How Is Seeing Marks and Being Free from Marks?

Seeing marks yet being apart from marks does not mean that upon seeing any mark, one leaves no mark in the mind, empties the mark away, discards it, and thereby the mind becomes pure with no dharmas. Try to avoid the disturbance of worldly marks upon your own mind; when the mind is not disturbed, it becomes pure—this is a method of cultivating meditative concentration (samādhi). Such purity is the absence of thought and conceptualization; it is a state of meditative concentration. The non-Buddhist practitioners all cultivate this kind of concentration, cultivating all the way to the concentration of neither perception nor non-perception, and at the end of life they ascend to the heavens to enjoy blessings, but when the blessings are exhausted, they fall again.

True separation from marks, however, is that when facing worldly marks, the mind clearly knows what the essence of the mark is, knowing that a mark is not the surface appearance presented to us, and that in substance it is empty. "Empty" has two senses: one is the emptiness of the Small Vehicle—suffering, emptiness, impermanence, and non-self; the other is the emptiness of the tathāgatagarbha's emptiness-nature (śūnyatā). This makes it clear that without realizing the fruits or seeing the mind, one simply cannot be apart from marks; one can only hide from them. Even if one can hide, it is only temporary; in the long run, one cannot hide at all—one will inevitably have to face them.

Only after realizing the tathāgatagarbha can one gradually become apart from marks in the mind; this is a long process and cannot be accomplished in one step. This process is the process of the transformation of the basis (āśraya-parāvṛtti); when the transformation of the basis succeeds, consciousness is transformed into wisdom, one enters the family of the Tathāgata, and possesses the seed-wisdom of Yogācāra. To see the tathāgatagarbha, one must first understand its essence and characteristics, its functions and roles, and then, carrying a questioning doubt, seek and realize it amid the operation of the dharmas of the five aggregates (pañca-skandha) and the eighteen realms. In the process of investigating Chan, of course one must know or realize that the functions and roles of the five aggregates and eighteen realms are not real, are not the self, and are empty; only then can one not attach to the marks of the five aggregates and eighteen realms as the self or as real, and only then can one negate the five aggregates and eighteen realms. After all the illusory dharmas have been negated, then raise doubt about that true dharma; investigating back and forth, when the bodhisattva's causes and conditions of the six perfections are complete, realization and enlightenment become possible.