Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha

by Jack Kerouac

  “You should regard all that changes as ‘dust-particles’ and that which is unchanging as being your own true Nature of Mind.”

  Then Ananda and all the assembly realized that from beginningless time, they had forgotten and ignored their own true nature amongst the illusive reflections of the world and the world was mind-only. They felt like a little baby that had found its mother’s breast, and became calm and peaceful in spirit. They besought the Lord Tathagata to teach them how to make right distinctions between body and mind, between the real and the unreal, between that which is true and that which is false, between the manifested natures of deaths and rebirths on the one hand, and the intrinsic nature of that which is un-born and never dies on the other hand; the one appearing and disappearing, the other forever abiding within the essence of their own mind.

  King Prasenajit rose and asked the Buddha for some instruction that would enable him to realize the nature of no-dying and no-rebirth, so that he could begin to understand the state that ultimately freed one from the wheel of deaths and rebirths. The Buddha asked him to describe his present appearance as compared with his appearance in boyhood. The King cried: “How can I compare my present with my youth?” and described the gradual process of decay and change year by year, month by month, “yes, day by day,” that would soon end in his complete destruction. Then the Buddha asked him how old he was when he first saw the River Ganges, age three; and the second time, age thirteen; and how old he was now, age sixty-two; and if his perception of the Ganges had changed. The King replied: “The sight of my eyes is not as good, but my perception of the sight is just the same as ever.”

  The Buddha addressed him: “Your Majesty! You have been saddened by the changes in your personal appearance since your youth—your greying hair and wrinkled face, your failing blood-supply—but you say that your perception of sight compared with it when you were a youth, shows no change. Tell me, Your Majesty, is there any youth and old age in the perception of sight?”

  “Not at all, your Lordship.”

  The Buddha continued: “Your Majesty! Though your face has become wrinkled, in the perception of your eyes, there are no signs of age, no wrinkles. Then, wrinkles are the symbol of change, and the un-wrinkled is the symbol of the un-changing. That which is changing must suffer destruction, but the unchanging is free from deaths and rebirths.”

  Everyone in the assembly was greatly cheered to hear this ancient news from the Tathagata and to begin to realize its mysterious truth.

  Then Ananda wanted to know why it was, since the perception of the Mind is free from deaths and rebirths, nevertheless people forget their true nature of Mind and act in a state of “reversed confusion” in the direction of the Principle of Ignorance.

  The Buddha held out his arm with fingers pointing downward in some mystic mudra. “Ananda, if this position is called ‘reversed,’ what would you call upright?”

  “Lord, putting the fingers up would be called ‘upright.’”

  The Buddha suddenly turned his hand and said to Ananda: “If this interpretation of positions, reversed or upright, is simply made by turning the hand so that the fingers are pointing either up or down without any change in the location of the hand, that is, as viewed by beings in this world, then you should know that the universal essence of Mind which is everywhere forever everything, which is the Womb of Tathagata, which is the pure Dharmakaya (Body of the Established Law), may be interpreted differently by viewing it from different view points of attainment, as being either Nirvana unborn beyond existence, the Tathagata’s ‘True Enlightenment’ (bright, perfect, empty, immortal), or as Sangsara, conditional existence, the world we have, mortal, impure, dark, suffering, the apparitions of ignorance in one’s own discriminating brain-mind, the ‘reversed position.’”

  Ananda and the whole assembly were confused and stared up at him with open mouths. What did he mean by a reversed position of mind? Yet the reason they were now seeing him with their eyes instead of seeing merely nothing in the pure true void, was verily because of this reversed position of their minds.

  In great compassion of heart, the Buddha pitied Ananda and the great assembly. He spoke to them reassuringly: “My good faithful disciples! Have I not been constantly teaching you that all of the causes and conditions that characterize changing phenomena and the modes of the mind, and of the different attributes of the mind, and the independently developed conditions of the mind, are all simply manifestations of the mind; and all of your body and mind are but manifestations of the wonderful, enlightening, and true nature of the all-embracing and mysterious Essence of Mind.

