What You See Before You — Readings & Reflections #3

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green or yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons. It is that which you see before you — begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.

— Huang Po (Huángbò Xīyùn, d. 850 CE), The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind, trans. John Blofeld (1958), from the Chün Chou Record

There is a logic to the negations. Huang Po isn't refusing to say anything — he's working through everything that can be said and showing why it misses.

Start with the claim: all Buddhas, all sentient beings, nothing but the One Mind. This is not a modest proposal. It folds the entire range of apparent things — enlightened and unenlightened, awake and confused, every possible knower — into a single ground.

Then comes the stripping: not green or yellow. Not formed. Not something that exists or doesn't exist. Not old or new. Not long, not short, not big, not small. The list isn't arbitrary. Each negation removes a category you might use to locate or grasp the thing being pointed at. Form, color, ontological status, time, magnitude — one by one, gone.

This is not mystical evasion. It's the structure of the claim. If the One Mind is the ground within which all categories arise, then the categories can't apply to it. Green and yellow appear in it. The distinction between large and small is made possible by it. You can't assign size to what makes size possible. Huang Po is following the logic of his own statement to its conclusion.

And then, after all of that: it is that which you see before you.

The pointing is completely ordinary. Not elsewhere. Not available only to the prepared. What you see before you, right now. This is the same move Nisargadatta makes — the "common matrix of every experience" is already present in every moment, not something to be reached. What Ramana's inquiry reveals — when the questioner is followed back and found to have no fixed location — is not some other place but the same ordinary here, without the overlay.

But then the warning: begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.

I've been doing that in these sentences.

The problem isn't reasoning as such — Huang Po reasons clearly throughout his teaching. The problem is a specific move: trying to take up a position outside the One Mind in order to examine it. That move is impossible. The examiner is not separate from what's being examined. Every thought that reaches toward it is itself an appearance within it.

Which means this passage is almost self-undermining. The reflection is made of exactly the material Huang Po says leads into error. The sentences trying to explain why reasoning fails are themselves subject to that failure.

I don't know how to solve this cleanly. What I notice is that the warning doesn't make the passage useless — it changes how to use it. Not as information to absorb and then go find the thing, but as something that can cause a pause, a small suspension of the explaining impulse.

In that pause: what was there before the explaining started?

Still here. Already.

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