on the other hand, are alive to their original vows, flowing out of the all-embracing love that is in their hearts. They do not enter into Nirvana (as a state separate from the world of becoming); they know that the visible world is nothing but a manifestation of Mind itself.
A conscious being alone understands what is meantTo those not endowed with consciousness the moving is [unintel] ligible.If you exercise yourself in the practice of keeping your mind unmoved,The immovable you gain is that of one who has to consciousness.If you are desirous for the truly immovable,The immovable is in the moving itself,And this immovable is the truly immovable one.There is no seed of Buddhahood where there is no consciousness.Mark well how varied are the aspects of the immovable one,And know that the first reality is immovable.Only when this reality is attainedIs the true working of Suchness understood.
These phrases about the unmoving first mover remind one of Aristotle. But between Aristotle and the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy within the great religious traditions there is this vast difference: Aristotle is primarily concerned with cosmology, the Perennial Philosophers are primarily concerned with liberation and enlightenment:
- Aristotle is content to know about the unmoving mover, from the outside and theoretically;
- the aim of the Perennial Philosophers is to become directly aware of it, to know it unitively, so that they and others may actually become the unmoving One.
Abiding with the non-particular which is in particulars,Going or returning, they remain for ever unmoved.Taking hold of the not-thought which lies in thoughts,In their every act they hear the voice of Truth.How boundless the sky of contemplation!How transparent the moonlight of the four-fold Wisdom!As the Truth reveals itself in its eternal tranquillity,This very earth is the Lotus-Land of Purity,And this body is the body of the Buddha.
Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort, nor anything else from which God is left out. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.
Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself.
My inner man relishes things not as creatures but as the gift of God. But to my innermost man they savour not of God's gift, but of ever and aye.
Pigs eat acorns, but neither consider the sun that gave them life, nor the influence of the heavens by which they were nourished, nor the very root of the tree from whence they came.
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Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father's palace; and look upon the skies, the earth and the air as celestial joys; having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride of a monarch, in her husband's chamber, hath no such causes of delight as you.
You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you can never enjoy the world.
Till your spirit fihleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels;
Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright,
The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it.
How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.
Before going on to discuss the means whereby it is possible to come to the fullness as well as the height of spiritual knowledge, let us briefly consider the experience of those who have been privileged to 'behold the One in all things,' but have made no efforts to perceive it within themselves. A great deal of interesting material on this subject may be found in Buck's Cosmic Consciousness. All that need be said here is that such 'cosmic consciousness' may come unsought and is in the nature of what Catholic theologians call a 'gratuitous grace.'
theophany, (from Greek theophaneia, “appearance of God”), manifestation of deity in sensible form. ... The mark of biblical theophanies is the temporariness and suddenness of the appearance of God, which is here not an enduring presence in a certain place or object.
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In this context it is interesting to compare Wordsworth with another great nature lover and man of letters, St. Bernard. 'Let Nature be your teacher,' says the first; and he goes on to affirm that
One impulse from the vernal woodWill tell you more of man,Of moral evil and of good,Than all the sages can.
St. Bernard speaks in what seems a similar strain. 'What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture, I learnt in woods and fields. I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks.'
- is not merely to be relished as one 'wanders lonely as a cloud' about the countryside,
- is not merely to be pleasurably remembered when one is lying 'in vacant or in pensive mood' on the sofa in the library, after tea.
That nirvana and samsara are one is a fact about the nature of the universe;
Even beyond the ultimate limits there extends a passage-way,By which he comes back to the six realms of existence.Every worldly affair is now a Buddhist work,And wherever he goes he finds his home air.Like a gem he stands out even in the mud,Like pure gold he shines even in the furnace.Along the endless road (of birth and death) heunto himself.In all circumstances he moves tranquil and ufied.
It is in the Indian and Far Eastern formulations of the Perennial Philosophy that this subject is most systematically treated.
A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfil the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.
The Perfect Way knows no difficulties,Except that it refuses to make preferences.Only when freed from hate and loveDoes it reveal itself fully and without disguise.
A tenth of an inch's difference,And heaven and earth are set apart.If you wish to see it before your own eyes, Have no fixed thoughts either for or against it.To set up what you like against what you dislike—This is the disease of the mind.When the deep meaning of the Way is not understood, Peace of mind is disturbed to no purpose.Pursue not the outer entanglements, Dwell not in the inner void; Be serene in the oneness of things, And dualism vanishes of itself.88When you strive to gain quiescence by stopping motion, The quiescence so gained is ever in motion.So long as you tarry in such dualism,How can you realize oneness?And when oneness is not thoroughly grasped,Loss is sustained in two ways:The denying of external reality is the assertion of it,And the assertion of Emptiness (the Absolute) is the denyingof it.
Transformations going on in the empty world that confronts usAppear to be real because of Ignorance.Do not strive to seek after the True, Only cease to cherish opinions.
The two exist because of the One;But hold not even to this One.When a mind is not disturbed,The ten thousand things offer no offence....
