Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha

by Jack Kerouac

  “A body only proves that the insemination of a woman by a man, assists in the appearance of bodies, that is, the activity of rebirth, and the mystery is that the body is really mind-made and really independent of its own bodiness! That is why your body, being a mere figure of speech, can neither be said to be existent or non-existent, neither caused nor not-caused, because in the Essential Mind of Enlightenment which is awake beyond conception no such discrimination is held. As I look at your body, I realize it is just a visionary bloom in the void, it has no hold on Reality. Where do the elements come from, that give your body its bodiness, and how do they sojourn here? Ananda, they come from everywhere; this is a Sea of Mystery.

  “Ananda, your body is like a thought, it is an impermanent form materializing awhile in the permanent essence of Mind. The essence of the thought and the essence of the Mind are the same, naturally, but the form is just a passing fancy which is completely ignored in Mind’s Essence of Omniscience which we call the Womb of Tathagata for purposes of teaching, it is neither considered as existent or inexistent. Who would notice it?—as a mirror the vain child, Ananda?”

  The assembled holy men, each one feeling like a man who had inherited a magnificent palace through the munificence of a heavenly King but could not take possession of it without first passing through the door of Enlightenment into the Bright Room of Perfect Wisdom, hard to achieve, bowed down at the feet of the Great Lord and, with Ananda as their natural spokesman, beseeched him for further sacred instruction, with regard to the actual starting-point for their devotion and their disciplinary practice, wishing each one surely to attain the intelligence and insight of the Lord Buddha.

  Ananda concluded by saying: “We pray thee, my Noble Lord, to show us how to get rid of all entangling conditions and thus to encourage all of us who are still practicing Arhats to concentrate our minds on the right path.”

  The Blessed One, in tones of tender and sorrowful compassion, and placing his hand kindly on Ananda’s head, replied:- “Ananda, within your body there is an element of hardness, of Earth; there is an element of fluidity, of Water; there is an element of warmth, of Fire; and an element of breathing and motion, the element of Wind. The body is in bondage to these Four Great Elements, and these four bonds divide your tranquil, mysterious, intuitive, enlightening Mind into such divisions as the sensations and perceptions of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching, and of the following conceptions and discriminations of thought, that cause your enlightened Mind to fall into the corresponding five defilements of this evil world from its beginning and will continue to do so to its end.

  “What are these five defilements, Ananda? What is their nature? Consider the difference between fresh, pure spring water, and such substances as dust, ashes and sand. If these are mixed, the water becomes opaque and dirty. It is just the same with the five defilements and the mind.

  “Ananda, when you look into the vast space that stretches beyond the universe, the nature of space and the nature of the perception of sight do not interfere with each other and mingling together there is no boundary line to limit their individuality. But if there is only empty space, with no suns nor planets in it, then space loses its substantiality. No objects means that there is no conception such as space. Also, the conception of sight looking into space with nothing to see, loses its sensibility. But as there is this false phenomenon of two arbitrary conceptions—suns and planets moving in space, and the false perception of sight, all interwoven together,—so there are all the uncounted false appearances of differences in the universes.

  “As you don’t clearly and continuously realize that it is all a hallucination made of the mindstuff, ignorant wrinkles on the surface of it, you go on being a victim of this first defilement of Individuation, of ‘making-out’ seeing and perceiving which is the basis of ignorance.

  “This is the first defilement, the Defilement of Discriminating Ignorance.

  “Next, having perceived the mass of phenomena as being a jumble of differences, your processes of the mind mingling with the processes of the body become interwoven together into the false imaginations that are the second defilement where you note details and develop erroneous views concerning the differences of form, not realizing that the substance of one form is not different from the substance of another. Is there any difference between the substance of light and the substance of shadow?

  “This is the second defilement, the Defilement of Form.

  “Again, having developed a notion of form and details and in accordance with the conscious processes within your mind, and including your pure intuition, you conceive a desire or aversion for these different forms.

  “This is the third defilement, the Defilement of Desire.

  “Again, having developed the desire based on the notion of discriminated form, and note how one leads to another, you grasp at these things, not realizing what they are, objective illusions. Your mind is continually in a process of change from morning to night, and every time your thoughts change, you seek to manifest and perpetuate them by some sort of creative activity in the terrestrial world. And every time your actions, conditioned by your Karma, take form, they transform sentient lives also. These interwoven false imaginations bring sentient beings to grasping the things they desire. Desire poses as a friend, but in secret ’tis an enemy.

  “This is the fourth defilement, the Defilement of Grasping.

  “Finally, your perceptions of seeing, hearing, touching, thinking, smelling and tasting have no difference in their nature in the pure Essence of Mind, and are mutually accommodating, but when they are placed in opposition to one another revealing abnormal differences, they become mutually incompatible. Thus there arise internal and external conflicts, which, although imaginary and mind-only, lead to weariness, suffering, growing old and decrepitude.

  “This is the fifth defilement, the Defilement of Decrepitude, Old Age, Disease and Death.

  “Ananda, why do you suffer decrepitude from grasping at the desire for some form that you should not have individuated in the first place?