  “Everything is taking place in your mind, like a dream.

  “As soon as you wake up and stop dreaming, your mind returns to its original emptiness and purity.

  “In truth, your mind has already returned to its original emptiness and purity, and this world is but a limping shadow.

  “Why do you still so easily forget this natural, wonderful, and enlightened Mind of perfect Purity—this mysterious Mind of radiant Brightness?

  “And why are you still bewildered in your realizing consciousness?”

  Whereupon the Buddha in a few brief words described the Genesis of the World: “Open space is nothing but invisible dimness; the invisible dimness of space is mingled with darkness to look like forms; sensations of form are turned into illusive and arbitrary conceptions of phenomena; and from these false inventive conceptions of phenomena, is developed the consciousness of body.

  “So, within the mind, narrowing finally to the brain mind of the self, these jumblings of causes and conditions, segregating into groups and coming into contact with the projected objects of the world, there is awakened desire or fear which divides the mind of original undisturbability and causes it to excite to either passion or panic, to either indulgence or anger. All of you have been accepting this confusing self-conscious conception as being your own nature of mind.

  “As soon as you accepted it as your true mind, is it any wonder that you became bewildered and supposed it to be localized in your physical body and that all the external things, mountains, rivers, the great open spaces, and the whole world, were outside the body.

  “Is it any wonder that you failed to realize that everything you have so falsely conceived has its only existence within your own wonderful, enlightening Mind of True Essence.

  In likeness you have abandoned all the great, pure, calm oceans of water, and clung to one ripple which you not only accept but which you regard as the whole body of water in all the hundreds of thousands of seas. In such bewilderment you reveal yourselves as fools among fools. Though I move my finger up or down, there is no change in the hand itself. Though you forget the true nature of mind or not, there is no change in the true nature of mind. But the world makes a distinction, and says that now the hand is upright, now it is reversed, that now the true nature of mind is Nirvana-purity, now it is Sangsara-defilement. Since Essence is beyond conception of any kind, those who do this are greatly to be pitied.”

  Ananda, realizing that his Essential Mind was the permanent ground for his changing discriminating brain-mind, wanted to know if the mind with which he was individuating and discriminating his Lord’s teaching about Essential Mind was the same as his Essential Mind.

  The Buddha replied: “Ananda, when in my teaching I point my finger at the moon, you take my finger to be the moon. If you take that which discriminated my teaching as your mind, then when it lays aside its conceptions of the discriminated teaching, the mind should still retain its own discriminating nature, which it does not.

  “It is like a traveller seeking an inn where he may rest for a short time but not permanently. But the inn-keeper lives there permanently, he does not go away. It is the same with this difficulty. If the discriminating brain-mind is your True Mind, it should never change and go away. How can it be your True Mind when, as soon as the sound of my voice ceases, it has no discriminating nature?

  “Both your brain-mind,
which is like a ripple, and its Essence, which is like the sea, have one individual and original nature which is the one and true reality.”

  Ananda said: “Noble Lord, if both my discriminating brain-mind and its Essence have one originality, why does the Essential Mind which is like the sea, which has just been proclaimed by the Lord Buddha as being one with my discriminating brain-mind, why does it not return to its original state?” But as soon as he asked this Ananda realized that he was talking about an originality that has no need of returning.

  And now the Buddha proceeded to elaborate the teaching that would free the assembled devotees from bondage to false perception.

  “There is no brightness in actuality, except as it is the perception of brightness:- for what’s bright to the door?

  “Brightness is not caused by the sun, it’s simply that the sun makes it possible for there to be perception of brightness in open space. Where do you return the perception of brightness to? Not to the sun. To the perceiving mind.

  “Because if you returned the faculty of perceiving to the sun, and said that it originated in the sun, then when the sun is gone down and there is no brightness, then there would be no perception of darkness. Perception is our Essential Mind; the sun’s brightness or the dim moon’s darkness are the conditional ripples on its surface.

