From the Vimalakirti Sutra and the Ideal (Hwagong Kang-seol)

The Vimalakirti Sutra (the Vimalakirti Nirdesha), a Chinese scripture, lays out practices that allow people who were once slaves to the Hindu gods to become their own masters and play a role in turning an absurd reality into an ideal world.

Temple-brother?... no, these days, temple-uncle... I, who had only encountered the sutra through formal Dharma texts, happened to find a book at the library with a detailed interpretation of the Vimalakirti Sutra. Since it was about five times thicker than the original Dharma text, I figured I'd just lightly read the prologue or so and close it... but the first few pages grabbed me so firmly and stirred my glass-jar heart so continuously that I had no choice but to tie up a few sentences here on the blog like this.






= From the first chapter of the prologue, and from the second through the fourth chapter =


1.
No-mind, no-thought does not, by any means, refer to an absolute state of stillness in which the mind does not move at all — like a rock sitting beside a pond. Such a state would be no different from a robot that has received no command, or an inanimate object like a stone or a stump that has no emotion whatsoever, and could not be human.
To reach no-mind, no-thought while still retaining human feelings is simply to receive every phenomenon arising inside and outside as a perfectly natural change. Everyone naturally accepts that the wind can blow madly for a while and then, as if nothing ever happened, sit utterly still. The problem is rather my own mind, which is extremely sensitive to changes in the environment around me — with me at the center — and which falls into joy, anger, sadness, and pleasure along with those changes.
These emotions of joy, anger, sadness, and pleasure are phenomena that arise only when I look outward with myself at the center. When the field of vision does not revolve around "me," the principle that changes in the surrounding environment can no longer do anything to me is precisely the Buddha's teaching of anatman (諸法無我, non-self in all dharmas). In simple terms, it means: don't be ruled by your environment. It is a teaching not to cling to any phenomenon that arises inside or outside of you.





2.
In the real world, the drama called "life" always, everywhere, makes me its protagonist. As the protagonist, no one wants to be the protagonist of a tragedy on this stage called reality. But those who don't live their own lives simply have no say in the matter. One whose fate is moved by others can only appear on the stage of reality as the protagonist of a tragedy who cannot escape the yoke of suffering. For a person who lives without ever asking who the true self really is, their life, following the changes of their environment, can only go through joy, anger, sadness, and pleasure and simply be dragged along. A life that moves like a puppet exactly as written in the script of the drama ultimately doesn't work in the real world. As long as you live such a life, you may want to escape the painful stage, but there is no way out.
The Vimalakirti Sutra presents the method and the path by which one can escape this stage of suffering. That is, the gist of the Vimalakirti Sutra is to preach, through the Dharma-gate of Non-Duality — the transcendence of dualistic, oppositional thinking — that the real world is itself the ideal world. The teaching of the Vimalakirti Sutra is that my fate (my life), which has one foot sunk deep in the saha world, is piloted by my own power — not by the power of others — toward the place I want to go, the ideal world, with the other foot I will step forward with.





3.
It is said that the tragedy of life begins with comparison. In other words, if you want to escape a painful life, don't compare. In the Xinxinming (信心銘, Verses on Faith-Mind), known as a guide for practitioners in Zen Buddhism, it is said "to arrive at the Way is not difficult — only cease picking and choosing." So if you simply don't weigh relative advantages and pick one over the other, reaching the Way is not hard. But can we really live in the real world without comparing? Most of our values are born out of dualistic comparison. If that is the case, it means that humans do not judge things or events by their absolute value as they are. In other words, we perceive things through relationships of opposition.
In Buddhism, however, those oppositional relationships we experience daily in everyday life — ideal and reality, success and failure, delusion and bodhi (wisdom), black and white, good and evil, and so on — these oppositional value systems are seen as the discriminating mind that arises from categorizing everything with "me" at the center. Buddhism holds that this discriminating mind, this mind of dividing, produced by one's own heart, is the very cause of suffering. In fact, buddhas and bodhisattvas may be saviors to sentient beings, but to demons and heretics they are perceived as worse than yakshas. When I don't put myself at the center, even that discrimination called "demons and heretics" does not arise. The reason we distinguish them as demons and heretics here is simply that their way of life or attitude — regardless of whether it's self or other — is the cause of the very anguish humans seek to escape.
What we call good and evil, success and failure, do not always keep their value as good or evil, success or failure; on the contrary, good can turn into evil, evil can turn into good; failure can be success, and what looked like success can turn out, later, to have been failure. People realize this kind of thing all the time. This is because all things are impermanent, and also because we fail to see success and failure, or evil and good, clearly because of our own ignorance. That is why Buddhism says: see things as they are. By analyzing and discriminating things on the basis of artificially learned knowledge or experience, people end up with distorted values that are far removed from the things themselves. In the end, actions based on that distorted thinking inevitably result in connection to suffering.