HERMETIC  - ESOTERIC - MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Hsin - Hsin Ming

By Seng - Ts'an

Third Zen Patriarch

When you try to stop activity to achieve quietude,
your very effort fills you with activity.
As long as you remain attached to one extreme or another
 you will never know Oneness.
Those who do not live in the Single Way
 cannot be free in either activity or quietude,
in assertion or denial.

Deny the reality of things
and you miss their reality;
Assert the emptiness of things
and you miss their reality.
The more you talk and think about it,
the further you wander from the truth.
So cease attachment to talking and thinking,
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

To return to the root is to find the essence,
but to pursue appearances or "enlightenment" is to miss
the Source.
To awaken even for a moment
 is to go beyond appearance and emptiness.

Changes that seem to occur in the empty world
 we make real only because of our ignorance.

Do not seek for the truth;
only cease to cherish opinions.

Do not remain in a dualistic state;
avoid such easy habits carefully.
If you attach even to a trace
of this and that, of right and wrong,
the Mind-essence will be lost in confusion.
Although all dualities arise from the One,
do not be attached even to ideas of this One.

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,
there is no objection to anything in the world;
and when there is no objection to anything,
things cease to be—in the old way.
When no discriminating attachment arises,
the old mind ceases to exist.
Let go of things as separate existences
and mind too vanishes.
Likewise when the thinking subject vanishes
so too do the objects created by mind.

An excerpt from the beautiful and inspirational small book : HSIN - HSIN MING
written by the
Third Zen Patriarch
SEN - TS'AN
and translated from the Chinese by Richard B. Clarke -
White Pine Press - Buffalo, New York.