Evildoing and doing good are both attachment to appearances. If you do evil attached to appearances, you subject yourself to vicious circles unreasonably. If you do good attached to appearances, you suffer the pains of laborious toil unreasonably. None of this is as good as immediately recognizing the basic reality on your own as soon as you hear it.
This reality is mind; there is no truth outside of mind. This mind itself is truth; there is no mind outside of reality. Mind is inherently mindless; and there is no mindless one, either. If you mindfully try to be mindless, then minding is there.
It's just a matter of silent accord; it is beyond all conception. That is why it is said that there is no way to talk about it, no way to think about it.
This mind is pure at the source. Buddhas and ordinary human beings both have it. All living beings are one and the same body with all buddhas and bodhisattvas; it is only because of differences in their subjective thoughts that they create all sorts of activities, with their various results.
Basically there is nothing concrete in buddhahood; it is just open perception, serene clarity, and subtle bliss. When you realize it profoundly in yourself, this is directly it---complete fulfillment, with no further lack. Even if you exert yourself at spiritual exercises for three incalculable eons, going through all the stages and grades, when you reach that one instant of realization, you have just realized the Buddha within yourself; you have not added anything at all. Rather, you will see your eons of effort as the confused behavior of dreams.
This is why Tathagata said, "In supreme perfect enlightenment I have not acquired anything. If I had acquired anything, Dipankara Buddha would not have given me direction." He also said, "This truth is impartial, without high or low; this is called enlightenment."This is the mind pure at the source, impartial in respect to sentient beings, buddhas, worlds, mountains, and rivers, forms, formlessness, everything through the universe, with no image of other or self.
This mind pure at the source is intrinsically always completely clear and fully aware, but worldly people do not realize it; they only recognize perception and cognition as mind, so they are shrouded by perception and cognition. That is why they do not see the very essence of their spiritual luminosity. If they would just directly be mindless, that very essence would appear of itself, like the sun rising into the sky, lighting up everywhere, with no further obstruction.
So students of the Way, only recognizing the actions and movements of perception and cognition, empty out their perception and cognition, so their minds have no road to go on, and they attain no penetration. Just recognize the basic mind in perception and cognition, realizing all the while that the basic mind does not belong to perception and cognition and yet it is not apart from perception and cognition.
Just do not conceive opinions and interpretations on top of perception and cognition, and do not stir thoughts on perception and cognition. Do not seek mind apart from perception and cognition, either, and do not try to get to reality by rejecting perception and cognition. When you are neither immersed nor removed, neither dwelling nor clinging, free and independent, then nothing is not a site of enlightenment.
Worldly people who hear it said that all buddhas communicate the truth of mind think it means there is some special truth in the mind to realize or grasp, so they wind up using mind to search for mind. They do not realize that mind itself is the truth, and the truth itself is mind. It will not do to use the mind to seek mind, for that way you will never realize it, even in a million years. It is better to be mindless right away, and then you find fundamental reality.
It is like the story of the wrestler who was unaware that a gem had been embedded in his forehead, and he looked elsewhere for it. He went all over the place but ultimately couldn't find it, until someone who knew pointed it out to him, whereupon he himself saw the original gem as it had been all along.
So it is that people who study the Way stray from their own original mind, not recognizing it as Buddha, and wind up seeking outwardly, undertaking practices and exercises, depending on a process for realization. Even though they seek diligently for eons, they never attain the Way. It is better to be mindless right away, realizing for certain that all things are originally without existence, ungraspable, based on nothing; they abide nowhere and are neither subjective nor objective. If you do not stir errant thought, you will immediately realize enlightenment.
{The House of Lin-Chi, The Five Houses of Zen}
{Image linked/Programming by DPC}
