FOURTH, AVOID PONDERING THINGS IN YOUR MIND, THEREBY PURGING YOUR BODIES OF DISCRIMINATORY COGNITION.¹
A single moment’s dualistic thought is sufficient to drag you back to the twelvefold chain of causation.² It is ignorance which turns the wheel of causation, thereby creating an endless chain of karmic causes and results. This is the law which governs our whole lives up to the time of senility and death.
In this connection, we are told that Sudhana, after vainly seeking Bodhi in a hundred and ten places within the twelvefold causal sphere, at last encountered Maitreya who sent him to Mañjuśrī. Mañjuśrī here represents your primordial ignorance of reality. If, as thought succeeds thought, you go on seeking for wisdom outside yourselves, then there is a continual process of thoughts arising, dying away and being succeeded by others. And that is why all you monks go on experiencing birth, old age, sickness and death—building up karma which produces corresponding effects. For such is the arising and passing away of the ‘five bubbles’ or, in other words, the five skandhas. Ah, could you but restrain each single thought from arising, then would the Eighteen Sense Realms⁴ be made to vanish! How godlike, then, your bodily rewards and how exalted the knowledge that would dawn within your minds! A mind like that could be called the Terrace of the Spirit. But while you remain lost in attachments, you condemn your bodies to be corpses or, as it is sometimes expressed, to be lifeless corpses inhabited by demons!
45. Q: ‘Vimalakirti dwells in silence. Mañjuśrī offers praise.’ How can they have really entered the Gateway of Non-Duality?
A: The Gateway of Non-Duality is your original Mind. Speech and silence are relative concepts belonging to the ephemeral sphere. When nothing is said, nothing is manifested.¹ That is why Mañjuśrī offered praise.
Q: Vimalakirti did not speak. Does this imply that sound is subject to cessation?²
A: Speech and silence are one! There is no distinction between them. Therefore is it written: ‘Neither the true nature nor the root of Mañjuśrī’s hearing are subject to cessation.’ Thus, the sound of the Tathāgata’s voice is everlasting, nor can there be any such reality as the time before he began to preach or the time after he finished preaching. The preaching of the Tathāgata is identical with the Dharma he taught, for there is no distinction between the preaching and the thing preached; just as there is none between such varied phenomena as the Glorified and Revealed Bodies of a Buddha, the Bodhisattvas, the Śrāvakas, the world-systems with their mountains and rivers, or water, birds, trees, forests and the rest.