Wisdom of the lotus.

Symbol of enlightened purity.

Unfortunately, most in the West have not been introduced to the depth and breadth of Eastern wisdom. It is more than a little arrogant and presumptuous to imagine that we Westerners are the sole keepers of the world’s great wisdom. One of the most profound of all Eastern sources is the Lotus Sūtra. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to profit from human wisdom, regardless of source. “Wisdom by any other source remains wisdom.”

The Lotus Sūtra is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential of all sutras, or sacred scriptures, of Buddhism. In it, The Buddha discusses the ultimate truth of life. The Sūtra’s key message is that Buddhahood, the supreme state of life, characterized by boundless compassion, wisdom, and courage, is inherent within every person without distinction of gender, ethnicity, social standing, or intellectual ability. Awakening to this inherent wealth changes your life for the better.

Of significance, the name “Lotus Sūtra” is symbolic of how a lotus grows. A lotus emerges from beneath the mud, reaching upward through clouded waters (adversity) to the light above. When the plant reaches the surface, it blossoms into a beautiful flower. 

This is a metaphor for how the human mind is purified. The seeds beneath the mud are symbolic of karmic seeds, buried deep within the subconscious. Liberation (e.g., enlightenment) is how those seeds move from a dormant stage upward into a conscious state that can reach the state of a purified, transformed mind. Many statues and symbols of The Buddha show him sitting or standing on a fully blossomed lotus flower. The lotus represents a wise and spiritually enlightened quality in a person; it represents somebody who carries out their tasks with little concern for any reward and full liberation from attachment.

The Sūtra is a teaching that encourages an active engagement with mundane life and all its challenges. Buddhahood is not an escape from these challenges but an inexhaustible source of positive energy to face and transform the sufferings and contradictions of life to create happiness.

I’m sharing just one example (The Parable of the burning house, following), without editing or redaction. The parable addresses the idea of “expedient means”—an important aspect of Mahayana wisdom as a commentary on the rash of “white lies” currently rampant throughout our political sphere. In this parable, The Buddha is conversing with Shariputra, one of the foremost disciples of the historical Buddha. Shariputra experienced enlightenment and became an arhat while still a young man. It was said he was second only to The Buddha in his ability to teach. He is credited with mastering and codifying The Buddha’s Abhidharma teachings, which became the third “basket” of the Tripitika.

“Shariputra, suppose that in a certain town in a certain country, there was a very rich man. He was far along in years, and his wealth was beyond measure. He had many fields, houses, and menservants. His own house was big and rambling, but it had only one gate. A great many people—a hundred, two hundred, perhaps as many as five hundred—lived in the house. The halls and rooms were old and decaying, the walls crumbling, the pillars rotten at their base, and the beams and rafters crooked and aslant. At that time, a fire suddenly broke out on all sides, spreading through the house’s rooms. The sons of the rich man, ten, twenty perhaps thirty, were inside the house. When the rich man saw the huge flames leaping up on every side, he was greatly alarmed and fearful and thought to himself, I can escape to safety through the flaming gate, but my sons are inside the burning house enjoying themselves and playing games, unaware, unknowing, without alarm or fear. The fire is closing in on them. Suffering and pain threaten them, yet their minds have no sense of loathing or peril, and they do not think of trying to escape!

Shariputra, this rich man thought to himself, I have strength in my body and arms. I can wrap them in a robe or place them on a bench and carry them out of the house. And then again he thought, this house has only one gate, and moreover it is narrow and small. My sons are very young, have no understanding, and love their games, being so engrossed in them that they are likely to be burned in the fire. I must explain to them why I am fearful and alarmed. The house is already in flames, and I must get them out quickly and not let them be burned up in the fire! Having thought in this way, he followed his plan and called to all his sons, saying, ‘You must come out at once!’ But though the father was moved by pity and gave good words of instruction, the sons were absorbed in their games and unwilling to heed them. They had no alarm, no fright, and in the end, no mind to leave the house. Moreover, they did not understand what the fire was, what the house was, and the danger. They merely raced about this way and that in play and looked at their father without heeding him.

