In the Diamond Sutra it’s said that there are five kinds of eye: the Physical/Flesh eye, the Heavenly eye, the Prajna eye, the Dharma eye and the Buddha eye.
The Flesh eye is our karmic way of seeing. It’s seeing the world with ourselves at the centre and how we can use the world to satisfy our needs and wants. The Heavenly eye is seeing the world as a Heavenly being would see it: from a distance, seeing structure, seeing systems and (for our purposes) seeing the world as linguistically constructed. So for example, seeing a particular tree as an exemplar of the word ‘tree’ rather than as a unique existent. The Prajna eye or wisdom eye is the eye that sees the emptiness of all things. The Dharma eye is the eye which sees the world as full of bodhisattvas, full of teachers. The Buddha eye is seeing the world as an alive feeling whole, like a body.
There’s a risk of thinking this is developmental: we start off with the physical eye and we gradually work our way up to the Buddha eye. Probably the pivot is having an insight into emptiness. On this view, once we develop the perspective of the Wisdom eye,we can move on to these higher stages. That’s a mistaken view in my opinion.
All five of these eyes are available to us now.
Rather than seeing each eye as being independent, I think it makes a lot of sense if we see these eyes in pairs, as they would be for a human being. If you look at it that way, then we can see that, as it were, the pair of eyes for an unevolved person who hasn’t encountered Buddhism or anything analogous to Buddhism is the first two, the Physical eye and the Heavenly eye. This person sees the world from the perspective of self needs and wants, but the world that person sees is also linguistically constructed. The person’s not intimate with the beings in the world, they’re kind of linguistically abstract. I think that’s a much more realistic way of regarding an unevolved or very self-centered person.
It’s very rare indeed to encounter somebody who just sees through the physical eye and that’s it. The pivot is the wisdom eye, but not necessarily in a pattern of linear progression. One can see the Wisdom eye taken with either the Flesh eye or Heavenly eye can produce a kind of Zen or Buddhist sickness. You can see that the Wisdom eye and the Divine eye taken together just produce a sort of ‘nothing matters’ perspective that you would get from a teenage male existentialist or something like that. Similarly the Prajna eye, combined with the Flesh eye, just produces somebody who’s got a justification to do whatever they want because ‘nothing matters’.
Insight into emptiness is a gateway to potentially seeing and living differently, but it can also simply be grafted onto a pre-existing egotism.
And the Buddha eye is far from being something which just appears at the end of a long process of spiritual development. It’s there all the time but it’s not really recognised. When people are out in nature for example they very often have the sense of a deep connective intimacy with their environment but because that’s not reconcilable with a self-centred perspective, it’s misidentified as being something relaxing or soothing rather than an exemplar of something which is fundamentally different.
So in this way of seeing the five eyes one can, as it were, see them in combination, as you would with a person. This gets us out of our developmental model and into something which actually corresponds very well to our actual experience.