  “What does your ear know of brightness or darkness? What does your eye know of silence or sound? So you should know, the phenomena that the sense-organs perceive does not originate in the reality of Essential Mind but in the senses themselves.

  “For instance, Ananda, the brightness of the sun that your eyes perceive does not originate in the reality of Essential Mind, which is neither in brightness or darkness, but exists exclusively for your eyes and in your eyes themselves.

  “And you may know, Ananda, the fire burning for centuries up there, which we call the sun, that your eyes, body, and brain-mind perceive, does not originate in the reality of Essential Mind which is the Holy Void and beyond all conditons of fire and absence of fire, but exists exclusively for the eyes, body, and brain-mind, and in the eyes, body, and brain-mind themselves.

  “Ananda, if you had no body, for you there could be no earth and you could pass through it. That is your sun.

  “Ananda, in reality, it’s just as foolish to say, that there is no body and no earth, as to say that there is a body and an earth: for all is empty and a vision throughout. That is your sun.”

  These mysterious words frightened the disciples who wanted a simple explanation, whereupon the Buddha, always obeying the universal intrinsic sincerity in the essence-heart of this ignorant world, complied with their earnest wishes.

  “My good and faithful disciples, in answer to Ananda’s request as to how he can fully realize that the nature of his mind’s perceiving, which is constant and deeply unruffled by seeming phenomena, is his true and essential nature, I shall ask him to go to the extreme limit of sight with me, that is, I will abandon my Tathagata sight which freely reaches everywhere through all the Buddha-lands of Purity greater in number than the fine particles of dust, and go with Ananda to the palaces of the sun and moon—do you see anything there that belongs to our true and essential nature? Coming nearer to the Seven Golden Mountains that surround Mt. Sumeru, look carefully, what do you see? We see all sorts of brightness and glory, but nothing that belongs to our true and essential nature. Moving nearer, we come to the massing clouds, the flying birds, the hurrying winds, the rising of dust, the mountains, the familiar woods, trees, rivers, herbs, vegetables, animals, none of which belongs to our true and essential nature.

  “Ananda, regarding all those things, far or near, as perceived by the pure Essence of your perceiving eyes, they have different characteristics, but the perception of our eyes is always the same. Does this not mean, that this wonderful essence of the perception of sight neither fixed nor changeable is the true nature of our minds?”

  Thereupon Ananda wanted to know if since the essence of the perception of sight naturally permeates the whole universe, why was it that now as he and the Buddha sat in the Hall their perception of sight was partitioned off by walls and houses?

  “Ananda,” replied the Buddha, “it is not an attribute of the essence of our perception of sight that walls are up and so the eyes can’t see through their impenetrability, or that walls are down and the eyes can see across open space, or that it is bright and so the eyes can see brightness, or that it is dark and so eyes can see darkness. This changeableness is not an attribute of our true perception of sight which is our wonderful, enlightening Essential Mind which, like space, is neither changeable nor fixed.

  “Ananda, the appearance of the wall does not hide the true emptiness, the true emptiness does not annihilate the appearance of the wall.”

  Then the Buddha continued, saying: “Suppose, Ananda, that you and I are looking out over the gardens, even to the sun and moon, and seeing all the multitudinous objects, and no such ‘thing’ as the perception of sight can be pointed out to us. But, Ananda, among all these multitudinous phenomena, can you show me anything which does not belong to the perception of sight?”

  Ananda replied: “Noble Lord! True, I am convinced now that all objects whatsoever, be they little or big, wherever there are manifestations and appearances, all belong to the perception of sight.”

  The Buddha expressed agreement, saying: “So it is, Ananda, so it is.”

  Then all the junior disciples, except the older ones among them who had finished the practice of meditation, having listened to the discussion and not understanding the significance of the conclusion, became confused and frightened and lost control of themselves.

