... Chapter 21 ....... Contents ...
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| 20. To you who like to hear ghost stories |
People often ask me if ghosts really exist. Somebody who racks their brains over something like that is what I call a ghost.
It's said that the dead appear as ghosts, but that's only true as long as you have the living. When the living are dead, they wonft see any more ghosts. In Yogacara philosophy, ghosts are the tools of the living.
One person says he saw a ghost, someone else learned of somebody's death in a dream. What's all this besides individual scenes in the theatre of transmigration.
Isn't everything a hallucination? Itfs only because we don't recognize this hallucination as a hallucination that we wander around in life and death.
Everyone is dreaming. The problem is simply the differences between the individual dreams.
When you are dreaming, it isn't clear to you that you're dreaming. If somebody hits you in the face, it hurts. But this pain is also only in the dream. One dream keeps another company, that's why even a dream doesn't recognize the other as a dream.
Some underpants are hanging to dry on a branch. Somebody sees them and thinks they've seen a ghost. Maybe you're thinking that something like that hardly ever happens in reality, but when we think, "I need money," "I want to become minister," "I want to get ahead," aren't we all taking a pair of underpants for a ghost?
Everyone is talking about erealityf, but this is only a dream. It's nothing more than the reality inside a dream. Good! When people are talking about revolution and war, we think that something really special is going on, but what is it besides struggling inside a dream? When you die, you recognize your dream. Someone who doesn't put an end to dreaming before then is an ordinary person.
Someone or another wrote this when committing suicide. That which beats and that which is beaten: Both, when they fall, return to the same dirt. It's a bit late to realize this when committing suicide. It should go: Both, even before they fall, are the same dirt.
We can neither plan nor rehearse our dreams. In the same way, dharma is a dream, the teaching is a dream. A dream teaches a dream within a dream.
If somebody treats you to a meal within a dream, it's still just a dream. It doesn't have any calories.
We are fooling ourselves when we take the hallucination of the self we find in our consciousness to be our true self. The immortality of the soul which the new trendy religions are talking about is based on this hallucination of the self. The true self is the true nature of all buddhas and living beings. It dwells in the inseparability of mind, buddha and living beings.
What we call our "free will" is nothing more than our personal mind.
We go wrong when we judge good and bad out of the hallucination of our "free will".
Illusion consists of serving again and again the warmed-up leftovers of our consciousness.
Our weak point as living beings lies in the fact that we produce our own hallucinations.
All people live in perplexity and fear.
Yogacara philosophy teaches, "When inner consciousness turns, it seems as if there were two sides." Though it's only the functioning of one single consciousness, it seems as if there were a subject and object. That's what chasing after one side or running away from the other side becomes such a big deal. What strange illusions we have.
Wandering around inside your own illusions [bonno] means living your life like a sleepwalker
Even if we put on a cool face, illusions [bonno] are brewing in our heart of hearts.
A year from now, think back to the illusions that you had yesterday during zazen:
Two bulls made out of mud have disappeared fighting into the sea.
No one has seen or heard from them since.
[Master Tôzan Ryôkai]
... Kapitel 21 ....... Inhaltsverzeichnis ...