What does it mean to have a ripe spiritual capacity? It means that a person has already engaged in spiritual practice in earlier stages of life, or even in previous lifetimes. For example, when the Sixth Patriarch Huineng heard someone reciting the line from the Diamond Sutra: “One should give rise to the mind without abiding anywhere,” he immediately understood it.
What does “without abiding anywhere” mean?
First, we should explain what it means to “abide somewhere.” It means that the mind remains fixed in a particular place. For example, abiding in the ālayavijñāna means the mind is resting in one place. Or during meditation and visualization practice, remaining trapped in a certain state, this is also called “abiding.”
For practitioners, “abiding” means being blind to the true nature of reality. The mind becomes fixed in a certain state without even realizing it, unable to remain natural and ordinary. This is the practitioner’s form of “abiding.”
The “abiding” of ordinary people is even more problematic. We abide in delicious food, fine clothing, family, and romantic love. This kind of “abiding” simply means attachment.
The Sixth Patriarch Huineng may well have been a practitioner in a previous life, or perhaps he had already done extensive practice before hearing this sentence and thus understood his own mind very deeply—possibly through long-term contemplation of mind. At that moment, he was told that the mind need not abide anywhere; when it remains natural and ordinary, that itself is the true nature. With just this single sentence—“One should give rise to the mind without abiding anywhere”—he realized that when the mind is without fixation or attachment, all phenomena are in fact your own essence, your original mind itself.
At that time, however, the Sixth Patriarch had only realized half of the meaning;his realization was not yet complete. Later, he went to the Fifth Patriarch at Dongshan and spent eight months pounding rice. Afterwards, the Fifth Patriarch again spoke the phrase, “One should give rise to the mind without abiding anywhere.”
At this point, Huineng understood not only emptiness, but also luminosity.
He then uttered the famous Five Exclamations:
“How unexpected that the self-nature is originally pure!
How unexpected that the self-nature is unborn and undying!
How unexpected that the self-nature is originally complete!
How unexpected that the self-nature is originally unmoving!
How unexpected that the self-nature can give rise to all phenomena!”
This means that the essence of mind has no findable substance, yet it is unshakable, and at the same time capable of giving rise to all phenomena. That which gives rise to all phenomena is luminosity. Yet luminosity itself has no substantial essence and is itself emptiness. Therefore, this is called the union of luminosity and emptiness.
—Excerpted and compiled from The Relationship Between Buddhist Theory and Practice
This article is a preliminary translation draft and has not yet been reviewed or proofread by the speaker.
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