Mirror?

A man once went to the Fifth Zen Patriarch in order to become a monk. The Patriarch asked him, "Do you want to know about truth or be truth?" The man replied, "To be truth."

He was given a lowly job cleaning and pounding rice for the monastery, but with no spiritual guidance and no initiation. Slowly he relaxed into his natural state and just pounded rice.

The Patriarch was dying and needed a successor. He told his hundreds of monks to write a poem to show what they had learned while with him. Whosoever wrote the best verse would receive the robe as the sixth Patriarch.

The chief disciple, Shenxiu, was the most knowledgeable monk and most diligent, cross-legged meditator. He wrote:

The body is the Bodhi tree of perfect wisdom, The mind like a bright mirror standing. At all times diligently wipe it, and allow no dust or smudges to cling to it.

The Patriarch declared it good, but far from perfect. Hui-neng, the rice cleaner, was illiterate so he had to ask someone else to write the poem. It read:

There never was a Bodhi tree. Nor bright mirror standing. In esseance, no mind exsists. So where is the dust and smudges to gather?

This story reveals two basic attitudes toward the spirit. One is that you can, through discipline, sitting cross-legged, and attending to rituals and seeking knowledge, purify the body, mind and soul. Or, as a man like Hui-neng reveals, the whole idea of seeking, of trying to do something to purify the mind, is irrelevant and confusing. Our true nature is already pure and clear so any attempt to purify it would actually contaminate it. Any artifical discipline takes us farther away from our natural state, or that which is called no-mind.

Think about it..

Two eyes blur, fuse together, assuredly stating, "We're free"

J-ji, jiva as far as I see, the dust of lack does not stick, no smudges can be.

A-ji