楞伽阿跋多羅寶經 心要連讀

Gaze long into a clear sky, and a flower will float up before your eyes — it is not up in the sky; it is your own eyes that have blurred it into being. You take it to bloom, and it has in truth not arisen; you take it to wither, and it has never ceased. All the many dharmas of this world that you know so surely — the very first verse, at the scroll's opening, says: all of them are like that flower in the empty sky.

Yet the scripture does not teach you to sweep it away into a sheer nothing. It says: the wise grasp not being, and grasp not non-being. Standing at neither of the two extremes of being and non-being, it joins, at this place least of all fallen into an extreme, one hottest saying — and yet he rouses a vast mind of compassion. Seeing all as illusion-like, and yet forsaking not one sentient being.

Then Mahāmati, in one breath, asks upward of a hundred matters, and the Buddha does not answer one by one, but gathers them all into a string of "not-phrases": set up an "arising" phrase, and with the same stroke set up a "not-arising." It turns out every phrase is a blade used up and put away on the spot — to hand you a name is in order that, at the very moment you have grasped it, you may strip off the clinging that has stuck to it. To set up is precisely in order to cast off.

Within this string of "not-phrases" is hidden the gate of a whole Laṅkāvatāra, and hidden too the entire root of the later Yogācāra's three natures, eight consciousnesses, and twofold no-self. Now enter this passage, and watch how the Buddha, amid the sound of praise, sets up and again takes away, phrase by phrase, the clinging in your own hand.

On the face of the ocean a thousand waves rise and fall, fall and rise, never still for a moment. Yet ask where these waves come from — and they come from nowhere at all; they are just this one ocean, welling up of itself the instant the wind stirs it.

The seeing, hearing, and knowing beneath our own body and mind are likewise waves on such an ocean. Mahāmati asks about the arising and ceasing of the consciousnesses, and the World-Honored One lays bare instead the ocean and the waves: the waves are those rising-and-ceasing consciousnesses of eye, ear, nose, and tongue; the ocean is the store-consciousness that bears all things at every moment, subtle and deep and hard to see. The wind is the objective realm; let it stir, and the waves of consciousness go leaping up, with never a time of ceasing.

The waves may cease, but the ocean does not — this is the point the outsiders cannot see, and so they pronounce the water dried up; and it is on this very point that Yogācāra takes its stand, saying of it "ever-evolving and not cut off, without a resting-place and so no self." That thing you call "self," constant and unmoving — search this whole ocean, and you will not find one drop of it that is at a stand.

Now enter this passage, and look: those waves of consciousness, whipped up by the wind of objects and taken by you for a "self" — from what ocean, after all, do they come?

On the stage by night, the conjurer relies on a few sticks of grass and wood, a few shards of tile and stone, and conjures a whole stage full of people: some laughing, some weeping, some coming, some going, and the crowd below looks on, lost in it. Yet go up and grasp at one of them, and there is nothing there at all — those people came from nowhere, they are just these few sticks of grass and wood, conjured of themselves the instant a pair of hands is set to work.

The world before our eyes is likewise such a stage of conjuring. What you take to be solidly, really "existent," what you judge to be plainly, clearly "non-existent" — the scripture says: whether the hare has horns, whether the ox-horn split down to motes of dust holds a single real "horn" — search it up and down, and existence is utterly ungraspable, non-existence utterly ungraspable. It turns out that "existence" and "non-existence" are not brought by the thing itself; they are a shadow set up by your mind, in that very moment, of mutual dependence, taking this to measure that.

So the Buddha teaches one thing only: all is only one's own mind's manifestation. To see it clearly, first keep far from the crowd and the mundane, far from torpor and sleep; in the first watch, the middle watch, the last watch, ever awaken of yourself — and peel away, layer by layer, this heaven-wide illusion that "the object stands outside the mind."

To peel it, one must not be hasty. The āmra-fruit ripens gradually, the clay vessel is completed gradually, the great earth brings forth the myriad things gradually — the beginningless false habit can be purified only joint by joint. Yet the shining use on the buddha's side is like a bright mirror facing the myriad images, like sun and moon in mid-sky, fulfilled all at once and needing no due sequence. The gradual belongs to the station of sentient beings, the sudden to the hands of the buddha-ground; the two do not obstruct each other.