At that time, the rich man had this thought: The house is already in flames from this huge fire. If my sons and I do not get out at once, we are certain to be burned. I must now invent some expedient means that will make it possible for the children to escape harm. The father understood his sons and knew what various toys and curious objects each child customarily liked and what would delight them. And so he said to them, ‘The kind of playthings you like are rare and hard to find. If you do not take them when you can, you will surely regret it later. For example, things like these goat-carts, deer-carts, and ox-carts. They are outside the gate now, where you can play with them. So you must come out of this burning house at once. Then whatever ones you want, I will give them all to you!’”

At that time, when the sons heard their father telling them about these rare playthings because such things were just what they had wanted, each felt emboldened in heart and, pushing and shoving one another, they all came wildly dashing out of the burning house. The father subsequently presents each of his sons with a large bejeweled carriage drawn by a pure white ox. When the Buddha asks Shariputra whether the father was guilty of falsehood, he answers.

“No, World-Honored One. This rich man simply made it possible for his sons to escape the peril of fire and preserve their lives. He did not commit a falsehood. Why do I say this? Because if they were able to preserve their lives, then they had already obtained a plaything of sorts. And how much more so when, through an expedient means, they are rescued from that burning house!”

The Buddha explains his father’s similes representing a compassionate Tathāgata who is like “a father to all the world,” and the sons representing humans who are “born into the threefold world, a burning house, rotten, and old.”

“Shariputra, that rich man first used three types of carriages to entice his sons, but later he gave them just the large carriage adorned with jewels, the safest, most comfortable kind of all. Despite this, that rich man was not guilty of falsehood. The Tathagata does the same, and he is without falsehood. First, he preaches the three vehicles to attract and guide living beings, but later, he employs just the Great Vehicle to save them. Why? The Tathagata possesses measureless wisdom, power, freedom from fear, the storehouse of the Dharma. He is capable of giving to all living beings the Dharma of the Great Vehicle. But not all of them are capable of receiving it. Shariputra, for this reason, you should understand that the Buddhas employ the power of expedient means. And because they do so, they make distinctions in the one Buddha vehicle and preach it as three.”

Being able to release oneself from hardened, inflexible rules that bind, and adapt in the interest of saving those in jeopardy, may appear unethical to many. Still, it must be considered who benefits when living by the law’s letter instead of the spirit beneath the law’s intent. Clinging to fixed ideologies can be (and often are) dangerous, even if such ideologies are considered Holy. To do so is like the rich man’s children who would rather play with their toys than save themselves.

The wisdom for solving our irreconcilable problems.

Meet Nagarjuna

Our world is drowning in a sea of rights vs. wrongs, governments trapped in ideological deadlocks, conflicts and wars, based on the same, religions likewise immersed in egocentric, self-righteousness (that results in an ever-increasing division of sects), news spun as fake, political alienation, and of course, a global pandemic that is decimating both people and economies. And lest we not forget: Global climate changes, that if not addressed soon, will eliminate us all. It is thus time to pull Nagarjuna out of the closet and dust him off.

We begin this dusting off in a familiar fashion; I need to introduce readers to Nagarjuna. He was a wise sage who lived a long time ago, roughly 1,800 years ago (150–250 CE), about 600 years following The Buddha’s death and, according to modern scholars, was thought to have resided in Southern India. In the Zen tradition, he is the 14th Patriarch. He is also recognized as a patriarch in Tantric and Amitabha Buddhism.

While considered a philosopher of incomparable standing, he put no stock in philosophy, claiming his mission was the apologist of the Buddha’s transcendent wisdom—Beyond any rational articulation. In that sense, he was a sort of Apostle Paul of Buddhism. The Buddha attempted to convey, with words, matters beyond words. The Buddha, like The Christ, was consequently recondite and rarely understood. Nagarjuna set out to correct that and, in the process, created what is now known as The Middle Way—of the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

The reason he is so critical to today’s world is that he was able to show, in a less mind-boggling way, that we live within a world of seeming contradictions that, when carefully examined, are not contradictory. To most, we live in a relative world, governed by conditional rights vs. conditional wrongs with nothing beyond. Nagarjuna used the logical method of his era to articulate how there is no contradiction. At that point, ancient Indian scholars employed a method of logic called a tetralemma: an algorithm with four dimensions (affirmation, negation, equivalence, and neither). In terms of conditional rights versus conditional wrongs, it would look like this:

1. Explicit absolute right exists: affirmation of absolute right, implicit negation absolute wrong.
2. Explicit absolute right does not exist: affirmation of absolute wrong, implicit negation absolute right.
3. Explicit absolute right both exists and does not exist: both implicit affirmation and negation.
4. Explicit absolute right neither exists nor does not exist: implicit neither affirmation nor negation.

