Surangama Sutra Exposition
by Living Buddha Lian Sheng, Grandmaster Sheng-Yen Lu
After the Buddha’s explanation, what do you think, do mountains, rivers, and the great earth truly exist?
“It is like a person with clouded eyes seeing flowers in the sky: once the eye problem is cured, the flowers vanish. Suppose a foolish person, in that very space where the flowers vanished, waits for the flowers to reappear. Purna, observe this person—is he foolish or wise?”
Purna said,
“Originally, there were no flowers in the sky; they arise and cease through false seeing. To see flowers vanish from the sky is already inverted thinking. To then demand that they reappear—this is truly madness and folly. How could one even ask whether such a mad person is foolish or wise?”
The Buddha said,
“As you understand this, why then do you ask whether the wondrous awareness and luminous emptiness of the buddhas and tathagatas could again give rise to mountains, rivers, and the great earth? It is like gold ore mixed with pure gold—once the gold is fully refined, it will never again become mixed. Or like wood turned to ash—it will never become wood again. The enlightenment and nirvana of the buddhas and tathagatas are just so.”
A deluded person is likened to someone with an eye problem who sees flowers in the sky. Claiming to see the flowers disappearing from the sky is already delusion; demanding that they reappear is sheer madness. To question whether such a person is wise or foolish is even crazier.
Human life is so fleeting. In the eyes of heavenly and asura beings, humans are as if born in the morning and dead by night—or even born and dead within the hour. What, then, is there to cling to? Youth and appearance? Land and territory? Property, power and prestige? All are utterly transient.
Only a thin wall separates the human and the asura realms. Constant struggle and conflict pervade the asura world, and the same is true in the human world.
According to the Surangama Sutra, everything—mountains, rivers, the great earth, life itself, as well as greed, anger, delusion, killing, stealing, and desire—arises from deluded thoughts. So then, do mountains, rivers, and the great earth truly exist?