Now enter this passage, and look: that whole stage full of people you take to be really existent — by which pair of hands, upon which few sticks of grass and wood, are they, after all, conjured out?

Someone points to a hare's horn and tells you: this is eternal. You reach out to touch it, and touch empty air — it has not one part of substance to it, only the two words "hare's horn" left hanging on the lips. The "constant" the outsiders reckon is just such a hare's horn: sayable, not touchable.

Yet there is in the world another kind of constant, like space. Space is made by no one; it is of itself just so; you can neither make it nor destroy it. The ultimate constant the Buddha speaks of is just such a constant — not by contrivance, falling neither into being nor into non-being, the middle way realized in its very substance by the noble wisdom of self-realization. One and the same word "constant": one is empty of all but its name, like a hare's horn; one is of itself uncontrived, like space; and between them lies the whole dividing-line of the true and the false.

And a stiller question yet is put to the śrāvaka. He fears the suffering of birth-and-death and lets the six faculties toward their objects come to rest, taking the objects' single cessation for nirvāṇa. He has halted at the moment the waves are leveled, and has never once asked: these waves — from what ocean do they rise? That ever-evolving, unbroken store-consciousness ocean, he — seeking "the ceasing of consciousness" — never resorts into at all.

Now enter this passage, and look: how those two constants are told apart, and why that one ocean cannot be brought to rest — what you take for "the eternal" is, in the end, a hare's horn, or is it space.

Reach up and feel the top of a hare's head: there is no horn there. Reach up and feel the top of a horse's head: there is no horn there either. This "there is not" is a not-being that never, from the first, was.

When people hear "all dharmas are non-arising," what they picture in their hearts is mostly this hare's-horn kind of not-being — as if everything had been emptied out, had never been there at all. Right here the World-Honored One cuts them off: that is the deluded person's annihilation-view, not the non-arising the Buddha teaches. The Buddha's "non-arising" is not that the thing is gone; it is that its nature has never really arisen — because it is only a shadow that your own mind manifests, apart from "existence," and apart from "non-existence" too.

One and the same mind: deluded, it is the real object falsely clung to upon the marks, like a snake seen upon a rope; by conditions, it is the dependent present functioning, appearing as if there, like that length of rope; awakened, it is the true mind disclosed apart from falsity, like knowing the rope is, in itself, hemp — these are the imagined, the dependent, and the truly-perfected, the three natures, one road walked from the false to the true. And that "truly-perfected nature" at the road's end, the scripture says outright: it just is the Tathāgata-womb mind.

As for that "self" you always feel to be there beneath your body and mind, the scripture points it out for you to see: it is restless like a monkey, clutching without a stop; it chases defilement like a fly, never able to settle; it goes on and on unceasing, like that wheel drawing up water, one bucket up, one bucket down, with never a bucket at a stand upon the wheel. Search this whole wheel of unresting water, and you will not find which bucket is the "self."

Now enter this passage, and look: see how the non-being of the hare's horn is not the non-being the Buddha teaches, and how the imagined, the dependent, and the truly-perfected run all the way through to that Tathāgata-womb mind.

On the head of a hare there was, from the first, no horn. Yet should you insist, with one firm bite, that it has a horn, that horn grows out of thin air — this is "adding." And should you, because it has no horn, go so far as to say the hare itself is not there either, then you have "subtracted" too far. Sentient beings, looking at this world of body and mind, spend a whole lifetime turning between just these two: either they plant a "being" by force, or they sweep clean into a "nothing."

Add a portion, and it is eternalism; take a portion away, and it is annihilation. The adding-upward is called affirmation, the subtracting-downward is called denial. You take what is underfoot to be solid ground, but it is a stretch of ocean; you take that ocean to be dried up, to be empty, but not for a single moment has it ever ceased. Neither extreme has seen the one thing: that all of this is but one stretch of measure manifested by one's own mind, here and now.

