Song of the Jewel Mirror Awareness1
BAOJING SANMEIKE
Composed by Dongshan Liangjie
The teaching of thusness
Has been intimately communicated by buddhas and patriarchs;
Now you have it,
So keep it well.
Filling a silver bowl with snow,
Hiding a heron in the moonlight —
When you array them, they're not the same;
When you mix them, you know where they are.2
The meaning is not in the words,
Yet it responds to the inquiring impulse.
If you're excited, it becomes a pitfall;
If you miss it you fall into retrospective hesitation.
Turning away and touching are both wrong,
For it is like a mass of fire. just to depict it in literary form
Is to relegate it to defilement.
It is bright just at midnight;
It doesn’t appear at dawn.3
It acts as a guide for beings —
Its use removes all pains.
Although it is not fabricated,
It is not without speech.
It is like facing a jewel mirror;
Form and image behold each other —
You are not it
It actually is you.
It is like a babe in the world,
In five aspects complete;4
It does not go or come,
Nor rise nor stand.
"Baba wawa" —
is there anything said or not?
Ultimately it does not apprehend anything,
Because its speech is not yet correct.5
It is like the six lines of the double split hexagram;
The relative and absolute integrate —
Piled up, they make three;
The complete transformation makes five.
it is like the taste of the five flavored herb,
Like the diamond thunderbolt.6
Subtly included within the true,
Inquiry and response come up together.
Communing with the source and communing with the process,
It includes integration and includes the road;
Merging is auspicious;
Do not violate it.7
Naturally real yet inconceivable,
It is not within the province of delusion or enlightenment.
With causal conditions, time and season,
Quiescently it shines bright.
In its fineness it fits into spacelessness;
In its greatness it is utterly beyond location.
A hairsbreadth’s deviation
Will fail to accord with the proper attunement.
Now there are sudden and gradual,
In connection with which are set up basic approaches.
Once basic approaches are distinguished,
Then there are guiding rules.
But even though the basis is reached and the approach comprehended,
True eternity still flows.
Outwardly still while inwardly moving,
Like a tethered colt, a trapped rat —
The ancient saints pitied them,
And bestowed upon them the teaching;
According to their delusions,
They called black as white —
When erroneous imaginations cease,
The acquiescent mind realizes itself.
If you want to conform to the ancient way
Please observe the ancients of former times;
When about to fulfill the way of buddhahood,
One gazed at a tree for ten aeons,8
Like a tiger leaving part of its prey,
A horse with a white left hind leg.
Because there is the base, (there are)
Jewel pedestals, fine clothing;
Because there is the startlingly different, (there are)
House cat and cow.
Yi, with his archer's skill,
Could hit a target at a hundred paces;
But when arrowpoints meet head on,
What has this to do with the power of skill?9
When the wooden man begins to sing,
The stone woman gets up to dance;
It’s not within reach of feeling or discrimination
How could it admit of consideration in thought?
A minister serves the lord,
A son obeys the father.
Not obeying is not filial,
And not serving is no help.
Practice secretly, working within,
As though a fool, like an idiot —
If you can achieve continuity,
This is called the host within the host.
NOTES TO SONG OF THE JEWEL MIRROR AWARENESS
1. Samadhi, concentration, meditation, trance, absorption, here we render awareness because of convenience, to avoid any suggestion of paranormality. The great Baizhang, with whom Dongshan's teacher Yunyan studied for twenty years, did not use the term samadhi for the mirror awareness, which he called the source, the king, the elixir of immortality; as long as it is not disturbed by anything in any circumstances, passing through all color and sound without lingering, it is the guide; yet he said one should not remain in the state of the mirror all the time. Though one must some time return to the source, it is still necessary, as Lopu said, to 'see the king in the busy marketplace.' In Dongshan's song, he speaks of this awareness sometimes as a medicinal trance, or simply basic awareness empty letting the flow through.
2. Silver and snow, herons and moonlight - all are white, yet not the same color. This symbolizes sameness and difference, and their interfusion. Sameness, symbolized by the common whiteness, is equality, equanimity, absence of ultimate reality; in relativity can be seen the merging of sameness and difference without dIfference there can be no relation; in being dependent and conditional all are the same. Also this symbolizes absolute purity; when the mind is pure, all worlds are pure - this too is ,snow in a silver bowl'.
3. This means the same as the Can Tong Qi's saying 'right in light there is darkness ... right in darkness there is light.'
