觀心論疏 2.30

2.30

The treatise says: "[The verse] asks: Contemplating the spontaneously arising mind, / How is it skillful crossing over? / The three vehicles do not sever bonds, / Yet attain entry into the two nirvāṇas." This single verse clarifies the shared teaching. The practitioner receives this teaching and cultivates contemplation, contemplating that the spontaneously arising mind in a single thought-moment is itself empty; it is not empty by the cessation of the mind, but the mind is empty in its own nature. A sūtra says: "Because it is devoid of own-nature, because own-nature does not exist, because own-nature cannot be attained." A sūtra says: "Just as a magician sees the people he has conjured," so does the bodhisattva contemplate sentient beings. Like a wise person seeing the moon in the water, like seeing one's reflection in a mirror, like a mirage in the heat, like an echo to a shout, like clouds in the sky, like bubbles upon water—so does the bodhisattva contemplate sentient beings. A sūtra says: "The fundamental nature of ignorance originally does not exist; it comes to exist through the aggregation of false conceptualization and conditions." Sentient beings merely fail to know that it is false and unreal, taking the body to be real, claiming it is permanence, bliss, self, and purity, and giving rise to the four inversions, arbitrarily reckoning various delusions, and transmigrating through birth and death. If practitioners today contemplate their own bodies and minds as illusory and lacking reality, how could there be permanence, bliss, self, and purity? Then inverted thoughts do not arise, and defilements are spontaneously extinguished. Just as a person in a dream sees someone disparaging or praising him, and is overjoyed when praised and grieved when disparaged; only after awakening from sleep does he realize that the joy and anger, pleasure and fear during sleep arose arbitrarily. The bodhisattva practitioner contemplates that the joy and anger of the spontaneously arising mind, and the various delusions that arise, are likewise like illusions and transformations; as a sūtra says: "Like what is seen in a dream." By performing this contemplation, one awakens to the principle of emptiness of the spontaneously arising mind in a single thought-moment; this is called the shared teaching, embodying phenomena as non-arising, skillful crossing over, which laterally expresses the principle of the transformed city.