The World-Honored One breaks both these extremes to the last, yet does not leave one fallen into an empty nothing. He turns his hand and points out a wish-fulfilling jewel: the jewel itself does not stir, yet according to conditions it shines forth, and the manifold colors appear, the buddha-fields and their great assemblies all within it. This mind of yours is just the same — recognize it clearly, and the objective realm binds you no more, but rather manifests according to you. What is broken is that pair of hands forever set on adding and subtracting; what is established is this brightness that was, from the first, able to manifest the myriad forms.

Now enter this passage, and look: over this whole life, what you have added and what you have subtracted — on which stretch of ocean, after all, was the adding done, and which single drop was it that you subtracted?

One and the same lump of clay: the potter's hand turns once, and it becomes bowl, becomes jar, becomes pot — each a different shape, yet the clay is one and the same lump. The Buddha speaks of the Tathāgata-womb, and speaks of no-self too; the words are two, but the thing spoken of is one and the same.

Mahāmati asks the most dangerous of questions: you say the Tathāgata-womb is pure and constantly abiding, present within the bodies of all sentient beings — in what does this differ from the outsiders' "divine self"? The Buddha's answer has but one move — the Tathāgata-womb is not a "self," it is a gate opening onto no-self; for those who take fright the moment they hear "no self," he gives first a gate to rely on, then leads them in through it.

And so the thirsting deer takes the spring mirage for water, and rushes after it in confusion — chasing a thing that is from the first not there. And that bright mirror shows a thousand colors according to conditions, yet the mirror does not stir, nor has it any false imagining — all that you and I take for a "realm outside the mind" turns out to be images within this mirror. The object is the mind's manifesting; let the clinging rest, and it is done.

Speech is no different. Say what you will, and you can never say your way to that ultimate truth — it can only be realized, it cannot be spoken, as a shadow can never point out the light. And at the last, the Buddha opens the four kinds of meditation, one layer above the next: from the no-self of persons, to the no-self of dharmas, to the setting-down even of the thought of "no self," to the entering of the Tathāgata's ground. This is one stair, walking into that gate of the Tathāgata-womb.

Now enter this passage. Look at that pure constant abiding you have taken for a "self" — and ask whether it is a gate, or a self; look at that realm you have chased your whole life long — and ask whether it is water, or the mirage in the thirsting deer's eye.

People always suppose that nirvāṇa is a matter of walking to some place, of winning some thing in exchange — of throwing away this tangled, disordered mind and seeking out another, a clean one, in its stead.

Mahāmati too asks it so: nirvāṇa — of which dharma is it spoken? Yet the World-Honored One points out no new thing; he speaks only the two words "be transformed": let that whole load of habit-energy within the store consciousness, mentation, and the mental consciousness be all alike transformed, and this is what is called nirvāṇa. It is not a changing of the mind; it is a turning of the mind. The ancient master says it to the very end — the name transforms though the substance does not. What transforms is the defiled-and-pure of the habit-energy; what does not transform is the substance of this one mind. The nirvāṇa you would seek is right here in this mind that is, at this moment, giving rise to delusion and framing deeds — turned about, right where it is.

It is apart from annihilation and apart from eternalism: not some coagulate, unmoving "self," and not an annihilation that is over and done. That abiding thing you call "self," search this whole mind and there is not a drop of it to be had; and yet it is not annihilated — the noble ones of the three times have all personally realized it.

And this one turning is not a shutting of the door and turning by one's own force alone. The habit-energy is too deep, one's own force often fails to hold it, and so the buddha upholds it with spiritual power — manifesting a body, preaching the Dharma, anointing the crown with the hand, like the wheel-turning king anointing the prince and conferring the position. That one anointing adds no thing to you; it only seals that this one mind of yours has already turned to the ground of succeeding to the buddha.

So enter this passage, and look — how that mind you took for something to be thrown away needs only one turning, and is nirvāṇa itself.

On a summer afternoon a pool of water-light wavers on the asphalt road, far off ahead. You walk toward it, and it draws back; you walk nearer, and it draws back again — that water you will never reach in a whole lifetime, because it was never there at all; it is only the heat deceiving the eyes. And yet there it plainly wavers, before you.

Most of what we see is water of this kind, a pool one can never reach. Mahāmati presses the World-Honored One: dependent origination speaks of cause and of condition — how does it not fall into the outsiders' rut of "some cause set apart," nor sink into the endlessness of cause chasing thing and thing chasing cause? The World-Honored One answers with a single line: this being, that is — the grasper and the grasped are alike without real nature; there is only your own mind's manifestation. The cause is not at the far end of the road; it is beneath your own eye.

