The Surangama Sutra

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The Surangama Sutra Page 25

by Hsuan Hua


  “The essence of tasting is generated out of the wondrous perfection of the pure mind because it adheres to the two interacting attributes of flavor and lack of flavor. The essence of tasting mixes itself with the essence of flavor, thus creating the essence of the tongue-faculty. The essence of the tongue-faculty is composed of the four primary elements in their pure state, and that is why it may be called the faculty’s ‘essence.’ The physical tongue takes the shape of a crescent moon and is composed of the four primary elements in their coarse state. The tongue-faculty recklessly races outward in pursuit of flavors.

  “The essence of the sense of touch is generated out of the wondrous perfection of the pure mind because it adheres to the two interacting attributes of contact and separation. The essence of tactile awareness seizes upon the essence of what is touched, thus creating the essence of the body-faculty. The essence of the body-faculty is composed of the four primary elements in their pure state, and that is why it may be called the faculty’s ‘essence.’ The physical body, with its torso which takes the shape of a skin-covered drum, is composed of the four primary elements in their coarse form. The body-faculty recklessly races outward in pursuit of tangible objects.

  “The essence of cognition is generated out of the wondrous perfection of the pure mind because it adheres to the two mutually perpetuating attributes of coming into being and perishing. The essence of mental awareness grasps the essence of objects of cognition, thus creating the essence of the cognitive faculty. The essence of the cognitive faculty is composed of the four primary elements in their pure state, and that is why it may be called the faculty’s ‘essence.’ The cognitive faculty, which is, as it were, seen in a dark room, responds to the four primary elements in their coarse form. The mind-faculty recklessly flows outward in pursuit of mental objects.

  “So it is, Ānanda, that the six faculties come into being out of the awakened mind when another understanding is added to that awakened mind. As a result, the essential understanding is lost and the faculties adhere to what is distorted, and each one assumes a different function. Therefore, if you were now to be deprived of both light and darkness, would your seeing continue to exist or would it not? If you were deprived of both sound and silence, would your hearing lose its fundamental characteristics or would it not? If you were deprived of both openness and blockage, would your capacity to smell continue to exist or would it not? If you were deprived of both the presence and the absence of flavors, would your capacity to taste continue to exist or would it not? If you were deprived of both contact and separation, would your sense of touch still exist or would it not? If you were deprived of both the coming into being and perishing of the objects of cognition, would your capacity for cognition still exist or would it not?

  “All that you need to do is not allow your attention to be diverted by the twelve conditioned attributes of sound and silence, contact and separation, flavor and the absence of flavor, openness and blockage, coming into being and perishing, and light and darkness. Next, extricate one faculty by detaching it from its objects, and redirect that faculty inward so that it can return to what is original and true. Then it will radiate the light of the original understanding. This brilliant light will shine forth and extricate the other five faculties until they are completely free.

  The text says literally: “All you need is not to follow.” This section of the Sutra is very important. Why don’t people become enlightened?... It is because they let themselves be distracted by illusory objects of perception. They are under the influence of their perceptions of objects and cannot gain control over them. But you don’t have to comply; you don’t have to be under their influence. You can go against the current and decline to follow the twelve conditioned attributes of light and darkness, sound and silence, openness and blockage, flavors and blandness, contact and separation, and coming into being and ceasing to be. (IV, 195)

  “If your six faculties are freed from the objects that they perceive so that the light of your understanding is not diverted into one or another of the faculties, then the light of your understanding will manifest through all the faculties so that all six of them will function interchangeably.

  “Ānanda, you know, do you not, that here in this assembly, Aniruddha is blind and yet can see; that the dragon Upananda is deaf and yet can hear; that the goddess of the River Ganges has no sense of smell and yet can discern fragrances; that Gavāṃpati’s malformed tongue cannot taste, and yet he is aware of flavors; and that the spirit Śūnyatā is incorporeal but just now has a sense of touch — you can see him here temporarily as he is illumined by the light of the Thus-Come One. By nature, however, he is as bodiless as the wind. And like all who abide in the samādhi of cessation16 and who have attained the stillness of the Hearers of the Teaching, Mahākāśyapa, here in this assembly, long ago caused his cognitive faculty to cease, and yet without relying on the thinking mind, his understanding is clear and perfect.

  “Once all your faculties are completely disengaged, Ānanda, a pure brilliance will shine forth from within them. Then all coarse perceived objects — indeed all phenomena subject to change in the material world — will be transformed, just as ice is transformed when it melts in hot water. Then, responding in the time it takes for a single thought to arise, all phenomena will merge into your supreme awareness.

  “Ānanda, consider someone who, seeing only with his eyes, quickly closes his eyes so that total darkness surrounds him. His six faculties will be enveloped in the darkness such that his eyes will not be able to distinguish the head from the feet on someone else’s body. But he will be able to tell the head and the foot apart if he traces their shape with his hands. He will be able to identify them as accurately as he would have done by using his eyes.