He thus created the Two Truth Doctrine of conditional truth and unconditional truth. That doctrine stated, so long as this tetralemma method of logic is used alone, there is no way to reconcile either a conditional absolute right or a conditional absolute wrong since all conditions are contingent. That is where Nagarjuna began, but it is not where he ended. He then went to the next level—to the unconditional, which has no contingencies (beyond rational understanding) and pointed out there was a fifth dimension: none of the above.

“The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths: a truth of worldly convention and ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the distinction drawn between these two truths do not understand the Buddha’s profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth, the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, liberation is not achieved.”

Allow me to translate for you. We ordinarily consider truth as conditionally contingent (e.g., one thing contingent upon something else, such as right and wrong). Still, there is an ultimate truth beyond contingencies, and these two (while appearing as two), are actually two sides of the same thing. They arise dependent upon one another, and neither can exist without the other, sort of like the inside and outside of a roof. One of these truths is a truth of discriminate opposition (e.g., this vs. that; right vs. wrong—the core dilemma), but the other is the truth of indiscriminate union. We must use the conventional truth to lead us to the higher truth since the conventional is the coin of standard logic and communications (words), and we use this truth to know how it is different from the higher. But unless we experience the higher truth, we will forever be lost in a conditionally, contingent, rational trap.

Then he stated a subset of this doctrine. That conventional truth was a matter of tangible form, but the higher truth was of imperceptible emptiness (thus, what the Buddha had said in the Heart Sutra/Sutra of Perfect Wisdom: Form is emptiness; Emptiness is form). Nagarjuna reasoned that if this ineffable dimension of emptiness was valid, then it must apply to everything, including emptiness, thus empty emptiness, which creates an inseparable feedback union back to form again. The two are forever fused together.

So how does this affect the problems of today? It “can” revolutionize the dilemma of egotism and self-righteousness. When properly understood and experienced, it means that the obstacle standing in the way of the higher truth is the perceptible illusion of the self (ego: the contingent, conditional image). Once that illusion is eliminated, we experience our true self (unconditional non-image) that is the same for all people. 

There is no discrimination at this higher truth level (e.g., distinction), and consequently, there is no absolute right vs. wrong, but neither is there not an absolute right nor wrong (independent of each other). Everything is unconditionally, indiscriminately united, yet not conditionally. Thus it can neither be said that truth either exists or does not. If all of us could “get that,” the conflicts of the world would vanish in a flash, and we would at long last know peace and unity among all things.

You can’t prove a negative.

If you check the colloquial definition of you can’t prove a negative, you will find the following distinction:

Two sides. One Coin.

evidence of absence, or absence of evidence. That, of course, is an understanding based on the ability to discover or measure something, scientifically. The implication is there is something to be discovered, directly. There is, however, another way established by The Buddha in Chapter 22: On Pure Actions in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra. This alternative way is called “fathoming.”

Here is the distinction expressed in that chapter: “If Dharma is eternal, one cannot gain it. It is like space. Who can gain it? In worldly life, what originally was not, but is now, is called the non-Eternal. The same with the Way. If the Way can be gained, this is nothing but the non-Eternal. If Dharma is the Eternal, there can be no gaining of anything, no arising, as in the case of the Buddha-Nature, which knows no gaining and no arising.”… “There are two kinds of Way. One is eternal, and the other the non-eternal. Enlightenment, too, is of two kinds. One is eternal, and the other non-eternal.”

Later in the same chapter comes “fathoming.” “There are two kinds of seeing. One is seeing by outer signs, and the other by fathoming…It is like seeing fire from afar, when one sees smoke. Actually, one does not see the fire. Though one does not see it, nothing is false here…Seeing the actions of the body and mouth, we say that we see the mind. The mind is not seen, but this is not false. This is seeing by outer signs…What is seeing by fathoming? We see the flower and the leaf, and we say we see the root. Though we do not see the root, this is not false.”