  “Ananda! Whenever during the course of your practice of holy meditation some vagrant thought obtrudes itself in your tranquil mind, run it backwards through the wringer of the five defilements, see it clearly, survey its effect of decrepitude destroying your tranquillity and all because of grasping at it, which is because of desire, which is because of form, which is because of discriminating ignorance. And the same with evil passions when they arise in your Mind in the stress of action, run the passion through the wringer of the five defilements, ask yourself, “Ananda, why do you allow yourself to fall into suffering and decrepitude by grasping at the desire to discriminate and ravish this form which is only an imaginary idea in Reality?”

  “Ananda! If you wish your sense perceptions and conscious understanding to be in harmony with the permanent joy of the Tathagata’s natural purity, you must first pull up these roots of death and rebirth which have been surreptitiously planted by these five kinds of defilements, namely, the defilements of discriminating ignorance, of form, of desire, of grasping, of decrepitude, and then begin the practice of concentration of your attention on the pure and essential mind of non-death and non-rebirth.

  “Yes, Ananda, sit thee in tranquillity, under a tree or anywhere you might be, and close your eyes, and breathe gently and serenely, loosen the knot in your stomach, relax, rest, remember the Light, and think: ‘This is the pure and essential Mind of non-death and non-rebirth, this shining essence is the Holy Reality, all else is a dream.’

  “For when it is realized that there is nothing born, and nothing passes away, then there is no way to admit being and non-being, and the mind becomes quiescent. It is by means of your quiescence of mind that you are able to transmute this false mind of death and rebirth into the true and clear Intuitive Mind and by so doing, to realize the primal, enlightening and intuitive Essence of Mind. You should make this your starting point for practice.

  “If you wis
h to tranquillize your mind and restore its original purity, you must proceed as if you were purifying a jar of muddy water. You first let it stand until the sediment settles to the bottom when the water will become pure, which corresponds with the state of mind before the defilements of the evil passions had troubled it. Then you carefully strain off the pure water which is the state of the mind after the five defilements of ignorance, form, desire, grasping, decrepitude, have been wholly removed. When the mind becomes tranquillized and concentrated into perfect unity, then all things will be seen, not in their separateness, but in their unity wherein there is no place for the evil passions to enter, and which is in full conformity with the mysterious and indescribable purity of Nirvana.

  “Ananda! Do not for a moment think that because accidental and momentary thoughts are stopped, that the Mind stops also.

  “It is just like the accidental and momentary sound of the gong when I strike it, when the sound dies away and there is perfect silence, has your ability to hear died away?

  “It is not right for you to say that if your thinking is separated from arbitrary conditions such as appearance and disappearance, death and rebirth that the perception of thinking would have no essential nature of its own.

  “All sentient beings, from beginningless time, have always hankered after beautiful sights and musical sounds and blissful feelings and exquisite flavors and lovely fragrances, filling their thinking minds with thought after thought and causing it to be always active, thinking that the Mind should be used, never realizing that it is beyond the using; never realizing that by nature it is pure, mysterious, permanent, and Void Divine, thus causing them, instead of following the path of permanency, to succumb to the five defilements and follow the current of transitory deaths and rebirths. Consequently there has been life after life ever recurring and ever filled with contaminations, impermanency and suffering.

  “Like so many dead birds on the ground, Ananda, are these lives, these forms. Does it fit the case to question whether a form is joyful or not?

  “Ananda, if you could only learn to get free from this bondage to deaths and rebirths and from this fear of impermanency, and learn to concentrate your mind on its true and permanent nature of Permanency, which is an inconceivable activity that has nothing to do with time or haste because it belongs to He-Who-Is-Already-Good (Sugata), then the eternal Brightness would illumine you and all the individualized and discriminated perceptions of objective phenomena, sense-organs, false imaginations, self and not-self, would vanish, for the phenomena of the thinking brain-mind are only empty and transitory things, the differentiated emotions of your mortal consciousness are only passing phenomena. If you can learn to ignore these two fundamental illusions—deaths and rebirths and the fear of impermanency—and hold fast to the Permanency that the Eye of Dharma perceives, which until now you thought to be a trivial and unreal instinctive vision that had no room in a busy world of facts, but now you see as the only reality indeed and the rest puppet-shows and racing up and down the Buddha-mountain, then you need have no fear of failure, Ananda, no fear indeed in the attainment of Supreme and Sacred Enlightenment.”

  Suddenly it seemed that all the trees of the Jeta Park, and all the waves lapping on the shores of its lakes, were singing the music of the Dharma, and all the intersecting rays of brightness were like a net of splendor set with jewels and over arching them all. Such a marvelous sight had never been imagined by the assembled holy devotees and held them all in silence and awe. Unwittingly they passed into the blissful peace of the Diamond Samadhi, that is, every one immediataly listened to the intense and mysterious roar of silence, the entire multitude of twelve hundred and thirty three, and upon them all there seemed to fall like a gentle rain the soft petals of many different colored lotus blossoms—blue and crimson, yellow and white—all blending together and being reflected into the open space of heaven in all the tints of the spectrum. Moreover, all the differentiations of mountains in their minds, and seas and rivers and forests of the Saha-suffering world blended into one another and faded away leaving only the flower-adorned unity of the Primal Cosmos. In the center of it all, seated on pure lotus, they saw the Tathagata, Already-Thus, the Pearl and the Pillar of the world.

