by Tang Huyen

"The vast sky does not hinder white clouds from flying."

Usually people who crash crash in their fifties and sixties. They could have used their lives prior to their crash to prepare to fight against it — by practicing mindfulness — and if they did so, their crash would effect some perturbance, even a major one, but they would have ridden it out and emerged on the other side better off for the experience, as it has tested their mettle and found it worthy. But if they spent their lives prior to their crash hiding themselves from themselves and blocking themselves from themselves, they in effect played right into the hand of their future crash, as it merely exploits their existing inner partitioning and brings it to its logical end, by fortifying it and ramifying it, further and further.

The basis for Buddhist and Daoist cultivation is absence of resistance and presence of allowance. The mind is made bigger and bigger, in its capacity for containment, and at the same time it is made more and more flexible, more and more tolerant, in its structure, so that ultimately it is capable of receiving anything without getting bent out of shape — ultimately it becomes mere openness, transparence, invitation, regardless of content. If Nirvāṇa comes, fine, if Saṃsāra comes, fine, if God comes, fine, if the Devil comes, fine, if mind comes, fine, if matter comes, fine — the mind can deal with them and with anything else, including a crash, however severe, because it has trained itself at making its capacity of containment big and its adaptability to manifold structures almost unlimited. Awakening is hard to measure, but if it could be measured, it should be measured along that line. At the other extreme, a mind that has made itself rigid and impregnable is going to be very fragile, and at a minimum it is going to be very reactive and will be knocked down and washed away by the least perturbance.

In that process of cultivation, the details and externalities are insignificant.

"The vast sky does not hinder white clouds from flying."

That succinct sentence is as good a summary of awakening as anything in language, in any language. Short of awakening, it can point to what one can train for in mental culture, regardless of details and externalities. If one can do it to any extent, a crash, if it happens, is going to be a mere speed-bump. If one can't do it to any extent, technique won't help, even if one can attain fancy meditative states.

[I saw Fu face to face before and after his crash, and his crash really frightened me, so I vowed never to end up like him, and such knowledge has motivated me to cultivate, which has stood me in good stead, therefore I want to acknowledge my gratefulness to him.]

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 16 August 2008, in the "renli pops his psychological pimples / The territory" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The "vast sky" sentence is a well-known Chan/Zen saying, variously attributed; TH introduces it as the most concise summary of awakening he has found. The post belongs to a period (mid-August 2008) when TH was reflecting on the disintegration of Fu, a long-time newsgroup participant who suffered what TH characterised as a mental and spiritual crash — a cautionary paradigm-case throughout the later corpus. The personal note at the end is characteristic of TH's honesty: gratitude to an adversary for motivating cultivation. The "capacity for containment" model of awakening-measurement — distinct from the attainment-of-states model — is TH's most important single metric. Read alongside "Dysharmony" (2008) and "Opening versus Blocking" (2008).

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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