Realisation by Non-Action
The extreme simplicity of the doctrines of the Maharshi and that of Huang Po, compared with the complexities of the religions into which each was born, is surely significant. This appears to some as a fault, whereas it is the very seal of their truth.
The doctrine of the Maharshi never varied over fifty years, and it had no development, demonstrating thereby the absence of intellectuality and the presence of reality. A philosophy evolves, it is an intellectual structure; the teaching of the Maharshi was merely the consignment of spiritual knowledge. And the difference between it and the doctrine of Hsi Yun is merely a difference of terminology.
When the most brilliant of his disciples died the Maharshi was asked whether this man of immense intellectual stature could have attained realisation in this life, and he replied, 'How could he? His sankalpas were too strong.' Sankalpas are desires and ambitions, i.e. affectivity and intellectuality under the sway of the ego.
If the great religions are highly complex in their developed forms - that is through intellectual elaboration and spiritual discipline - we observe little trace of either in the doctrines of their Founders. It may be difficult to sift the recorded words that may reasonably be attributed to them from those placed in their mouths several centuries later, but what appears authentic in the earliest recorded form of their doctrine has considerable simplicity, whether it be attributed to Shri Krishna, the Buddha, or Jesus.
Why, then, do men and women elaborate these doctrines to the point at which they become in many respects the opposite of that which the Founders themselves preached?
It may be that when these doctrines were understood, which may have happened rapidly, it was observed that such comprehension had little noticeable effect and did not immediately produce illumination. Since such rapid understanding, save in one case in ten thousand, is almost entirely intellectual and hardly at all intuitive, this is clearly inevitable. So the disappointed but hopeful disciples, who keenly perceived the reality (truth) of the doctrine, started elaborating techniques (philosophies and disciplines) in order to transmute their simple understanding into realisation.
But it is doubtful whether such methods can often succeed in transmuting intellectual understanding into spiritual experience, and the later teachers do not encourage us to believe that they do. Rather do they suggest that there is no method - other than intuitive comprehension itself, and the elimination of the artificial ego which stands in the way. As long as we identify ourselves with that, with our psycho-somatic apparatus, instead of with our I-Reality, we cannot possibly realise anything, for realisation is precisely experiencing that shift of identification.
But the artificial ego cannot be eliminated by an act of will, nor can discipline dispose of it, since all such attempts are within maya, i.e. on its own plane and via itself (a thief, posing as a policeman in order to catch himself, as the Maharshi put it).
The suppression of pride, desire, anger, what you will, cannot destroy their cause. A malady cannot be cured by suppressing its symptoms. That is putting the wagon before the oxen. When the artificial ego is transcended, all its manifestations will automatically disappear. For that reason discipline must be futile.
Therefore detachment is the only method, and that is attained by understanding the falsity and futility of all the things on which the ego depends for its sustenance.
Only when that state of mind is attained is the way clear for the intuitive comprehension of the I-Reality and the transcendence of identification which in a flash raises a man or a woman to consciousness on the plane of Reality.