The actions of mind and body, by necessity, presumes (e.g., requires) the existence of the unseen Mind. Can we prove the existence of “up?” Up cannot be proven directly, but it can indirectly with the existence of “down.” These two are opposite sides of the same coin. Remove one side, and the other side will disappear.

In the same way, proving a negative, by necessity requires a positive. Remove one, and the other disappears. When a positive comes into being, a negative must likewise be present. So can a negative be proven? We may not be able to prove a negative directly, but without a negative, a positive could not exist.

Seeing you seeing me.

Nearly 400 years have passed since the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns, offered the words, “O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.” 

Seeing ourselves, in that way, is a daunting challenge. What others see is limited to the perception of our objective nature, and the same is true in reverse: we see the outside evidence, and they see ours. None, however, can ever see another’s true subjective nature. We see the tip of the iceberg but not what lies beneath. 

The evidence of what lies beneath must be seen through word and action. In the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, The Buddha himself is quoted as having said there are two kinds of understanding: “One is seeing by outer signs, and the other by fathoming. Seeing by outer signs is like seeing fire from afar when one sees the smoke. Actually, one does not see the fire. Fathoming is like seeing the colour of the eye. A man’s eye is pure and does not get broken (damaged by looking). The same is the case where the Bodhisattva clearly sees the Way, Enlightenment, and Nirvana. Though he sees thus, there are no characteristics to be seen...Seeing the actions of body and mouth, we say that we see the mind. The mind is not seen, but this is not false. This is seeing by outer signs.” And Jesus, likewise said, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” 

Our inner truth is reflected through word and deed. We are all seeing through a glass either filtered by the darkness of how we think and imagine ourselves, through the bias of our own egos, or through a clear lens cleansed of defilement. What we believe ourselves to often stand against how others see us and that contrast is a thorny problem everyone must work through before the darkness vanishes. We can see clearly, life as it truly is: a magnificent creation—a heaven on earth!

The genuine truth is the same regardless of source. The same is true of wisdom. If honesty and knowledge are real, they will be the same for all people irrespective of origin or affiliation. Nevertheless, people often are misled between gold and fool’s gold. Genuine gold is always authentic, regardless of judgments and filtered bias. In the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians, the Apostle Paul addresses this matter of the accouterments of religiosity compared to correct vision. 

He said, “…where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

This wisdom is not different from that offered by Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas to which I referred in a previous post Getting saved: “When you know yourself, then you will know that you are of the flesh of the living Father. But if you know yourself not, then you live in poverty and that poverty is you.” 

Neither is it different from the words of The Buddha found in the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment: “Good sons, it is like smelting gold ore. The gold does not come into being because of smelting...Even though it passes through endless time, the nature of the gold is never corrupted. It is wrong to say that it is not originally perfect. The perfect enlightenment of the Tathagata (A Buddha: our right mind) is also like this.”

The central battleground is the impediment that blinds us all and turns righteousness into self-righteousness. What is right doesn’t depend upon our ideas about ourselves. Right is always right. Truth and wisdom are always what they are. To claim that our views alone are right, standing against the opinions of others, is nothing other than an egotistical reflection of the internal workings of not understanding who we indeed are: “…flesh of the living Father.” We can see the flesh. The question is, can we see “…the power of the gift within.” When completeness comes, what is in part disappears. Then only will we know fully, even as we are fully understood.

Connecting the dots.

The talent of connecting relevant dots (not all dots are relevant) is a critical one. In a good many cases, what seems as disconnected and independent is instead the opposite (e.g., connected and interdependent). We can quickly lose the sense of the whole tree when our noses are pressed against the bark. Throughout history, there have been those who could stand back and see the big picture of lots and lots of dots. But to then see the emerging pattern, when the dots are connected, is an even more rare talent.

One of the more profound dot connections was an East Asian Sūtra known as the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. Upon thorough investigation, this sūtra reveals that it was constructed over a long period and is actually a sūtra of other sūtras, a sort of supreme dot connection. What the sūtra says is that the entirety of the cosmos, from top to bottom, is an interconnected web known as “Indra’s net.”

