This is this. That is all.

While you are using your mind symbolically, that is, depending on names and comparisons, you cannot see Reality. See Reality first, then use your mind. The glass of water---what is it? This is this. That is all. There is just one Reality. Transcendental, actual---just names. Surprise the mind and see Reality directly.

When you talk you need names, but in meditation you do not need a word. We start in naked silence. When you find real meditation without a word, you attain true wisdom [Prajna]. Your mind becomes pure, and you can see your true soul directly. When your mind is free from all conceptions that do not truly exist---Is it good or bad?---you will find true emancipation.


--- Sokei-an

It is not thinking of truth; it is not looking at truth as a picture.

When we are thinking about the highest truth, we think and think and think until we come to the ultimate, then we cannot think anymore. Our thinking mind can go no further; it is at the edge of a great cliff.

It's like using a drill. As long as you can drill, it's not the end. When there is no resistance left, when you can drill no more, it goes "Ztt" and the end is reached. We say thought has penetrated through reason. When you have reached the true conclusion, there is no word. When you have destroyed the last word and arrived at chaos, it is infinite. If you come to God or Buddha or anything, it is not the end. But when you have destroyed the last word, when you cannot think of anything more, then you will see that endless gap.

Perhaps you will turn back because you are afraid. But the Zen student is not afraid; the Zen student will leap into the infinite. You must jump into it. Just jump! (Not with your body; your body still sits where it is; so you need not be afraid.) Jump into that conclusion!

While you have a word, you are not a good student. While there is some picture in your brain, you have not reached the end... You are thinking about it, but you don't SEE it. You are looking at something, so you haven't come to the end yet. As long as you are thinking something is there, and you are thinking about it, it is not the real end. But when there is nothing to think about, and your faculty of thinking has come to an end, and you all of a sudden throw yourself into chaos---into the infinite---your mind and body and soul all disappear. That is the real end.

Shakyamuni's enlightenment under the bodhi tree is an example of reaching the end. He proved Nirvana. There is nobody whose name is God, whose name is man, neither devil nor demon, who lives in Nirvana. Nirvana is infinite, boundless.


from "The Zen Eye" by Sokei-an

the only spot that speaks loudly about the truth of the universe

Certainly you have a center in yourself. Where is it? If you try to find it, you will search in vain; but if you do not try, it is there like a moonprint in the water. You cannot grasp it. Do not touch it! The moon is floating on the surface of the waves. If you abandon all your attention toward anything, you will come into that center.


--- Sokei-an

"Self-awakening only I call my teacher"- Buddha

"Self-awakening" is awakening to one's own self. But this self is a Great Self...not this self called Mr. Smith, but the Self that has no name which is everywhere.

Everyone can be this Self that is the Great Self, but you cannot awaken to this Self through your own notions. When you abandon your self (your notions, your thoughts, your desires), all of a sudden you will find your Self there.

You do not need to go anywhere. You find you are already there.


from "The Zen Eye" by Sokei-an

THIS is ALL !

The Buddha's Buddhism was, so to speak, simply his realization of God, which in Japanese is called Satori. He had left his friends, his brothers, and his teachers Ramaputra and Kalama because their attitude was was to become one with Brahma in meditation, so that meditation became the main reason for surviving on earth.

The Buddha left them. He could not accept such a theory, and he went alone to sit under the Bodhi tree. All of a sudden---he realized: THIS is God, THIS is ALL! The endless sky is the extension of this body, and the earth, covered with mountains and divided by rivers, is also this very body---and trees, weeds, insects, flowers, and other human beings are also Buddha's body; and this soul is the soul of the universe, the soul of God.

He realized that prayer (and reasoning) are not necessary to prove God. All of a sudden
---"THIS is THAT." THIS is his standpoint.


--- from "The Zen Eye" by Sokei-an

seemingly

In-seeing (whole-seeing)
is cut off (cut up)
by out (divided) -seeing.

In the absence of out-seeing, it is present. --- Wei Wu Wei


...in every state Prajna is there, but it is covered by the turmoil of the mind

...in quietude, Prajna, which is innate, appears. --- Sokei-an

Rest...