  “Now, if his visual awareness were dependent on the presence of light, he would have no visual awareness when he was immersed in darkness. But without light, he can still perceive. Total darkness need not prevent him from being aware of distinctions among objects. In the same way, once your faculties and their objects have melted away, how could your awareness and understanding not become perfect and wondrous?”

  The Example of the Bell’s Sound

  Ānanda said respectfully to the Buddha, “World-Honored One, as the Buddha has said, when one’s practice is based on the resolve to seek what is everlasting, one’s mind should be correlated to the mental state of the enlightenment that will be the result of one’s practice. This result, World-Honored One, may be called Full Awakening, Nirvana, the Suchness of Reality, the Buddha-nature, the Pure17 Consciousness, the Emptiness of the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, and the Wisdom of the Great Perfect Mirror. Those are seven different names for what is pure and perfect, everlasting and indestructible, that essential nature which is like the most durable vajra.

  “If, ultimately, seeing, hearing, and the other sense-consciousnesses do not exist on their own apart from light and darkness, sound and silence, openness and blockage, and so forth, then in the same way the mind-consciousness must cease to exist when it is apart from its own objects. How then can these consciousnesses, which will ultimately perish, be the basis for practice as one strives for the Thus-Come Ones’ everlasting realization as it is characterized by those seven names?

  “World-Honored One, suppose that in the final analysis no seeing can take place when neither light nor darkness are present. In the same way, no thought-processes can take place if no objects are being presented to the faculty of cognition. Then no matter how much I look here and look there, going about in circles in an exhaustive search, I can find nothing that fundamentally is my mind or my mind’s objects. On what then can I base my quest for supreme enlightenment?

  “What the Thus-Come One has just said contradicts his previous words about what is clear, pure, perfect, and everlasting.18 It seems to be mere speculation. How can these words spoken by the Thus-Come One be true?

  I only hope the Buddha, out of his great kindness, will set me free from the doubt
s that I am clinging to.”

  The Buddha said to Ānanda, “You are very learned, but you have not yet put an end to your outflows. You know the reasons for delusion, but when you encounter delusion you fail to recognize it. It is to be feared that, though you are sincere, you still do not quite trust the teaching. I will have to make use of another everyday situation to dispel your doubts.”

  The Buddha then instructed Rāhula to strike the bell once, and he asked Ānanda, “Do you hear?”

  Ānanda and the others in the assembly answered, “We hear.”

  When the bell had ceased ringing, the Buddha asked again, “Now do you hear?”

  Ānanda and the others in the assembly answered, “We do not.”

  Then Rāhula struck the bell once more, and the Buddha asked once again, “Now do you hear?”

  Ānanda and the others again replied, “We hear.”

  The Buddha asked Ānanda, “How is it that you heard and then did not hear?”

  Ānanda and the others said respectfully to the Buddha, “We heard the bell when it was struck, but when at length the sounding of the bell had died away and its reverberations had faded, we no longer were hearing.”

  The Buddha then instructed Rāhula to strike the bell yet again, and he asked Ānanda, “Is there a sound now?”

  Ānanda and the others in the assembly answered, “Yes, there is a sound.”

  In a little while the sound faded, and the Buddha asked, “And now is there a sound?”

  Ānanda and the others replied, “There is no sound.”

  After a moment Rāhula again struck the bell, and the Buddha asked again, “And is there a sound now?”

  Ānanda and the others said, “There is.”

  The Buddha asked Ānanda, “How is it that there was a sound and then no sound?”

  Ānanda and the others in the assembly answered respectfully, “When the bell was struck, there was a sound, but when at length the sounding of the bell had died away and the reverberations had faded, there was no longer any sound.”

  The Buddha said to Ānanda and the others in the assembly. “Why have you given such muddled answers?”

  Ānanda and the others thereupon asked the Buddha, “Why do you say that our answers were muddled?”

  The Buddha replied, “When I asked you whether you heard, you said that you had heard. When I asked if there was a sound, you said that there was a sound. Since you did not clearly distinguish between hearing and sound in your answer, how could I not say that your answer was muddled?

  “Ānanda, once the sounding of the bell and its reverberations had faded, you said that you no longer heard. If it were true that you had stopped hearing, your essential capacity for hearing19 would have ceased to exist. It would be like a dead tree that is unable to grow again, in that you would have been unable to hear the bell if it were struck again. You knew when the bell’s sound, which is a perceived object, was present and when it was absent. But how could it be that your essential capacity for hearing was present and then absent? If your essential capacity for hearing were in truth no longer present, what then would be aware that the sound had ceased? Therefore, Ānanda, although the sounds you hear come into being and cease to be, neither the presence nor the subsequent absence of sound can cause your essential capacity for hearing to come into being and then cease to be.

  Ānanda and the members of the great assembly all said that they did not hear once the bell’s sound died away. That’s where their problem lay.... They thought that when there is no sound, there is no hearing. But actually, when there is no sound, what is it that perceives that there is nothing to be heard?... If you were really without hearing, then you would not know whether there was sound or not. (IV, 215)

  Although the sound ceases, the enlightened nature of hearing has not ceased to function. It is still in operation, because the enlightened nature of hearing neither comes into being nor ceases to be. It is sound that comes into being and ceases to be. Thus when the sound ceased and Ānanda said that he did not hear, he was mistaken. (IV, 218)

  “You are still deluded. In your confusion you take hearing and the presence of sound to be the same thing. You consider something everlasting to be something that will come to an end. In the final analysis, it cannot be said that hearing in its essential nature is dependent on the presence of sound or silence, or dependent on whether the ears are obstructed or unobstructed.