4. In the Mahaparinirvanasutra true thusness is likened to a baby in that it does not come or go, rise or stand and cannot speak.
Also this can mean complete with five senses, without conceptualization - this is the mirror trance. Ippen, the Japanese pure land saint, once said that the practice of invoking the name of the buddha to be reborn in the pure land affected the sixth consciousness; ending all discrimination of pure and impure, pleasant and painful, one realizes great bliss beyond extremes and sees the world as the field of the vow of the buddha of infinite light and life.
5. Baba wawa is to represent baby talk; the Mahaparinirvanasutra likens that which is materialized and that which is not - whatever is done becomes undone, and the whole process of doing in the infinite range of cosmoses cannot be described or compared, adequately conceived or thought. It is not doing anything because there is nothing to compare it to, nothing to indicate any direction.
6. The relative and absolute, or partial and true, are also called minister and ruler, son and father, light and darkness; Caoshan called the relative the world of myriad forms and the absolute the realm of emptiness; the relative is also called the phenomenal, and the absolute the principle. The relative within the absolute is realization of the emptiness of mind, whereby all things are emptied - thus it is the relative absolute containing the absolute relative. The absolute within the relative is the mirror awareness which is revealed by cleaning and polishing the mind by cessation and emptiness; at this point, the focus of concentration can make anything fill the universe, or make the universe into one point of awareness. Relative and absolute depend on each other, so two elements make three, adding their mutual intermingling, the source of the two. The absolute is always being expressed in the relative - this is the true absolute, but it is not always seen. Perfect comprehension of the relative grounded on experience of the absolute culminates in simultaneous realization of knowledge and complete peace and calm. At this point, Dongshan said, one 'comes back to sit among the ashes/ living this life as a wayfarer, expressing one's solidarity with the world in the vow to realize perfect enlightenment with all beings. The five flavored herb and diamond thunderbolt are images of five in one; these so-called ranks or positions, the set of five being the ultimate paradigm of dialectic and an illustration of meditational stages, are all from the same source, hence the association of five in one.
7. Dogen emphasized that practice and realization are not two separate things; the source and the process can be called absolute and relative as a device,- integration and merging refer to these this includes the road, or process itself, merging into the process, having no sense"of seeking or acquisition, thus merging into the source. This was the point of the transcendance of wisdom scriptures.
8. Mahabhijnanabhibhu, an ancient buddha mentioned in the Saddharmapundarika or Lotus scripture, sat for ten aeons on the site of enlightenment, but did not realize perfect enlightenment or attain buddhahood, even though he sat with his body and mind perfectly still. Then gods from the heavens of the thirty three celestial kingdoms built a seat for him. When he sat on the seat, other gods and goddesses rained flowers around him for ten aeons, then'still others played music for ten more eons. After ten aeons the buddha became enlightened and realized the truth. The scripture calls stillness and quiescence the ultimate nature of all things, but also an illusory citadel for those on the path to rest awhile, not an individual salvation because there is no self. The flowers and music represent the world of particulars, part of the sphere of knowledge of an omniscient buddha. Dongshan seems to use this old story with a slightly different emphasis; he recommends sitting for 'ten aeons' to make sure that there is no leaking of views, emotions, etc., when the celestial flowers begin to fall. This is consistent with the Cao-Dong saying emphasized by Dogen, 'eighty or ninety percent complete/ alluding to eternal bodhisattvahood, remaining in the causal state in this world to help deliver infinite beings to the other shore of the ocean of suffering, without craving personal liberation to the extent of willfully becoming totally extinct.
9. As seen in the Can Tong Qi, arrowpoints meeting symbolizess principle - mutual interdependence, absolute equality of dependent forces and entities. The lines before about the excellent and the inferior illustrate relativity. In buddhist science it is traditionally said that the workings of causes and effects are in fact inconceivable; we are in it, making conceptual models and devices to make use of what we can find out, but all of this is just a fragment of reality. In deep meditation one truly plunges into the unknown by not applying any way of knowing or seeing. The meeting of arrowpoints also symbolizes the meeting of minds of teacher and disciple; regardless of what preparation went before, the actual meeting is not contrived, because it is the simple agreement of two minds seeing the same one reality.
(The sayings of Dongshan have been taken from Dongshan yulu; the commentaries consulted on the Baojing sanmei ke 'song of the jewel mirror awareness' are Tenkei's Hokyozammai kimpei and Shigetsu's Hokyozammai funogo.)
Translated by Thomas Cleary in Timeless Spring: A Soto Zen Anthology