Conquering One's Own Mind Is Equivalent to Conquering the World.

The world is established within empty space, and empty space exists within the tathāgatagarbha, just as a single cloud appears in the great sky. The Sāhā world and the land of bliss (sukhāvatī) are the closest to each other, yet they are still separated by one hundred thousand buddha-lands—how vast, then, must the great chiliocosm of sand-worlds be. Conquer your own mind, and you have conquered the universe, conquered the worlds of the ten directions, conquered the one true dharma realm. Bring your mind out and come to understand all the dharmas within it, and the immeasurable worlds will belong to you. In fact, conquering the world is nothing other than conquering one's own mind, for outside the mind there are fundamentally no dharmas.

Yet every day we still cling to petty worldly dharmas, giving rise to thoughts and mental activity over trivial matters—how small and insignificant this makes us appear. If you stand in the midst of the universe and empty space and observe, what matter in this world could even count as a matter? The moment you expand your mind's capacity to be as vast as the tathāgatagarbha, that is the moment you possess the ocean of worlds of the ten directions. The Buddha said: “譬如澄清百千大海弃之。唯认一浮沤体。目为全潮。穷尽瀛渤。汝等即是迷中倍人。” Hearing these words spoken by the Buddha, we truly ought to wake up quickly and stop clinging to delusion.