  “Consider someone who has fallen deeply asleep on his bed. While he is sleeping, someone in his household starts beating clothes or pounding rice. The dreamer hears the sounds of the beating or the pounding and mistakes them for something else, perhaps the striking of a drum or the ringing of a bell. In his dream he wonders why the striking of the bell or drum sounds like clothes being beaten or like rice being pounded. He wakes up suddenly, and he immediately recognizes the sound of the pounding. He tells the people in his household, ‘I just had a dream in which I mistook your pounding rice for the beating of a drum.’

  He is so sound asleep that he does not wake up when someone calls him. But even though he does not awaken, the enlightened nature of his hearing is still present. He perceives sounds, albeit mistakenly, even though he is asleep. The mistake is not made by the enlightened nature of hearing but by the sixth consciousness, the mind-consciousness. (IV, 221)

  “Ānanda, how was it that this dreamer could have been conscious of sound or silence? How was it that his ears were unobstructed and functioning? Although his body was asleep, the enlightened nature of his hearing did not sleep. Even when the body wastes away, its energy dissipates, and its life force moves on, how could that essential capacity to hear dissipate along with them?

  “Nevertheless, since beings have allowed their attention to be drawn to sights and sounds and have allowed themselves to be carried along in their streams of thought, as it has been since time without beginning, they have not yet awakened and do not yet understand the purity, the wondrousness, and the permanence of their own essential nature. Instead of attending to what is everlasting, they attend to what comes into being and perishes, and as a result, in life after life, they are mired in impurity and are bound to the cycle of death and rebirth. But if they turn away from what comes into being and perishes and hold fast to what is true and everlasting, then the light of the everlasting will appear, and as a result the faculties, their objects, and the sense-consciousnesses will fade away and disappear.

  “By entirely disengaging yourself from two impurities — defiled mental processes and defiled emotional attachment to those processes — your Dharma-eye will become clear and bright. How then could you fail to go on to realize a supreme understanding and awakening?”

  “Defiled mental processes” refers to the observed division of the eighth consciousness, while “defiled emotional attachment” refers to the observing division.... Attachment to these processes leads to emotion, and with emotion comes defilement.... Emotion causes people to be born in a stupor and die in a dream. If you can separate yourself from emotional attachment to both aspects of the eighth consciousness, your “Dharma-eye will become clear and bright.” The Dharma-eye referred to here is not necessarily the Dharma-eye that is one of the five spiritual eyes. It can be interpreted figuratively to mean that you have gained access to your inherent wisdom. It is even more wonderful if you actually open your Dharma-eye so that, throughout the ten directions and the three periods of time to the ends of empty space and the Dharma-Realm, everything is seen as a Dharma-treasury....

  Everyone should pay particular attention to this short passage of Sutra text. Don’t get attached to emotional love and become involved in making distinctions and indulging in deluded thinking. Separate yourself from them. This teaching is very important; don’t take it lightly. (IV, 230–1)

  Ānanda said respectfully to the Buddha, “World-Honored One, the Thus-Come One has now explained the second of the unalterable principles.20 But let us consider an example from ordinary life. Someone trying to untie a knot must un
derstand how the knot was tied in the first place. I believe that otherwise he will not be able to untie it. World-Honored One, we Arhats in the assembly who still need instruction may be compared to the person who is trying to untie a knot. Since time without beginning we have been born into ignorance and have perished in ignorance. Although we are learned and have strong roots in the Dharma, and although we have entered the monastic life and call ourselves monks, it is as if we were subject to a fever that recurs every other day. I only hope that the greatly compassionate one will be moved to deeply pity us who are drowning in the sea of afflictions. How are the knots of our bodies and minds tied, and where do we begin to untie them, so that we and the suffering beings of the future may be freed from the cycle of death and rebirth and fall no longer into the three realms of conditioned existence?”

  Having spoken these words, he bowed to the ground, as did all the others in the assembly. He shed tears as he eagerly awaited the sublime instructions given by the Buddha, the World-Honored One.

  Then the World-Honored One took pity on Ānanda and on all the others in the assembly who still needed instruction, wishing that, for the sake of the future, they might transcend the conditioned world and become guides for the time yet to come. As he circled his hand over the crown of Ānanda’s head, his hand shone with light that was the color of the purple-tinted gold of the River Jambu. Then throughout all ten directions, every world in which Buddhas were dwelling quaked in six ways. Each one of the numberless Thus-Come Ones of those worlds emitted resplendent light from the crown of his head. Those beams of light shone down upon the crown of the Thus-Come One’s head as he was seated in Jetri’s Grove. No one in the assembly had witnessed such an event before.

 

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