Lecture Notes on the Sūtra of the Collection of the Father and Son (168)

Seeing Through the Illusory Nature of All Dharmas, Turning Toward the Great Path of Liberation

Original text: 佛言大王。譬若有人。于睡梦中。与诸宝媛。共相执持。是人觉已。忆念梦中。所受妙触。为实尔不。王言不也。

Explanation: The Buddha said: "Great King, suppose there is a person who, in a dream, engages in amorous pleasures with many beautiful women. After this person awakens, he keeps recalling the wonderful tactile sensations experienced in the dream. Do these things truly exist?" King Śuddhodana said: "They are not things that truly exist."

After this person finishes the dream and wakes up, he still takes the events of the dream as real, remaining immersed in the dream, with endless recollections, clinging and unwilling to let go. Such a person lacks wisdom, not knowing that the dream is not real, not actual; one should not be infatuated with unreal false appearances, chasing illusory sensations and feelings, and should not be so deluded and inverted as to take the false for the real. The sensations within a dream are all illusory, let alone recalling the events of the dream after waking—the feelings are even more illusory. Do the events recalled in the mind still exist? They no longer exist; otherwise it would not be called recollection. For example, when I recall that the food I just ate was delicious—the food has already been eaten, and the flavor no longer exists now; it is gone. No matter how one savors the memory, there is no actual effect and no benefit whatsoever; what has vanished does not come back. And a dream is even more illusory than a past real scenario; recollection only shows the mind's attachment and unwillingness to let go, a pointless immersion in illusory imagination, wasting precious time and energy.

Take another example: when we recall words someone once said, are those words still at our ears now as we recall them? There is no sound at the ear; past sounds, words once spoken, do not exist in the present and no longer have any effect. If one still refuses to let go of those sounds, endlessly dwelling on and clinging to them, that is illusion upon illusion. Sounds are illusory at the very moment they exist, let alone after they have vanished—they are even more illusory and unreal. As for past states of the six sense objects, if they seem to still have an effect, it is actually just the false discrimination, deliberation, and imagination produced by the mind, with the mind generating illusory feelings and clinging emotions—actually they no longer have any effect. What is past is past; clinging without letting go only adds afflictions in vain. In daily life, sentient beings feel that their experiences of the myriad dharmas of the six sense objects are all very real, but are those experiences truly real? None of them is real; they are like flowers in the sky and illusory shadows.

This is how sentient beings have been since beginningless kalpas: life after life, they pursue things that are unreal, empty, and ethereal, taking the illusory world of the five aggregates as real, with deluded thoughts without end, only adding to their suffering. Seeing the dullness and suffering of sentient beings, the Buddhas give rise to compassion, appear in the world, proclaim the truth, and guide the deluded multitudes, causing them to leave the dark and decayed house of ignorance and turn toward the great path of liberation.