Relax,

'I' can neither be affirmed nor denied,

Neither captured nor gotten away from.

Omnipresence

Everything that noumenally we are---is godhead-noumenon.

Everything that phenomenally we may be---is also godhead-noumenon.

Whatever godhead-noumenon (or noumenal godhead) may be---noumenally we are.

Whatever godhead-noumenon (or noumenal godhead) may be---phenomenally we are.

That is because no "thing" is, other than as objective phenomenon, which necessarily is the appearance, or manifestation, of noumenal godhead.

Noumenal godhead is every objective appearance, while whatever is not objective appearance is nothing but noumenal godhead.

There are no separate bits of noumenal godhead---for noumenal godhead is non-objectivity, which being the subjective source of conceptualisation, cannot be its object.

Therefore noumenal godhead knows no conceptual limitations, such as space-time.

Spaceless and timeless, there can neither be one (whole) nor parts.

There can only be UBIQUITY.


--- Wei Wu Wei

I am, but not as an object.

[Sometimes] on examination it will be found that the "non-existent," the "void," "non-being," etc., of which so much has been written and taught...in fact represents nothing whatever but a philosopher's attempt to objectify subjectivity.

However, [trying] to conceive them as objects is simply looking in the wrong direction...these so familiar emptinesses are not objects at all, for they are what the perceiver of them is. He has reached a dead-end in his analysis and finds himself face to face with his own nature. But instead of recognising it as such and realizing that his void is "what an eye sees when it looks at itself," he goes on trying to objectify what he can never see by turning it into an objective concept.

[Fortunately] there has always been an alternative when the dead-end of conceptualization has been reached, and that is just to turn round and wake up to the truth. Having arrived at the gate [our philosopher] tried to prise it open, not realizing that he was already on the right side of it.

The traveller has only to turn round in order to find that he is already at his destination, which is home. The sought is then seen to be the seeker.


---Wei Wu Wei on the Heart Sutra

effects in consciousness

If we could apperceive that subject is always and also object, and object always and also subject, we should be able profoundly to understand that neither could possibly have any independent existence as either, which IS the bodhisattvic vision wherein there is no see-er nor anything seen---but just a functioning that produces effects in what we know as consciousness.

That, indeed, is freedom, for all bondage is limitation consequent on identification with a supposed object which could not exist as such. There is no other freedom, and it is liberation from all that is not joy.


--- Wei Wu Wei on the Heart Sutra

void-seeing

What is called "voidness" is not an object, but a functioning. It is void because seeing cannot see seeing.

Appearing (form) is not an object, BUT A FUNCTIONING. It appears as an objectivisation.

To "empty," therefore, is to apperceive non-objectively (void-seeing): no thing seen as such by no see-er as such.

Doctrines also are ways of seeing, not things seen; they are not a description of absolute truths---for nothing of the kind could exist.


--- Wei Wu Wei on the Heart Sutra

whole-seeing

Perceiving is everything, "Seeing, seeing, seeing," as Rumi cried---and he was not referring to phenomenally-based observation of objects by subjects, but to the noumenally-based in-seeing that is devoid of both !

In-seeing does not mean looking in one direction instead of another, "in" instead of "out", but seeing from the source, which is noumenon, not from manifestation, which is phenomenon.

The one is whole-seeing, the other is divided-seeing: that is the essential, for a spatial discrimination could not be correct.


--- Wei Wu Wei

The Heart Sutra

The burden of the Heart Sutra

Is not the nature of objects

But the seeing of them,

Which is what they are.


--- Wei Wu Wei

the ground-principles of Buddhism

If I am requested to formulate the ground-principles of the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism, and, indeed, of all the schools of Buddhism, I would suggest the foillowing:

(1) All is momentary.

(2) All is empty.

(3) All is without self.

(4) All is such as it is.

These four tenets, as it were, are so closely interrelated that, stand or fall, they all inevitably share one fate together.


--- from "Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism" by D.T. Suzuki