If an eye never falls asleep,All dreams will cease of themselves;If the Mind retains its absoluteness,The ten thousand things are of one substance.
When the deep mystery of one Suchness is fathomed,All of a sudden we forget the external entanglements;When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness,We return to the origin and remain where we have alwaysbeen....
One in all,All in One—If only this is realized,No more worry about not being perfect!89When Mind and each believing mind are not divided,And undivided are each believing mind and Mind,This is where words fail,For it is not of the past, present or future.
Do what you are doing now, suffer what you are suffering now; to do all this with holiness, nothing need be changed but your hearts. Sanctity consists in willing what happens to us by God's order.
The seventeenth-century Frenchman's vocabulary is very different from that of the seventh-century Chinaman's. But the advice they give is fundamentally similar. Conformity to the will of God, submission, docility to the leadings of the Holy Ghost—in practice, if not verbally, these are the same as conformity to the Perfect Way, refusing to have preferences and cherish opinions, keeping the eyes open so that dreams may cease and Truth reveal itself.
The world inhabited by ordinary, nice, unregenerate people is mainly dull (so dull that they have to distract their minds from being aware of it by all sorts of artificial 'amusements'), sometimes briefly and intensely pleasurable, occasionally or quite often disagreeable and even agonizing. For those who have deserved the world by making themselves fit to see God within it as well as within their own souls, it wears a very different aspect.
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates at first were the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! 0 what venerable and‑[ ....]
the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared; which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.. And so it was that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of the world. Which now I unlearn, and become as it were a little child again, that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.
Therefore I give you still another thought, which is yet purer and more spiritual: In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours.
The doctrine that God is in the world has an important practical corollary—the sacredness of Nature, and the sinfulness and folly of man's overweening efforts to be her master rather than her intelligently docile collaborator. Sub-human lives and even things are to be treated with respect and understanding, not brutally oppressed to serve our human ends.
The ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu, the ruler of the Northern Ocean was Hu, and the ruler of the Centre was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they
might repay his kindness, and said: 'Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating and breathing, while this ruler alone has not a single one. Let us try to make them for him.' Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day. At the end of seven days Chaos died.
In this delicately comic parable Chaos is Nature in the state of wu-wei-----non-assertion or equilibrium. Shu and Hu are the living images of those busy persons who thought they would improve on Nature by turning dry prairies into wheat fields, and produced deserts; who proudly proclaimed the Conquest of the Air, and then discovered that they had defeated civilization; who chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda. In brief, Shu and Hu are devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress, and their creed is that the Kingdom of Heaven is outside you, and in the future. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, like all good Taoists, has no desire to bully Nature into subserving ill-considered temporal ends, at variance with the final end of men as formulated in the Perennial Philosophy. His wish is to work with Nature, so as to produce material and social conditions in which individuals may realize Tao on every level from the physiological up to the spiritual.
Compared with that of the Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude towards Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to exploit for their own ends. Like landscape painting, the humanitarian movement in Europe was an almost completely secular affair. In the Far East both were essentially religious.
The Greeks believed that hubris was always followed by nemesis, that if you went too far you would get a knock on the head to remind you that the gods will not tolerate insolence on the part of mortal men. In the sphere of human relations, the modern mind understands the doctrine of hubris and regards it as mainly true. We wish pride to have a fall, and we see that very often it does fall.
To have too much power over one's fellows, to be too rich, too violent, too ambitious—all this invites punishment, and in the long run, we notice, punishment of one sort or another duly comes. But the Greeks did not stop there. Because they regarded Nature as in some way divine, they felt that it had to be respected and they were convinced that a hubristic lack of respect for Nature would be punished by avenging nemesis. In 'The Persians,' Aeschylus gives the reasons—the ultimate, metaphysical reasons—for the barbarians' defeat. Xerxes was punished for two offences—overweening imperialism directed against the Athenians, and overweening imperialism directed against Nature. He tried to enslave his fellow-men, and he tried to enslave the sea, by building a bridge across the Hellespont.
Atossa. From shore to shore he bridged the Hellespont.Ghost ofDarius. What, could he chain the mighty Bosphorus?Atossa. Even so, some god assisting his design.Ghost of Darius. Some god of power to cloud his better sense.
Today we recognize and condemn the first kind of imperialism; but most of us ignore the existence and even the very possibility of the second. And yet the author of Erewhon was certainly not a fool, and now that we are paying the appalling price for our much touted 'conquest of Nature' his book seems more than ever topical. And Butler was not the only nineteenth-century sceptic in regard to Inevitable Progress. A generation or more before him, Alfred de Vigny was writing about the new technological marvel of his days, the steam engine—writing in a tone very different from the enthusiastic roarings and trumpetings of his great contemporary, Victor Hugo.
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Sur le taureau de fir, quifurne, souffle et beugle,
Et Ic gai voyageur lui livre son trésor.
And a little later in the same poem he adds:
Tous se sont dit: 'Jillons,' mais aucun n'est le maitre