The Profound Meaning of the Diamond Sutra from the Perspective of Yogācāra (8)

Original text:尔时。世尊食时。著衣持钵。入舍卫大城乞食。于其城中。次第乞已。还至本处。饭食讫。收衣钵。洗足已。敷座而坐。

Explanation: What is narrated next is the hidden meaning—and it is an immense secret, one that all Mahāyāna practitioners wish to know. If one truly knows it, then it is no longer secret. What follows is: at mealtime, the World-Honored One put on his robe and took up his alms bowl, entered the great city of Śrāvastī to beg for food, begged sequentially through the city, returned to his dwelling place, finished his meal, put away his robe and bowl, washed his feet, and arranged his seat and sat down. What is this all about? Why go on so verbosely about these things? These were merely the World-Honored One's daily mundane affairs, the same every day, as worldly as can be. Since every day he begged for alms, ate, and washed his feet in this way, why was this written into the sūtra, and written at the very beginning? When expounding other sūtras, such descriptions are not given, yet here, in the exposition of the Diamond Sūtra, they are described—and moreover at an assembly expounding the Great Prajñā. The Diamond Sūtra is the essence of the six-hundred-fascicle Great Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, and the World-Honored One never spoke meaningless trivialities when teaching the Dharma—except under special conditions; even a smile would not appear casually.

Herein lies an extremely profound mystery, revealing a truth and manifesting the real nature of all dharmas. A person of the highest faculties and sharpest wisdom need only read up to this point to comprehend the truth and the real nature; the entire purport of the Diamond Sūtra and of the six hundred fascicles of the Great Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra would then run through completely, and such a person becomes a bodhisattva of true meaning. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra teaches that all dharmas are created by mind alone—created by the tathāgatagarbha mind alone. Are the World-Honored One's daily mundane affairs not a part of the myriad dharmas? Is there not the operation of the World-Honored One's true suchness mind within them? The answer is affirmative. All dharmas arise from the coalescence of the real and the deluded; the true mind alone can accomplish nothing, and the deluded mind alone cannot be established either. It must be the true and deluded minds working together to jointly manifest the myriad dharmas. Therefore, within our impermanent, arising-and-ceasing, empty and illusory realm of phenomena, there must be the prajñā true mind operating.

For example, in our daily eating, drinking, relieving ourselves, talking, laughing, walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, the participation of the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha, must be present simultaneously; otherwise not a single dharma can be established. The seventeen hundred kōans of the Chan school all point to this truth. Thus the Chan masters used all kinds of means—glances, gestures, laughter, scolding, raising the fly-whisk, lowering the fly-whisk—to guide students to awakening. For instance, Deshan's staff (striking here and there) and Linji's shout (loud shouts and small shouts) were all compassionate acts. If any student came to me, I would kick them with my foot; after being kicked, those whose conditions had ripened would be able to find the vajra prajñā mind. Yunmen, on the other hand, had his foot crushed in the gate by his master; after letting out a great cry, he attained enlightenment. Such examples are too numerous to list. After awakening, one attains the patience of non-arising, and the wisdom of real nature is developed—knowing the falsity of self, person, and sentient beings, that they have no true birth, and that the tathāgatagarbha itself also does not arise. Accepting this principle is the patience of non-arising—only it is very hard to endure!