A monk asked Yunmen, “Where is the place the Buddhas go beyond Buddhahood?” Yunmen answered “Where the east mountain walks on water.”
When we hear this – if we assume that Yunmen’s answer isn’t intentionally nonsensical – we’ll try and decode it. So we may say, “Well, the mountain is the symbol of the whole world of interdependence, which is flowing,like water would flow”; an early version of the process view.”
But what we don’t do is take the image seriously. Which is strange because many of us have had the experience of being in a boat on water, looking over at a mountain, and it appears that the mountain is walking on water. We have these magical experiences all the time. So, for instance, at this time of year in the early dusk, before people close the curtains and the lights are on internally, there’s an extraordinary mirror effect on the windows, intermingling inside and outside.
We can think of other examples. But what we would say is that this phenomenological world, where we appear to see magical things, where we appear to be living within miracles is just something that’s going on inside us. And what we do to eradicate those miracles is that we superimpose upon the world of our experience a conceptual world, which we call reality.
So we say “There’s a mountain over there. It’s not doing anything. It’s not walking on water. There’s the sky, there’s the water.”, and so on. What we need to understand is that our universe is not made up of lots of things acting on each other. It is a living dynamic whole, full of perspective and full of expression. And that perspective that we have of seeing the mountain walk on water is not some odd psychological thing that’s happening internal to us. It’s part of the dynamic expression of the whole universe. That relationship that we have with the mountain is part of the expressive creativity of the mountain. If we understand that and do not flatten our experience with this concretising ‘reality’, then we can live within miracles.