Genuine Practice

By: Hongzhi Zengjue (translated by Guo Gu)

Genuine practice is to simply sit in stillness and investigate this silence. In its profound depth, there is the realization where, externally, you can no longer be swayed by causes and conditions. Mind being empty, it is all-embracing; its luminosity being wondrous, it is precisely apt and impartial. Internally, there are no thoughts of grasping after things. Vast, solitary—the mind is [orginally] free from dullness. Being alive and potent, you are able to sever all opposition and remain content. Being content has nothing to do with emotions. You must be open and spacious, relying on nothing whatsoever. Splendid and marvelous, [your mind] is full of life and spirit.

Note: This passage is taken from Hongzhi’s Practice Instructions, which are a series of beautiful and evocative pointers to the realization of Silent Illumination, or Buddha-nature. The translation is from Guo Gu’s book Silent Illumination: A Chan Buddhist Path to Natural Awakening. This is just a portion of this particular practice instruction.

The Priceless Pearl

By: Rebecca Li

In the Tathagatagarbha Sutra there is a story of a boy whose parents sewed a priceless pearl inside his coat. Yet, the boy forgot all about it and as he grew older looked for wealth everywhere. Finding none, he could barely survive. All the while he was in possession of a priceless pearl that he could use to benefit all beings. The pearl in the story refers to our buddha-nature—our natural capacity for wisdom and compassion. It is our capacity to see clearly and act with an appropriate response according to conditions, to see the interconnectedness of all beings, and to love them unconditionally as we see clearly that loving others is no different from loving ourselves. In other words, we each have an innate capacity for wisdom and compassion. We are already fully endowed with this capacity; we are each in possession of this priceless pearl. However, our untrained mind is often too confused and agitated to see this fact and instead we keep looking outward, grasping for what we already possess.

From Illumination.

Something In Us Can Teach Us

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

In Zen they say, “Buddha is in everybody.” That's not a shallow statement. It means something. Buddha is in everybody. Buddha is in you and in you and in you and in you. Buddha is in all of us. That means something in us knows. Something in us can teach us. Something in us can inform us how it wants to be. So that we can feel whether we are coming in touch with another person in such a way that we can be open for the other person, or whether we are not open for the other. We can feel whether we speak the truth or whether we go a little off the truth. We can feel whether we're putting pressure on something or whether we only give our weight to it. We can feel whether we allow our breathing to function as it wants to function or whether we manipulate it. We can feel whether we're dealing with a person and letting the person have his own way of being or whether we manipulate him. And so on and so on. In other words we have the ability within ourselves--if we become more awake--to feel more clearly what our own nature has to tell us. That's the thing that interests me.