Why is that pool of heat-shimmer "constant"? Not because it stiffens and stops, but because mark and mark do not perish — one water, four seeings, the hungry ghost seeing pus and the other destinies seeing water, manifesting differently according to deeds while the principle of that manifesting has never perished. The noble one sees it as illusion-like, unreal, swiftly perishing like lightning, manifesting in an instant and in an instant gone; but the common person takes it for real water, and further borrows names and sentences to set up a real body for it — and so, like a giant elephant sunk in deep mire, sinks the more it struggles.

One and the same pool of water: cling to it, and it is the elephant sunk in mire; observe it, and it is the swift winning of awakening. The whole divide lies in a single thought — to cling, or not to cling.

Now enter this span, and look: that water-light you have chased half your life — out of what stretch of your own mind's manifestation, after all, does it waver into being?

On a scorching road, far off, a patch of glare, bright as a pool of water. The deer sees it, takes it in good earnest for water, and runs headlong to drink. There is not one drop of water there — the water is a thing its own mind pieced together upon the spot.

That "self" underneath your body and mind is likewise just such a pool of shimmer-water. When the śrotāpanna cuts off the view of self, what he cuts off is no removing of some outer thing; it is the seeing-clear that it was never water — and once he sees it clear, the thirst that chased the water comes to rest of itself. The four fruits, rank climbing upon rank, what they cut off and what they leave behind, told to their very depth, are all the setting-down, layer by layer, of that one thought that "takes the shimmer for water."

The outsiders too seek nirvāṇa, but they seek, outside of arising-and-ceasing, some other permanent, unmoving "self" to abide in — as though they took an ocean for a slab of halted water. Yet the Buddha shows them: this ocean's water flows without break, its waves never rest, not one drop of it is at a stand. Ever-flowing, and so not cut off; without a resting-place, and so no "self." The nirvāṇa the Buddha teaches is but one sentence — the ceasing of the consciousness of false imagining; that wave of consciousness that rose to the wind and was taken by you for self, let the flow of the water be exhausted, and the waves rise no more.

The four fruits, the meditations, the four elements, the five aggregates — every one of them looks to stand outside the mind, yet every one of them does not pass beyond this one thing one's own mind manifests. Enter now this passage, and look: that wave of consciousness, whipped up by the wind of objects and taken by you for a "self" — from what ocean, after all, does it come?

A single piece of driftwood upon the sea, drifting this way and that with the waves — it does not sink, yet neither does it reach the shore. It is not that it cannot move; it is that the wind pushes it along, and it cannot be its own master. The scripture says: the śrāvaka is just such a piece of driftwood, buffeted about by the wind of "marks."

Mahāmati asks the Buddha: since in the end there is only the one vehicle, why not say it outright, and instead speak of three? The Buddha's answer is not that the Buddha is hiding the one vehicle and will not give it — it is that there is one who, at this moment, cannot take it up. Three things are unfinished: the affliction's present activity is cut off, but the lingering scent of the habit-energy is still there; the "self" is broken on the side of persons, but on the side of dharmas it still stands there; the birth-and-death of this life and the next is escaped, but that deeper layer of shifting and changing is not so much as touched.

You and I, at this moment, are for the most part just that piece of driftwood. We take ourselves for safe and sound, when in truth we are pushed along by the wind of the objective realm; we take ourselves for arrived at the shore, when in truth only half of it is emptied.

Yet the scripture paints a second picture too: the man drunk to the ground — the wine has, at the last, its day of wearing away; and one waking is no return to where he stood before, but a going toward the Buddha's supreme body. The driftwood tells you where you are trapped; the drunken man points to where you wake.

Now enter this passage, and look at those three things left unfinished — the awakening of the one vehicle is, when all is said, "self-realization"; it is a thing another cannot do in your stead. To wake, you must wake of yourself.

