POSTHUMOUS PIECES : 20





The Great Pearl (Hui Hai) Concerning 'Time'


'There is no single thing (dharma) which can be grasped or rejected. When you cease looking on things in their temporal aspect, as having come or gone, then in the whole universe there will be no grain of anything which is not your own treasure ... Do not search for the truth with your intellects. Do not search at all. The nature of mind is intrinsically whole. Therefore it is written in the Avatamsaka Sutra: 'All things have no beginning, and all things have no end'.'



Note: 'Your own treasure', relatively an objective concept of possession, here is used to imply something like 'the absolute value of what you are'.
In relative language his revelation could hardly be clearer. We have only to apperceive it directly.


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Big Joke


As long as we go on tacitly accepting 'time and space' as veritable, anything we say or do must necessarily be nonsense metaphysically, or, more politely, just fun-and-games.

We close our eyes to them presumably because we instinctively know that their inevitable invalidity blows the whole structure of phenomenality sky-high: for nothing but 'noumenality' could survive.



(© T.J. Gray, 1968)
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