Bodhidharma came from the West with the bowl, the robe, and a copy of the Lankavatara Sutra. As you might expect, many of the things we talk about in Zen practice come from this Sutra. One of them is the notion that”All things are created by mind alone.” Before dismissing that as preposterous, in Zen we also vow to save ALL beings, so “Mind makes everything,” is no more likely or unlikely.
Our imaginations create the world. Our perceptions, interpretations, and inferences create what we think of as reality. We believe it, and think of it as incontrovertible, that It. Is. Reality. It. Is. Truth. This is our world, and we make it up as we go along. That’s not good or bad, it’s an acknowledgement of what humans do; we think our way into sadness, happiness, pleasure, pain, all of it. We create Nirvana and Samsara. We create all sorts of concepts, beliefs, and ideas.We infer meaning to things that really don’t have any meaning to them, like the omens predicting doom, or hurricanes being divine punishment. We take statements made by others out of context; we misinterpret intention and motivation. Someone can say something to you that elicits anything from “meh,” to laughter, and to running away screaming, regardless of what the intention behind the statement was. We’re winging it, bouncing through the pinball game of existence and thinking we’re making a straight line, always one step back from reality, and all made by mind.
One of our Sangha members was involved in the cleanup of a major natural disaster, where hundreds of thousands lost their lives, homes, everything. We can make a mental image of the cleanup, we can possibly imagine what the sounds were, probably come nowhere near the actual smells, tastes, and touch were present in the cleanup. Our Sangha member is the only one among us who has actually experienced that and knows what his experience of it was. The rest of us may as well be writing the script for the next disaster movie, because our “experience” of it is just created by our thinking.
All our perceptions and interpretations remove us by one step back from reality. Since one of the major tenets of Zen is to directly experience reality, are we doomed to fail at that task? ZM Seung Sahn pointed out that just seeing, just hearing, just tasting, just smelling, just touching, not dependent on an outside object. No eye, sense of sight, object of sight, no differentiation between subject and object, no mind; all before thought. When we take our invented “I” out of the mix, we’re more likely to experience reality in its totality. We’re one step closer to the experience rather than we are when “I” am involved, thinking myself one step back from reality as it is and we can get on with the business of helping all sentient beings.
One final question: “What makes mind?”