In our time, a branch of mathematics has arisen called “Chaos theory” that showed these interconnections, to the smallest of detail, within the apparent randomness of complex, chaotic systems, contain underlying patterns, feedback loops, repetitions, self-similarities, fractals, self-organizations, and reliance on programming at the initiating point, are sensitive to dependencies of initial conditions. The butterfly effect describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic, nonlinear system can result in substantial differences in a later state, e.g., a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas.

On a less ambitious plane (which some see as less complex but instead more practical) are those who see dots in our world of economics, migration patterns, immigration, climate change, etc. And among this branch are the likes of Todd Miller, journalist, and author of his latest book, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security. What Todd has to say, could not be more timely and essential to the understanding of the interconnected variables driving our modern world. His book may be found by clicking here. It is highly worth the time it will take to read, grasp, and enlighten your understanding.

Here, there and everywhere.

Illusion?

I confess: For a long time I’ve been fascinated with how things work, particularly how our mind works and how, if possible, to explain this by merging spirituality with science, which introduces this post. 

Some time ago, while visiting the eye doctor, we had a conversation about how sight functions in the brain. I had read that the entire world is actually seen upside down, projected onto the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain, and then inverted right side up again. Not only that, our brain turns what is otherwise a 2-dimensional image into a 3-dimensional one. 

In effect, never suspecting, what we are “seeing” is a hologram. And then I began to patch together some otherwise seemingly disparate pieces of information I had come upon over the years. The first of these pieces was from The Śūraṅgama Sūtra—“All things in all worlds are the wondrous, fundamental, enlightened, luminous mind that understands, and that this mind, pure, all-pervading, and perfect, contains the entire universe...it is everlasting and does not perish.”

Then there was this from The Dalai Lama: On Buddha Nature…“Every sentient being—even insects—have Buddha nature. The seed of Buddha means consciousness, the cognitive power—the seed of enlightenment. That’s from Buddha’s viewpoint. All these destructive things can be removed from the mind, so, therefore, there’s no reason to believe some sentient being cannot become Buddha. So every sentient being has that seed.”

Don’t see the connection yet? For the defining link, watch this video concerning a debate within the world of physics about the seeming conflict between General Relativity (held by Steven Hawkings), Quantum Mechanics (argued by Leonard Susskind) and resolved by Argentinian theoretical physicist Juan Martín Maldacena. 

The topic of debate? The holographic principle. And while you are watching, bear in mind some fundamental Buddhist principles which overlay the discussion: Dependent Origination, The ego—the illusion of the true Self and the reality of the Self, and The One Mind (non-dual). 

If you’re good at connecting dots, given a proper grasp of these fundamental Buddhist principles, and digesting the basic physics discussed, I suspect you might come to understand the essence of The Śūraṅgama Sūtra: We exist within The One Mind as a holographic projection of the truth that lies beyond articulation. 

“Things are not what they seem; nor are they otherwise.”—The Śūraṅgama Sūtra

Already, not yet

The culmination of every spiritual journey is the realization of completion and unity. Many religions claim we are incomplete and must find the road to a far distant heavenly home. 

Johnny Cash made famous the song In the by and by there’ll be pie in the sky, meaning there will be a reward waiting for us in heaven if we do God’s will here on earth. Because we imagine incompletion we seek completion. Because we misunderstand our source and ourselves, we desire fulfillment even though we are from beginning to the end already full. Our cup runs over with goodness and we remain thirsty for what is already ours.

Acceptance of the already and not yet is a seeming paradox. How can both be true at the same time? The answer as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, is, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Our true nature is spiritual, complete and there is nowhere to go. Our mortal nature is phenomenal, in a process, and we search for the already. We are like the man who looks through lenses, searching for the eyeglasses that sit upon his nose.

It was Zen Master Huang Po who expressed the doctrine of One Mind: “All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning: is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it  transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons.”