A man walks in the wilderness and sees, far off, an old road leading to an ancient city; he follows it in, and the city holds its own blisses ready for him. But that city is none of his building, that road none of his making — he has only found a path that was there of itself from the first. When the Buddha says that from the night he won awakening to the night he entered nirvāṇa, in between he did not speak one word, this is the very thing he means: the dharma-realm is abiding, constant from the first, like the nature of gold, like the ancient city standing there; the Buddha has only walked in — how should he have newly made a single word?

This passage takes the three things — body, deed, dharma — and draws them, one by one, back into one's own mind. The body is the mind-made body, won at the wish of the mind, appearing the instant body and mind are turned. The deed is the reading of those five outer crimes — the killing of father, the harming of the assembly — as five inward cuttings-off: the cutting-off of craving, of ignorance, of the fetters, of the grasping-at-the-aggregates, of the grasping-at-consciousness. The dharma is that ancient city of speechless self-realization, abiding and constant. Three matters coming home to one place: let the basis but turn, and the body alters with it; cut off the root in the mind, and the hell is no hell; be but apart from verbal telling, and the dharma stands present before you.

That body you spend day and night exchanging, those deeds you spend them doing, that dharma you spend them seeking — could it be that none of them is outside the mind at all, that all of them are here in this one thought of your own mind, waiting for you to turn, to cut off, to walk in?

Now enter this passage, and look upon that ancient city where not one word is spoken — where, from the first, it stands.

In the water-jar at night, one round moon — plainly there it is; reach in your hand to scoop it, and you cannot get it; say it is not there, and it is there all the same. It did not fall in from outside, nor is it about to leap out from within — it does not go out, it does not come in.

The wisdom of self-realization is just such a moon in water. It is not something heard, something remembered, something that can be spoken; words are like a lamp, and a lamp can light up color, yet the lamp is not that color. You may hear a thousand lines and ten thousand of the Dharma — that is the lamplight; to see the moon in your own jar, you must still turn your own head and look.

One and the same mind: take it out to reach and grasp, to summon together, to make deeds, and it is "consciousness," thought after thought arising and ceasing, like the waves on the sea; let this reaching-and-grasping rest, self and thing both forgotten, no longer grasping-clinging, and it is "wisdom," neither arising nor ceasing, like the moon that does not move. The outsiders stare at the rings and bracelets and necklaces beaten out of gold and cry, "the gold has transformed!" — yet the shapes have changed a thousandfold, and the nature of the gold has not stirred by a hair. That "self," that "thing that transforms," which you and I go looking for beneath body and mind, is just such a case of the eye gone astray.

It is not the object that transforms, it is the mind that manifests; it is not that consciousness must perish before there is wisdom — it is this same reaching-and-grasping mind, let it rest, and it is wisdom.

Now enter this passage, and see how that one lamp lights up the color, how that one round moon neither goes out nor comes in — the moon in your jar has been waiting, all this while, for you to turn your head.

A silkworm — no one binds it; it merely spins its thread, mouthful by mouthful. And spinning on and on, the thread winds into a cocoon and seals it up inside — fast bound, yet bound inch by inch with a thread of its own.

That bondage we undergo day and night is just such a cocoon we spin ourselves. Thought continues on into thought, deed into deed, one life joining the next without a break; you take it for a rope destiny has tied on from without, but it is the false imagining of your own mind — saying "being," saying "non-being," greedy for this, hating that, taking each phrase for real, and winding one loop for every phrase.

In this passage the World-Honored One shows you the rope from the beginning: three strands — greed, hatred, delusion — twist it, and stretched on toward the future it runs on into the five destinies. Yet turn a layer over, and within that reality there was, from the first, no continuum, and no liberation to be found either — the thread was spun by false imagining, and false imagining was empty all along.

So to cut the cocoon, there is no need to go looking outside for shears. The verse leaves only one line: the foolish common person is bound because he "does not contemplate the continuum." Turn it about — be willing to look back and see one thing as-it-is, that this thread was from the first false imagining, and false imagining from the first without intrinsic nature — and the thread is spun no more; the cocoon opens of itself.

Now enter this passage, and look: beneath your own body and mind, that one bout of spinning-and-binding-oneself — who, after all, is it that is bound, and by whom is it to be untied?

Just now it said "all dharmas are non-arising"; here the Buddha turns back and lays down a prohibition: this one word "non-arising" — you are not permitted even to set it up as a thesis.

