Lecture Notes on the Sūtra of the Collection of the Father and Son (Pitāputrasamāgamasūtra) (80)

How to Realize the Emptiness of Body and Mind

When bodily, verbal, and mental actions are first created, they cease and vanish in an instant. For example, if I take a knife to kill someone, after picking up the knife, the action of picking it up is gone; in the next step, the hand extends outward, and afterward the action of extending the hand is also gone; in the next step, the knife is thrust into the other person's body, and afterward this action also disappears; in the next step, the knife is withdrawn, and the action vanishes; in the next step, the knife is thrown away or washed, and the action again disappears. The act of killing is carried out as a continuous series of actions—as each subsequent action arises, the previous one ceases. After all the actions have ceased, has the act of killing actually disappeared? If this action did not cease, the killing would have to continue endlessly, which is impossible; any action must eventually come to an end. The action itself ceases as soon as it is completed, and therefore it is subject to arising and ceasing, utterly unattainable; yet the seeds do not vanish—moment after moment they must be stored in the tathāgatagarbha, awaiting the ripening of conditions in the future for the retribution to be received.

The creation of actions ceases and vanishes in an instant, extremely fast. In each instant, eighty-one thousand seeds arise and cease, arise and cease, arise and cease and pass by, and only then is the entire act of killing formed. Therefore the act of killing is entirely subject to arising and ceasing; yet this entire action is stored as a karmic seed in one's own tathāgatagarbha. In a finger snap, in a single instant, eighty-one thousand seeds arise and cease and pass by; countless phenomena of arising and ceasing form this single finger snap, so the finger snap as a dharma is illusory. And the act of killing is a dharma connected together by countless finger-snap durations, composed of countless actions similar to finger snaps; thus the act of killing is also illusory, subject to arising and ceasing, and without self-nature. By contemplating and practicing in this way, one can realize the Small Vehicle's emptiness of body.

One can likewise contemplate the seeds of the conscious mind arising and ceasing in each instant; countless instants of arising and ceasing constitute the continuous discriminating and acting behavior of the conscious mind, so the conscious mind is subject to arising and ceasing, illusory, and without self. In this way one can realize the emptiness of mind. With the emptiness of body plus the emptiness of mind, the five aggregates are empty and without self, and the Small Vehicle's first fruit, srotāpanna, is realized.

While carrying out this contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) to eradicate the view of self (satkāya-dṛṣṭi), one can continue the contemplation: how was this whole series of actions of killing created? One can contemplate from the action of a finger snap—within a single finger snap, how can those eighty-one thousand seeds emerge? How is the snap performed? And how does the tathāgatagarbha record the karmic actions? Contemplating in this way, for a person with good meditative concentration (samādhi), enlightenment comes very quickly. With someone to guide the way, enlightenment can be realized in a few minutes; without a guide, it takes ten thousand or eighty thousand kalpas. To attain realization of the fruits, when the conditions ripen, it takes only an instant; when the conditions do not ripen, one remains deluded and confused in the six realms for hundreds of thousands of millions of kalpas.

Although karmic actions cease and vanish in an instant, these karmic actions do not abide in any of the directions—east, west, south, north, the four intermediate directions, up, down, or the middle—they simply vanish in this way. For example, I raise my hand and then lower it; observing the karmic action of raising the hand, where does it go when it disappears? The karmic action has vanished and does not abide anywhere; if it abided somewhere, then in that place I would always be raising my hand; if it were killing, the karmic action of killing would always exist in some place, and that would be terrible.