by Wu Hsin
In general, the same can be said for self-recognition, one must fight for it.
Admittedly, there have been instances where enlightenment occurred uninvited.
Yet, in most cases, it is predicated on a receptivity, an earnestness and desire to understand. To these, no further practice as such is mandatory.
However, if the allures of the world hold sway, regardless of how profound Wu Hsin's words are, they will not find their mark.
December (Shí Yuè)
1
Only imperfect knowledge must be protected by a mountain of words.
Here, the words are few.
Wu Hsin's is not a philosophy of logic and reason, but a philosophy of direct experience.
He tells you that, like fire is the cause of smoke, yet is obscured by it, this self-centric life obscures its underlying cause.
One's personal story is the memory of a self-expansive continuity: I, me, mine, my house, my family, always accumulating more for itself.
2
Seekers are numerous, but the finders are rare.
This is due to the fact that the one who is trying to go beyond manifestation is a part of the manifestation.
Discern the inherent flaw in this approach.
Attainment is predicated on understanding that there is nothing to be attained.
This is the root.
3
The table cannot enter the mind, only the sense impressions of the table can.
The mind must not abide on any image presented to the senses or on any thought presented to consciousness.
It has to go beyond both image and thought.
Only then can it reach the ultimate which cannot be thought or imagined.
4
In the experience of the union of the knower, the object of knowing, and the process of knowing, the familiar separation between subject and object is transcended.
All that remains is the Knowing.
More than mere theory, this is a direct experience, one that is unavailable to the rational faculty because reason always presupposes the existence of an objective world distinct from the subject or knower.
In order to transcend the limitations posed upon reality by the rational faculty, the mind must turn back upon itself and away from the senses to know itself intuitively, in its undivided wholeness, in its nonduality.
When experienced through the senses and reason, reality appears multiple, ever-changing, and finite.
When experienced through the height of intuition, reality is found to be unified, unchanging, and infinite.
5
You are here; the essential thing is done, and from this point forward, neither place nor time are of major importance.
The language of Wu Hsin may not be your language.
What does it matter what words he uses?
Their whole power lies in the hearer’s inner response.
6
The Absolute cannot be described.
It is infinite as it is the negation of limits and it is eternal as it is the negation of time.
Even to say, "It is," is misleading, since It is beyond Being.
Even the word "prior" suggests causal or temporal sequence, and It is beyond both.
It is even prior to The First. Nothing can be said of It without settling upon a name in order to speak of It, and so Wu Hsin chooses to name It the Absolute or Pure Potentiality.
It is the Potentiality of all multiplicity, and it holds this potential multiplicity within it.
7
The purpose of the form of Wu Hsin is to announce that which underlies all form.
The failure of religion lies in its inability to take one beyond religion, to that place beyond image and concept.
It fails to reveal That-Which-Is, that from which one cannot depart.
It fails in its capacity to awaken love in its followers.
It fails in its capacity to awaken oneness in its followers.
It fails.
8
Wu Hsin reminds that there is no need for sandals since this is not a journey requiring feet.
It is a journey to clarity, to the end of conflict. If conflict continues, then the old continues.
This clarity, this newness, is the total destruction of the old.
You can do nothing to bring it about except to avoid creating impediments.
When one is looking from where Looking looks, the journey is over.
9
There is virtually a global ignorance, an ignorance in the sense of ignoring What-Is.
Wu Hsin prefers to use the word confusion which is characterized by both non-apprehension and misapprehension.
Wu Hsin presents before you an alternative to the tendency of the human mind to seek the path out of its confusion by way of the ideological fixation of belief.
10
Reject what is heard frequently;
Reject tradition;
Reject scripture;
Reject conjecture;
Reject inference;
Reject analogy;
Reject compatibility with various views;
Reject another’s seeming wisdom;
Look, and accept only your own findings.
Recognition comes from this, and this alone.
11
The focus of Wu Hsin remains in the essence and is not distracted by the substance.
Whereas whatever is perceived is intemporal, the Seeing is eternal.
Once you accept that you are a form in this dualistic world, feeling separate is a natural response.
When the form is "not you", there is no separation.
Wu Hsin's words here are final.
12
This self, in fact, is just a bundle of perceptions and memories, but the more actions performed imagining that it is the self that originates and executes them, the more substance this insubstantial entity is endowed with.
In this manner of gaining substance for itself, this structure assumes authority, takes it upon itself to mediate between consciousness and reality.
It continually intrudes between the mind and what is, screening and filtering, so that it becomes an impediment to true knowing.
The paradox is that this process is deemed an unsatisfactory condition, resulting in seeking new experiences in order to transcend this self or to take oneself out of oneself.
13
Man can live his life either as entangled with the phenomenal or as openness to the noumenal.
The choosing of the latter prompts the investigation.
The self must discern what it is, not that it is. That it is is self evident.
To do this, one must discriminate the innermost from the outer physical and mental coverings just as one exposes the pure white core of the coconut by removing its outer husk.
In this sense, Seeing is of the highest importance. This seeing is out of time and space; it's immediate, instantaneous.
14
One may plan and plan until exhaustion arrives.
Yet there is no one who is a cause of anything.
The wise observe their actions, knowing that they are moved by something far greater than themselves.
The ignorant plan.
15
Whereas the individual consciousness is like a space in a pot or in a room, the universal consciousness is like the total space.
Many candles can be lit from the flame of a single candle.