It is not that the words are taken back. It is a reminder to you: whatever can be framed into a thesis and carried off to dispute with people is already no longer that realm realized in person. Non-arising is the sense in which word and thought are alike cut off; the moment it is set up as a thesis, then and there it falls back into word, falls back into thought — and so the Buddha teaches you only to "say that all dharmas are like illusion, like a dream": illusion-like, and so truly without intrinsic nature yet not falling into existence, vividly appearing yet not falling into non-existence.

Below comes a single dragon, changing its form and going up to heaven to argue even Śakra down. The dreadfulness of worldly discourse lies not in its shallowness but in its ornament and its edge, that it can win over a man, and yet from first to last it spins only within the realm of bodily awareness, never getting past that ring of the six dusts. The Buddha says of himself, "I do not teach worldly discourse, [and] there is no such thing as coming or going; I teach only not-coming, not-going" — not-coming, not-going is just not-arising, not-ceasing; worldly discourse reaches ever outward and clutches, and this one sentence turns the light back upon the measure of one's own mind's manifestation: this is the watershed of the two.

At the very end, the outsiders' twenty-odd nirvāṇas are spread open one by one: the utterly-ceased, the unruinable, the maker … and the Buddha lays down one judgment — "they fall, one and all, into the two extremes"; and the verse says, "all arise from the thought of the mind." They all point outward and identify some thing as nirvāṇa, forgetting that it is wholly the shadow manifested by their own mind's false imagining. It is like an image in a mirror, appearing yet not existent; the foolish will insist on taking the shadow for real, and would go on to divide out of the shadow a realizer and a realized.

Now enter this passage, and look: all those "non-arisings" and "nirvāṇas" you have pointed at outward, carried off to set up as a thesis, carried off to dispute — are they, after all, or are they not, a single strand of hovering hairs inside the mirror of the mind.

One orb of moon, mirrored in a thousand rivers and ten thousand waters. In this river, one orb; in that lake, one orb; in the ditch too, one orb. Yet ask when the moon bored its way into the water, and when it withdrew itself out again — where did it ever go out, or come in? It pervades and appears in all waters, itself not stirred by a thread, not increased by a hair.

The Tathāgata's names are just such an orb of moon. Tathāgata, Buddha, World-Rescuer, Self-Awakened, the True Limit, Suchness, Nirvāṇa, the Constant — three asaṃkhyeya hundred-thousand names, and the fools every one of them hear and can pronounce, yet not one of them knows: these hundreds and thousands of names all call one and the same "he." The names change by the thousand, and that substance has not stirred a step.

The hardest phrase is "neither arising nor ceasing." One step off, and it is heard as "nothing" — taking unarising for a cut-off, for a void empty of a single thing. The World-Honored One would block off this very road: neither arising nor ceasing does not dismiss the Tathāgata into an emptiness; unarising is "unarising and yet arising" — precisely because its substance does not arise, it can bring forth all the names, all the dharmas.

That thing you call "self," you would always have it be solidly real, able to come and to go, to increase and to decrease. Yet this one orb of moon points it out to you: that which pervades and appears in all things is precisely without going-out or coming-in, without increase or decrease. Seize a substance that moves, and you will never seize this orb of unmoving moon.

Now enter this passage, and look: beneath those hundreds and thousands of names, the one and the same "he"; and that neither-arising-nor-ceasing you have heard as "nothing" — is it, in the end, a dead emptiness, or a living true substance?

A player: this scene he acts a king, the next scene a beggar, the roles never done with changing. You watch, rapt, and could all but believe the king on the stage is really a king. But let the curtain fall, and where is any king, where any beggar — there is only a single player, a single mind that can manifest them all.

This passage speaks of just this mind. It is called the Tathāgata-womb; touched once by the beginningless habit-energy, it takes another name, the consciousness-store; it can hold good and can hold evil, and can bring forth the whole great play of the six destinies. And that "self" you take for the one in charge, the master, is no more than the lead singer in this play — the seventh consciousness sings the accompaniment, the first five are the partners, and false imagining is the spectator looking on, rapt, from the side.