Thus the idea of mind over matter is absurd. The mind is the matter in the exact same way that Emptiness is form (The Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sūtra). Every atom of our material body is nothing other than the perfect integration of the One Mind and looking elsewhere for what is already ours is a fools journey.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is a story that reveals this truth.  The message of the Prodigal is the same as contained in the Song of Zazen written by one of the Zen giants (17th-century Hakuin Ekaku). Here are his words: 

“How near the truth, yet how far we seek. Like one in water crying, ‘I thirst!’ Like the son of a rich man wandering poor on this earth we endlessly circle the six worlds. The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.”  

What can be seen blinds us and keeps us ignorant of what is unseen. So, on the one hand, we are deceived by the conditional, discriminate nature of what we can perceive and on the other hand, our true nature is unconditionally indiscriminate, ineffable but full. And out of our sense of incompletion, we are consumed by desire, not realizing that we already possess what we seek.

The noble winning poet Rabindranath Tagore captured the journey beautifully when he wrote, “The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.” 

So on this spring day, reflect on the labor of your life. Are you laboring for becoming complete? Or are you laboring to accept your never-ending completion? It makes a difference.

Mind

“He’s lost his mind.” “She changed her mind.” “I can’t make up

my mind.” We use the term “mind” in such an off-handed way that it’s rare to look at the concept closely, but it is impossible to be a serious student of Zen without considering how it is understood. So today I want to devote some attention to a thorough look at the “mind” from a Zen perspective.

We fail to consider that this conclusion results from a collaboration between the object and a process in our brain. In Buddhism, this collaboration has a designation called the Five Skāndhas—“Skāndhas” is a Sanskrit word which means aggregate or heap, and the five are (1) form, (2) sensation, (3) perceptions, (4) mental formations and (5) consciousness. None of these singularly is adequate to produce the conclusion of “rock.” And this is true for all objects, whether internal or external. This collaboration amongst these Skāndhas fabricates the illusion of solidity, and this illusion is the basis of “mind.” Consequently, Buddhism says that forms (objects) are “empty,” meaning that a form has no substantial existence, and if there are no forms to see, then a mind is not produced since “mind” is the result of this collaboration.

Because of the incredible advances made in neurological detection, it is now possible to validate what Buddhism has been saying for centuries. When we examine the brain with today's neurological tools, we can see that this Skāndhas view of fabrication is correct. Given this, it now makes sense that there is no substantial, independent objective anything, including the mental formation of a self (otherwise known as a “self-image”). Since everything is impermanent and in flux, when any one of these Skāndhas changes (which is all of the time), our “mind” reflects these changes. Thus the expressions above: (“He’s lost his mind.” “She changed her mind.” “I can’t make up my mind.” ) take on an entirely different meaning. In fact, the notion of a “mind” sitting between our ears is simply a convenient way of referring to our thoughts, which are in constant motion.

So the next step along this exploration is how this understanding affects the practice of Zen meditation. When we sit, we “see” mental formations and sense feelings wafting across our consciousness. When these formations cease, our mind goes away as well, and this cessation reveals MIND (which has no dimension or distinguishing characteristics)—the ground from which everything arises. 

The capacity of seeing must entail separation and life. An object, such as a mental image, may have separation but not life. Only a subject has life, but it too must have separation for seeing to occur (or hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking).

If it were possible for one person to completely merge with another person, there would be no sense of self and other—Only unity. At the manifestation level, there is what appears as duality—me vs. other, this vs. that, a thought vs. a thinker, etc. This level of reality (the level of manifestation) is the ordinary level where we notice ourselves versus our world. But this level is only possible if there is a separate level of unity, the ground from which manifestations arise. 

Because we only notice forms/objects, our subjective nature (Buddha-Nature) is never seen, yet this source ground is who we truly are. Through the process of Zen meditation, we couple this understanding together with our practice to experience both the illusions (e.g., images) and the ground from which they arise. This noticing, separated from what is noticed, allows the emergence of our true nature.

Nagarjuna—the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, referred to these two levels as “two truths” (Partial/conventional truths and sublime truths) and said that we learn about the sublime truths (which set us free) by way of the conventional/partial truths. In other words, we are forced to use the mental formations (which admittedly are empty) produced by the Skāndhas to fathom sublime reality. And until that happens, we are trapped in the illusion that what we experience is the totality of our existence.