Yet, the flame of the first candle is not diminished because it has given light to many candles.
It is the same for the Conscious Life Energy.
It is the singular, illimitable force responsible for both the phenomena that are seen and the act of seeing them.
16
One must not confuse the suppression of thought with the transcendence of thought.
What is the transcendence of thought?
It is where thought becomes unimportant, where one is impartial to it and where it has lost its ability to affect you.
An illness is not cured just by pronouncing the name of the medicine without taking it.
The medicine prescribed by Wu Hsin is turning Selfward.
17
Believing that lasting happiness can be found in objects is delusion.
Believing that only your view is the right one is delusion.
The notion that you are separate from the world is delusion.
Belief is movement away from reality.
It is the result of conditioning, or the product of fear, or the result of an authority which gives a seeming comfort. It colors all experience.
When beliefs are released, one is available to understand.
As one restores a white shirt by removing the dirt, one removes delusion to restore clarity.
18
There are no doors to the Absolute.
There is only the door through which you emerged. Call it I-am.
Returning to it, passing through it, is the only way.
The sense 'I am' is the representation of something deeper.
Never forget that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and that you have taken yourself prisoner.
Every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelled, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is personal.
19
Man is quick to assign the conceptual presence of an entity in circumstances where, in fact, there is none.
In this regard, personality is then not pertaining to an individual but to a set of behaviors of the organism.
Drop the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not.
Wu Hsin says that you are the dimensionless and timeless center of observation.
Even this is inadequate.
20
What is the world other than the images one has formed?
To the extent that people share some images, they believe that the world is singular.
However, in fact, all worlds are personal.
In a similar vein, every man superimposes his own experience on others and imagines that their experience is like his.
Since it is impossible to know whether the taste of sugar in one man’s mouth is the same as its taste in another’s, never suggest that another’s experience is the same as your own.
21
Appearances in Emptiness can never affect Emptiness.
The space inside the cup is the same as the space outside the cup.
Only walls, mental or physical, delineate inside from outside.
The silence preceding the words is the same silence after they are spoken. These are the offspring of the Unchanging.
Therefore, forget whatever can be forgotten. In so doing, what is revealed is that which cannot be forgotten.
One must be empty of the known to understand this.
To try to incorporate it into the known is bound to fail.
22
The transcendence of distinction is not the denial of distinction.
What is discerned is that the world is an event; it is something that happens to you in the same way as your body and your mind happen to you.
The way of Wu Hsin is to inquire:
To what does the body appear?
To what does the mind appear?
To whom do they happen?
Where do the body and mind appear?
When do the body and mind appear?
23
Events are temporal appearances; they come and go.
The world is an event. It appears, lasts a while, and then dissolves.
The body and the mind are also events. The world, your body and your mind all happen to you.
With clarity, this is the immediate, unmediated experience.
When a person is as firmly convinced of his identity as awareness as an ordinary person is convinced of his or her identity as the body, he or she is free.
24
Sugar candies may come in varying shapes and sizes. But, they are all sugar.
In the same way, see the One in the many, and be clear that the only thing you can ever know is what appears in your mind.
The moment you grasp this, you will easily discover that anything perceived by you comes and goes, whereas you were there before its appearance, during the moments when it presented itself to you, and after it had left you.
In the absence of water, there are no waves.
25
Even an emperor, in spite of his wealth and power, often suffers because of an unsettled mind.
The sage, who does not know where his next meal will come from, is always happy.
Tomorrow is hardly guaranteed. All one has is this day.
In squandering it, all may be squandered.
Stop all projections and rest in That to which all happens.
26
There is the belief that there is something that needs to be done to close the distance between oneself and the Totality.
The distance between the individual and the Totality is, in fact, the same as the distance between the moon and space.
Discern the fragmentation of consciousness into consciousness of this as "I" and consciousness of that as the world.
In seeing this, the I-notion is seen as the bridge between Self and its human instrument.
Holding this I-notion, you track it, as you would track an animal. You follow its footprints or its scent back to its lair.
Suddenly, without warning, inexplicably, the lightning strikes.
You could say that it is not unlike returning the spark to the fire. The individual returns to the universal.
27
Confusion generates desires because it causes a false sense of incompleteness and inadequacy consequent on taking the Self to be what it is not.
The end of confusion presents as fullness and completion.
The Being Consciousness understands the world to be Its expression and to be dependent on It for its existence and reality.
Such clarity yields neither a new, improved person nor a new, improved world.
Whereas the identification with the body ceases, the association, the conscious union, with the body continues. The clarity merely removes confusion, the cataract that clouds What-Is.
Once it is crossed, the bridge is dismantled.
28
Wu Hsin is disinterested in your imagined entity.
What he is trying to convey is that whatever happens, points to your existence as a perceiving center.
When one is aware of one's mind, one stands outside it.
This is the only stance in which it can be known.
This Self, which is all too often portrayed to be inaccessible and mysterious, is really the most accessible.
What can we know more certainly than our Self, that one is?
29
Wu Hsin has shown you the triangle. Yet, you continue to merely see three lines.
It is only when the viewpoint changes that the triangle is discerned.
For now, the color of the water may seem to be the color of the vessel, but it is not so.
To say that you are part of everything is incomplete knowledge.
You are everything.
30
Nothing relating to the physical body, nothing perceptible by the senses, nothing conceivable by the mind, nothing that can be claimed by the intellect is unchanging, permanent.