It is like a sheet of ocean. Let the wind of objects blow once, and the waves of consciousness surge up wave upon wave, night and day without break. The outsiders, seeing the waves rise and the waves fall, are thrown into a fright and ask: is this eternal, or impermanent? They have asked wrongly — for though the waves arise and cease, the ocean is never cut off; yet this ocean too runs on thought after thought, and not one drop of it is at a stand. Ever-flowing, and so not annihilated; without a resting-place, and so not that "self" you would find. That constant, unmoving thing you grope for beneath body and mind — search this whole ocean, and you will not find one drop of it.

Even in the deepest attainment of cessation, the two vehicles are still crossing the river in a dream, taking "cessation" for the far bank. The bodhisattva, though, has woken, and looking back sees: that river, that crossing just now, were the doings of a dream. Only the one awake knows that this one store lies in the Tathāgata's palm, clear and plain as a fruit on the palm of the hand — where the difference was never in the fruit, but in the wisdom that can see.

Now enter this passage, and look: that one sheet of ocean, holding good and evil, raising a thousand waves, taken by you for a "self" — who, after all, is it that arises there, who that ceases?

When the silkworm spins its silk, it does not know that it is building itself a house it cannot walk out of. Coil upon coil, all of it is silk drawn from its own body; and by the time it is trapped within, of the thing that binds it not a single strand came from outside.

Day and night we fix names upon the things before our eyes, own them as appearances, and take them for real — this name, this appearance, this false imagining that goes on recognizing all down the line, is the silk we ourselves spin. Fix one name, and a grasp arises; a grasp arises, and a weight of deeds is added; a weight of deeds is added, and a layer of cocoon is wound. This wilderness of birth-and-death turns like the well-wheel drawing water, never stopping — and what turns us is still ourselves.

Yet the World-Honored One, within this one passage, points the way out with five words only: name, appearance, false imagining — these are the cocoon; right knowledge, suchness — these are the open sky beyond the cocoon. These five words are one and the same field of dharma: awaken to them, and they are throughout awakening; be deluded in them, and they are throughout the binding. The difference lies nowhere else than in this — whether you take name and appearance for a "thing that really is" and reach to seize it, or see it as a "passing guest," come but a moment and not to be detained.

Seize, and you go on spinning silk. See it as a guest, and the silk can no longer be wound into a cocoon — and this one letting-go the scripture calls "by not-winning one wins," the first step by which the bodhisattva ascends the ground.

The cocoon you spun yourself, and so only you can unravel it. Now enter this passage, and look: that one strand of silk that binds you — from where, after all, was it drawn?

That piece of meat on your plate — you take it only for a meal. But in this passage the Buddha would have you look past it to what lies behind: to see where it came from, and where it draws you on to.

Mahāmati asks five questions in a string, each of them barbed, forcing the World-Honored One to attest his own perfection. Yet the World-Honored One first takes "buddha" apart into two layers to see it: the one who manifests his body according to the occasion, suffers men's slander, and is guarded by warriors is the transformation-buddha, like the vessel a potter turns out at the touch of the wheel; the one who is apart from all that the sense-faculties can measure, unmoving and yet ever expounding the dharma, is the true Tathāgata. The whole board of contradictions, once told apart, falls away. Following this parting, the scripture lays bare the two obstructions and the two deaths, and the deepest sentence of all — one and the same Tathāgata-womb is at once the cause of birth-and-death and the cause of nirvāṇa. The earlier statement that it is "named the consciousness-store" when perfumed and Scroll One's ocean-and-waves simile may illuminate this sentence, but neither erases the condition attached to that naming.

Then the theme turns, and comes down onto the knife's edge: one taste of meat. Sentient beings have been, turn upon turn, one another's six kinds of kin; the meat in your bowl today, how do you know it was not, in a former time, your own flesh and blood? The money with which you buy the meat is a net that, cast down but once, draws in every being of the air, the water, and the land. Even the "three kinds of pure meat" the śrāvakas permitted, the Buddha here closes the last gate upon — there is not, in the whole world, one piece of meat truly killed by no one for you.

Now enter this passage. See how the single line running from the prophecy down to the abstaining from meat gathers the highest doctrine of consciousness up into the most intimate thing of all — one mouthful of your food.