rory wrote:Sukhamanveti:
you're collapsing everything back into an undifferentiated oneness, that's a misunderstanding. Here:
"Fa-tsang interpreted the two aspects of the one mind as suchness that is absolute or unchanging and suchness that accords with conditions equating them with principle and phenomena respectively. Suchiness in it's unchanging, quiescent mode is the one pure mind; in its dynamic mode, responding to the ignorance that is the condition of sentient beings, it manifests the phenomenal world." (Stone, p.7)
" the oceanic reflection concentration or oceanic reflection of interdependent origination of the universe, refers to the clear mirrorlike mind, like the placid ocean reflecting everything at once.In this holistic awareness everything is part of everything else, so that when one is brought up all are included. The Ch'an master Ma-tsu Tao-i likened this awareness to bathing in the ocean -at once using the waters of all tributaries." T. Cleary "Entry into the Inconceivable" p. 217 footnote 25.
So as I said the Buddhas experience everything, but they are not attached.
gassho
Rory
Rory,
Awareness doesn't have to be the "quiescent" aspect of the One Mind to be nondual, since Fazang incorporated Yogācāra doctrine of the three natures into his philosophy, as Cleary mentions in his introduction to
Entry Into the Inconceivable. (For an in-depth look at the three natures, see the Yogācāra chapter in
Mahāyāna Buddhism by Paul Williams.) Only in the constructed or conceptualized nature (
parikalpitasvabhāva) does one find the duality of concepts. There is a "dynamic," undifferentiated nonduality in the nonconceptual flow of experience that is the dependent nature (
paratantrasvabhāva), which is dependent origination stripped of conceptualization. As Paul Williams puts it, the dependent nature is "beyond language." When Fazang says that a buddha perceives all things infinitely interpenetrating and containing everything else, when he says that an atom "is person and is thing, is 'that' and is 'this,' is object and is subject, is defiled and is pure, is cause and is effect, is same and is different, is one and is many, is broad and is narrow, is animate and is inanimate" and this so because "phenomenon and phenomenon are without mutual interference," he is pointing to this nonduality, he is indicating this undifferentiated experience.
Thus nonduality also applies to a Buddha's experience of all phenomena, according to Cleary. In the same treatise, Fazang writes about "the mystic merging of mind and environment," involving the "mind without obstruction" and "environment without obstruction" that "all Buddhas realize." In my copy this is on page 166. If you have Cleary's
Entry into the Inconceivable, look at his comments on this "merging" (p. 149). Cleary writes, "The mind can then
lose its boundaries of thought and merge with the environment, receiving information ranging
beyond the strictures of word and concept, reflecting myriad conditions of the environment in a mirrorlike faculty from which is born the body of knowledge." On page 166 Fazang writes of this, "In this way
object and subject merge without distinct boundaries." The Buddha's experience of the environment is beyond words and concepts. It is clearly nondual. If it were constrained by the dualism of concepts, then it could not be accomplished at all. It would be divided into subject (perceiver) and object (perceived). This is why Cleary refers to losing "boundaries of thought" before merging with the environment.
Since the Buddha's experience of all phenomena is nondual according to Cleary, it can't be used to argue that the Buddha experiences "evil thoughts."
Ed