  Thereupon Manjusri addressed his Lord Buddha, saying:- “Blessed Lord! Since my Lord has descended from the Angel Realms to this reincarnating suffering world, he has helped us most by his wonderful enlightening Teaching. At first we receive this Teaching through our sense of hearing, but when we are fully able to realize the Teaching, it becomes ours through a Transcendental Faculty of Hearing. This makes the awakening and perfecting of a Transcendental Faculty of Hearing of very great importance to every novice. As the wish to attain Samadhi deepens in the mind of any disciple, he can most surely attain it by means of his Transcendental Organ of Hearing. At first, it is only on occasions, or in enclosed places, or in breezeless mid-watches of night, when all creatures seem to be asleep, and the deep resonant hush of silence fills the ear, that the novice can concentrate his attention on this Intrinsic Sound of Reality which is the absence of sound, the Hearing of the Emptiness Sublime. He recognizes it at once as the Eternal Hearing that has been going on in his own pure and Essential Mind of non-death and non-rebirth since beginningless time. My Lord, in the silence he hears a teaching going on! Later on, he learns to hear it everywhere and under all conditions.

  “For many a kalpa—as numerous as the particles of sand in the river Ganges—Avaloki-Tesvara Buddha, the Hearer and Answerer of Prayer, the Bodhisattva of Tenderest Compassion, has manifested the Sacred Teaching Without Words in all the Buddha-lands of the ten quarters of the universe and has acquired Transcendental Powers of boundless Freedom and Fearlessness and has vowed to emancipate all sentient beings from their bondage and suffering. How sweetly mysterious is the Transcendental Sound of Avaloki-Tesvara! It is the pure Godly Sound. It is the subdued murmur of the sea-tide setting inward. Its mysterious Sound brings liberation and peace to all sentient beings who in their distress are calling for aid; it brings a sense of permanency to those who are truly seeking the attainment of Nirvana’s Peace.

  “While I am addressing my Lord Tathagata, he is hearing, at the same time, the Transcendental Sound of Avaloki-Tesvara. It is just as though, while we are in the quiet seclusion of our Dhyana practice, there should come to our ears the sound of the beating of drums and if our minds, hearing the sounds, are undisturbed and tranquil, this is the nature of perfect accommodation.

  “The body develops feeling by coming in contact with something, and the sight of eyes is hindered by the opaqueness of objects, and similarly with the sense of smell and of taste, but it is different with the discriminating brain-mind. Thoughts are rising and mingling and passing. At the same time it is conscious of sounds in the next room and sounds that have come from far away. The other senses are not so refined as the sense of hearing; the nature of hearing is the true reality of Passability.

  “The essence of sound is felt in both motion and silence, it passes from existent to non-existent. When there is no sound, it is said there is no hearing, but that does not mean that hearing has lost its preparedness. Indeed! When there is no sound, hearing is most alert, and when there is sound the hearing nature is least developed. If any disciple can be freed from these two illusions of appearing and disappearing, that is, from death and rebirth, he has attained the true reality of Permanency.

  “Even in dreams when all thinking has become quiescent, the hearing nature is still alert. It is like a mirror of enlightenment that is transcendental of the thinking mind because it is beyond the consciousness sphere of both body and mind. In this Saha world, the doctrine of intrinsic, Transcendental Sound may be spread abroad, but sentient beings as a class remain ignorant and indifferent to their own Intrinsic Hearing. They respond only to phenomenal sounds and are disturbed by both musical and discordant sounds.

  “Notwithstanding Ananda’s wonderful memory, he was not able to avoid falling into an evi
l way. He has been adrift on a merciless sea. But if he will only turn his mind away from the drifting current of thoughts, he may soon recover the sober wiseness of Essential Mind. Ananda! Listen to me! I have ever relied upon the teaching of the Lord Buddha to bring me to the indescribable Dharma Soul of the Diamond Samadhi. Ananda! You have sought the secret lore from all the Buddha-lands without first attaining emancipation from the desires and intoxications of your own contaminations and attachments, with the result that you have stored in your memory a vast accumulation of worldly knowledge and built up a tower of faults and mistakes.

  “You have learned the Teachings by listening to the words of the Lord Buddha and then committing them to memory. Why do you not learn from your own self by listening to sound of the Intrinsic Dharma within your own Mind and then practicing reflection upon it? The perception of Transcendental Hearing is not developed by any natural process under the control of your own volition. Some time when you are reflecting upon your Transcendental Hearing, a chance sound suddenly claims your attention and your mind sets them apart and discriminates them and is disturbed thereby. As soon as you can ignore the phenomenal sound the notion of a Transcendental Sound ceases and you will realize your Intrinsic Hearing.