A Life of Huang Po by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

Huang Po’s most original achievement was the doctrine of one mind.

P’ei Hsui, who put together the collection of Huang Po’s talks now known as The Zen Teachings of Huang Po on the Transmission of Mind, was in no doubt about the greatness of his master.

…his words were simple, his reasoning direct, his
way of life exalted and his habits unlike the habits
of other men. Disciples hastened to him from all quarters,
looking up to him as a lofty mountain, and through their
contact with him awoke to Reality. Of the crowds which
flocked to see him, there were always more than a
thousand with him at a time.

It must have been very crowded in there. This biographer was himself an abbot of a monastery and on two occasions gave hospitality to Huang Po. Each time he spent days in his presence questioning him on the Way. In the event he was only able to put down about a fifth of what the master told him. But despite this summarizing, he proclaimed it a direct transmission of the doctrine. Like any good historian, however, he had the manuscript taken back to Huang Po’s monastery and checked by the resident monks. Not only can we be grateful for the translucent clarity of the master’s words, but also for the care and devotion of Huang Po’s Boswell, P’ei Hsui.

The doctrine of One Mind, as held by Huang Po and his followers, is a diametrically opposite viewpoint to our normal ego-prompted way of seeing. Generally, we take matter as solid and real, and we recognise a rather ineffable substance called mind or spirit (or both), which in some way interacts with matter to produce our consciousness of the hard, metallic landscape out there. This duality of matter and spirit, however, serves to fracture the actual reality of the world and gives rise to all our false notions of separateness and alienation.

Buddhists accept the relativity of the phenomenal world but seek to heal the duality by adopting a viewpoint based in the Absolute. they do not talk of mind and matter, but of mind and form, where form is not a separate substance like matter, but the shape that mind assumes in this case and that. Mind is the only reality. Form is the way that mind works, its play and way of expressing itself.

“All very well,” say the materialists, “but how do you explain the solidity of the world? If I hit you on the head with this hammer, will you still believe that the hammer is ‘mind only’?” The reply is that both the hammer, the interaction and the pain are all products of mind’s activity. A stage hypnotist, for example, tells his subject that there is a fierce dog on the stage. Immediately, the subject sees the dog and moves away from it. Later he is told to pat it on the head. Now he feels the solidity of the animal, its skin and bones, its hot breath. To the hypnotised man, the dog is totally real. The same effect occurs during dreaming. We recognise the absolute presence of the dream world, until, that is, we awaken and realise that it was all the product of our mind.

Concentration of Mind
Objects, then, are concentrations of mind activity, clusters of thoughts, brought about by concentration. To the One Mind school of Buddhism, the universe is the vast concentration of the Buddha. We ourselves are clusters of concentrated thought-energy. But since in a single ocean the part is inseparable from the whole, we are also the whole of the contemplating mind.

This “idealism” can be off-putting to many people. We sense a kind of existential abyss here and back away from it. The question we should ask, thought, is who is it who is afraid? The answer is that it is fear that fears because, in a non-dual perspective, the ego-entity does not have a separative existence. It is only its “death” that opens the way to the picture of eternity. In other words, you have to lose your life in order to find it. Huang Po also recognized the difficulty:

Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing
to fall through the void with nothing on to which they
can cling. They do not know that the void is not really
the void but the real realm of the Dharma.

Paul Brunton expressed this paradox, or reverse perspective thus, “What the unenlightened regard as substance, that is, the form of things, is really its negation, whereas true substance, that is the essence out of which those forms emerge, is disregarded by them as non-existent. The hardest barricade for our Western understanding to break through is this simple acceptance of the Unmanifest as ultimate reality.”

The void as non-void, or One Mind, was a favourite theme of Huang Po’s. He often emphasised the point that a non-existent was in itself an existent — by virtue of being a non-existent. If you suppose a universe full of nothing, as scientists sometimes do in describing the world before the “big bang”, there is still the void of nothingness, and this space is itself something, and yet nothing. You can never reach the end of negation, because at that point it slips back into an affirmation. Wherever you want to place the end of the universe, perhaps with a wall, there must be something else beyond the wall, even if it is only nothing, which in itself is something. This is the “plenum void” of the Mahayana, which “holds in it infinite rays of light, and swallows all the multiplicities there are in the world”. The nothingness of this void would be untenable without a consciousness to void it. Try to imagine, intuitively, an empty space without any form of consciousness to observe it. Thus consciousness and space are identical. Both are Brahman, as the Upanishad implies.

Consider this curious passage from the Chun Chou Record of Huang Po. “You do not see that the fundamental doctrine of the Dharma is that there are no dharmas, yet that this doctrine of no-dharma is in itself a dharma; and now that the no-dharma doctrine has been transmitted, how can the doctrine of the Dharma be a dharma.” Here Huang Po is making use of different meanings of the word dharma; in the one case as the ultimate law and in the other as a particle of being. Huang Po’s testament of the One (or Original) Mind as the ultimate non-dual reality, was the hammer he used constantly to beat the truth into the minds of his disciples.

His was also a fearless doctrine. In a world of something and nothing, our normal reality realm, there is always a pit into which we can fall. If we step away from the comforting solidity provided by the ego viewpoint, we are in a dreadful limbo, an emptiness so profound that it is sometimes described as the “dark night of the soul”.

In a world of One Mind only, however, there is nowhere to fall, nowhere to disappear, nowhere to face annihilation, and, more to the point, there is no “thing” to fall, disappear, or face annihilation. This is why the prefix no- is so important in Buddhism and why it represents an affirmation rather than a nihilistic negativity. The essence of Buddhism, as well as other non-dual spiritualities, is precisely to point to life itself existing beyond consciousness in our pure Original Mind.

Go to Part 3.