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Kusen

162. Buddhist language

Buddhist language is often quite abstract.

And so it is often difficult for us at first to understand the feelingness underneath.

So for example in the Surangama Sutra there is what appears to be quite an abstract discussion about perception.

We are told that false perception is like the moon in water. So in other words we imagine that each thing is a kind of concrete reality.

But every thing is just dependent on the causes and conditions of everything, from moment to moment. Were the water to be disturbed, the image of the moon would be shattered into a thousand shards of light. All things are like this.

The Sutra then talks about a second moon. It’s as if a person with cataracts looking at the moon sees another moon next to it. And by this – I think – is meant awareness of perceiving. So I see something but I am aware of the act of perception, and hence aware that my ‘seeing’ isn’t just noticing what’s there already. It’s a creative act. But I’m still going astray, somehow.

The real moon is unmediated experience itself, which is a description of our sitting.

When we sit, we are not concerned with inside or outside, identifying or classifying our experience. And when identifying and classifying arise, they are not meta phenomena, they are just aspects of experience.

We are simply experience.

It takes a little while to realise that this ocean of experience, this something rather than nothing is a miracle.

Is a miracle.