  The Tathagata consoled them: “My good, pious disciples! All that the supreme Teacher of the Dharma has taught are true and sincere words, they are neither extravagant nor fancies and chimerical. They are not to be compared with the puzzling paradoxes propounded like riddles by the famous heretic teacher. Do not be disturbed by what has been taught, but ponder upon it seriously and never give yourself up either to sadness or delight.”

  Then Manjusri rose up and wanted for the sake of the others to have the ambiguity cleared up, as to whether the things that we see exist for, and belong to, the perception of sight, saying, “For these Brothers the explanation needs to be very plain.”

  The Buddha replied: “Manjusri and all my good Disciples: Why should there be any ambiguity as to belonging or not belonging, between the perception of sight which is the ocean, and the seeing of things which is the ripples on that same ocean?

  “The Tathagatas in the ten quarters of the universe, whether they teach with words or without, together with all the Great Wise Beings, as they are intrinsically abiding in Ecstasy, regard all of the seeings of things, their causes and conditions, and all of the conceptions about them, as being visionary flowers in the air, having no true nature of existence within themselves because they partake of the quick infelicitous imaginary state of cause-arisen ripples.

  “The wonderful, enlightening perception of sight, the seeing of objects as well as objects themselves, they all intrinsically belong to the pure, perfect Essential Mind.

  “Therefore, when one is looking upon these manifestations, which are visionary flowers arising from the senses in contact with objects, he must remember that they are all illusion and then there will be no ambiguity.”

  Then Ananda, professing his faith in the Buddha’s teaching that pure perception of sight itself was his original Essential Mind and all the variegated sights in themselves belonged to it only in essence because they had no self-nature but were like ripples coming and going as ignorance dictated, now wanted to know exactly how all this worked so that he could apprehend with his own mind what his heart already believed with respect to the reliability of the Buddha’s teaching.

  Thereupon the Buddha explained how the false perception of the eyes worked. “Ananda, it is the eyes, not the intrinsic perception of Mind, that is subject to false mistakes. A man with sic
k eyes sees lamp halo but it is not his undisturbable Essential Mind that developed the halo, it is his brain-mind discriminating according to the eyes that are sick. In the same way, healthy eyes see imaginary balls and traveling blossoms in empty space. So you will know, it is because eyes are naturally invested with false perception of sight that everything that you see with your eyes is a false ripple. This has been so with eyesight since beginningless time; the very fact that you have eyesight is part of your Karma, your inheritance from ignorant deeds done elsewhere.

  “But Ananda do not be disturbed. Since it is just a matter of time that you will shed this eyesight, then you have already shed this eyesight.

  “Ananda, not only the sense organ known as your eyes, but the other five sense organs of ears, nose, tongue, body, and brain, are by nature false and fantastic and continue to fool you as you live and breathe.

  “Let me show you how all six organs work to delude you and make you forget the bright, perfect, mysterious, divine Emptiness of your true and Essential Mind.

  “When you look at empty space in the day sky, you immediately begin to see imaginary little balls and traveling blossoms; other strange sights such as particles of the sun’s burning energy can be seen coming on and off like little lights, but these cosmic particles seem to belong to the sun’s energy; but where do the imaginary blossoms have their source? Ananda, they are false and fantastic appearances pure and simple. And why? Because if these imaginary blossoms belonged to the eyesight naturally they would have the power of seeing, they would be like your eyesight and being out there in plain view of your eyes you could see yourself with them. Or if, then, they belonged to empty space, they would be coming from and going somewhere else in empty space and hiding in empty space and so you could no longer say that it was empty space. Be sure, it is empty space, and by looking, perception was roused from dreamless sleep in the deeps of Essential Mind, and the seeing of sights was made manifest. Ananda, the imaginary blossoms are indications of the sick condition of morbid mist which we call ‘good eyesight’ and which has been instrumental in making sentient beings pitiful dupes of false sights since beginningless time.