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

Huang Po thought the world was generally in decline (it was ever thus), and that Zen students of his day were not at all concerned with the Original Mind.

“Let your mind be like the vacuity of space,” he would enjoin them, “like a chip of dead wood and a piece of stone, like cold ashes and burnt-out coal.” Then he added a mischievous note, “Otherwise some day you will surely be taken to task by the old man of the other world…” One day Huang Po was going out for a walk. Handing him his hat a monk said:

Monk: You are enormously big, but your hat is none too large for you, is it?

Huang Po: That may be so, but the entire cosmos is readily covered underneath.

Monk: And what about me?

Huang Po put the hat on and walked off.

Here is the atom, in this case the master’s head, which contains within it the entire cosmos. The monk’s concern to include his own head shows his lack of understanding. His question obviously does not merit a reply. But by not resorting to an intellectual explanation, Huang Po is acting directly out of the Buddha-mind. This is standard Zen practice.

A similar non-dual interpenetration, here over time, is implied by Ma Tsu (Huang Po’s teacher) in his reply to a monk’s question:

“What was the mind of Bodhidharma when he came from the West?”

“What is your mind this moment?” answered the master. Ma Tsu would sometimes make the statement that, “your everyday thought is the Tao.” In a non-dual reality what else could it be?

Today, nostalgia or aversion to events of the past, or planning or longing for the future, make up a great deal of our mental furniture. Twenty-five year olds are advised to take out a pension plan. The fashion industry creates a yearning for a particular decade: the sixties or the forties. Old films remind us of better days. Now we have digital cameras to recreate our personal past and of those we care for. People, places and events can be brought up on a screen with extraordinary realism. Futurologists and astrolgers look into tomorrow for us, diverting us from the present moment. By fixing the past and fixing the future we allow ourselves to look away from the present moment, rendering it tenuous and transient. Dogen reminds us that, “When we have no aversion or longing, only then do we reach the heart of the Buddha.”

When asked why his disciples were so happy, the Buddha said: “They do not repent of the past, nor do they brood over the future. They live in the present. Therefore they are radiant. By brooding over the future and repenting the past, fools dry up like green reeds cut and left out in the sun.”

The simplicity of this is often beyond the complex machinations of the intellect, which specialises in mental time travel. Huang Po’s students sometimes had the same problem. When told that “Mind is the Buddha”, one asked, what sort of mind do you mean, the ordinary mind or the enlightened one? Huang Po replied, “Where on earth do you keep your ‘ordinary mind’ and your ‘enlightened mind’?” The student remained sceptical. The master said: “If you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own mind. When Bodhidharma came from the West he just pointed out that the substance of which all men are made is the Buddha.” That is, Buddha-mind.

Huang Po’s followers continued to misunderstand by holding onto their concepts of ordinary and the like, thoughts which “gallop about like horses”.

So I tell you, mind is the Buddha. As soon as
thought or sensation arises, you fall into a dualism.
Beginningless time and the present moment are the same.

This and that do not exist. And just to comprehend this matter is to realise “complete and unexcelled enlightenment”. Since beginningless time and the present moment are the same, there is obviously no point in repenting over the past or brooding over the future. The timeless present moment contains it all, and to live in the present is to live “radiantly” as a disciple of the Buddha.

Go to Part 5.