The Profound Meaning of the Diamond Sutra from the Consciousness-Only Perspective (VIII)

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 esoteric meaning, and it is an immense secret — something all Mahāyāna practitioners want 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 bowl, entered the great city of Śrāvastī to beg for food, begged in sequence through the city, returned to his dwelling place, finished his meal, put away his robe and bowl, washed his feet, arranged his seat, and sat down. What is this all about? Why ramble on about these things? These were merely the World-Honored One's daily trivialities, the same every day, utterly mundane. Since every day he begged for food, ate, and washed his feet in this way, why was it written into the sūtra, and written at the very beginning? When expounding other sūtras it is not described, yet it is described only when expounding the Diamond Sūtra — moreover, at a Dharma assembly proclaiming the Great Prajñāpāramitā, and the Diamond Sūtra is the essence of the six hundred fascicles of the Great Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. The World-Honored One never spoke meaningless trivialities when teaching the Dharma; unless there was a special karmic condition, He would not even casually show a smile.

Herein lies an extremely profound mystery, revealing a truth and manifesting the ultimate reality of all dharmas. A person of the highest faculties and keenest wisdom, upon reading only this far, can awaken to the truth and ultimate reality, and the entire purport of the Diamond Sūtra and of the six hundred fascicles of the Great Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra will then run through completely; such a person becomes a bodhisattva of true meaning. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra teaches that all dharmas are created by the mind alone — created by the tathāgatagarbha mind alone. Are the World-Honored One's daily trivialities 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 union of the true and the false: the true mind alone can accomplish nothing; with the deluded mind alone, the deluded mind likewise cannot be established. It must be the union of true and false mind that together 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, our daily eating, drinking, relieving ourselves, talking, laughing, walking, standing, sitting, lying down, and so on — all of these simultaneously require the participation of the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha; otherwise not a single dharma can be established. The seventeen hundred kōans of the Chan school all point to this truth. Therefore the Chan masters used every kind of means — glances, gestures, laughter, anger, raising the fly-whisk, lowering the fly-whisk — to guide students into awakening. For instance, Deshan's staff (striking back and forth) and Linji's shout (great shouts and small shouts) were all compassionate acts. If they came to me, I would kick with my foot; after being kicked, a student whose conditions have ripened can find the vajra prajñā mind. Yunmen, on the other hand, had his foot crushed by his master with a door; after letting out a great cry, he attained enlightenment. Such examples are too numerous to list. After enlightenment, one attains the patience of non-arising, and the wisdom of ultimate reality is developed — knowing the falsity of self, person, and sentient beings, that they are not truly born, and that the tathāgatagarbha itself also does not arise. Accepting this principle is the patience of non-arising — only it is very hard to accept!