Although people have a self and are selfish, evil is not real either. So an evil person can also transform toward goodness; he may be evil today and gradually transform tomorrow. If he were real, if there were something real there, he would not be easy to transform. Precisely because both are empty, good and evil are both empty. Good and evil are illusory; they are empty appearances. Love is eternal—just remember that.
Whether people are good or evil, in the end they are all seeking love; they are all yearning for love. But love has always been there, enduring. We have never lost it; we simply cannot find it.
Why can’t we find it? Because we cling to appearances—that same old problem. Do not cling to the appearance of evil; do not cling to the appearance of goodness. But you have to look at this from the standpoint of the self: once you have a self, you have all these things, you cling to appearances, and it still comes from the root of the self. Only because you have a self do you acknowledge selfishness and acknowledge evil; once you see yourself as selfish, evil appears.
Fundamentally speaking, if we cannot find love, if there is no love in our hearts, then we are cruel and violent. How could someone without love not be indifferent, cold, and cruel? We are yearning; yearning shows that you are empty inside, that you have no…
If we are yearning and still hope to be loved by others, then there is none in your heart. Love has always been there; everyone has it. They simply do not believe it, just as they do not believe that they themselves are Buddha. Everyone can do it. Love is eternal.
Let us first discuss this from the angle of love, and then talk about romantic love. Those who do not understand love do not understand romantic love. This love and romantic love are two different things. Romantic love is bodily intimacy between a man and a woman. But you must first understand love. If you understand love, then you can talk in this world about romantic love, blood relations, and all kinds of friendship; in every situation, you will not act wrongly, and you will feel fulfilled. If you do not understand love, talking about all these other things is false.
The self is illusory too; our self does not exist. Why can’t we begin by changing through this understanding? Do not doubt it at first; first believe that love is there. Why doubt that this selfless love exists within you? Why doubt that the people around you have no love? Why doubt doubt itself? Why doubt this truth? This is the truth!
Most important, we begin by doubting. What is doubt? You have seen too much harm; you have seen yourself being hurt and people around you being harmed. You have seen too many evil appearances, so you conclude that love does not exist in this world. But a person who practices cultivation turns around; a true realized one turns around.
The truth is that we are Tathagatas, and love is something eternal in our hearts. Deep within every person in this world there is a sacred, beautiful, stainless love, and everyone yearns to return to that love. If someone finds this love, they are immensely rich and deeply fulfilled—and everyone is looking for it. This is not about what you possess in this world. You could change girlfriends every three days, or boyfriends every three days, and still never reach it or find it.
Everyone is searching for this. At the beginning, you have to believe it, just as you believe that you are Buddha. You have to believe that love is in every person’s heart, that everyone has a sacred, transcendent love there, free of clinging to appearances; they simply cannot find it. Everyone searches painfully, continually reincarnating and cycling through samsara… Whether they are good or evil, all their desires arise because they have become separated from this love. They can no longer feel it, they have moved farther and farther away, and so they seek to find their way back.
Once a person finds their way back, they are completely fulfilled. Then, in this world, whether they become a monastic, marry, or have children, everything else is OK; everything can be resolved smoothly, as long as they find this love—the eternal, unmoving thing.
But you must believe first. Why don’t you believe? What are you doubting? You must believe that they are transcendent, sacred, and stainless, and that everyone has this. They have no worldly appearances; there is nothing worldly in love, nothing at all—none of the bad things you imagine. They are completely perfect. This is your entry point for beginning cultivation and realization in this world. You have to believe it.
When you cling to that appearance, if you do not believe that love exists within them, you will not be compassionate. If you always believe that this love exists within them, that they have simply lost their way and cannot find it now, have changed for the worse, have done many bad things, and struggled until they could not return, then you are compassionate. You only need to guide them to find that love and let them return. Everyone can be forgiven; everyone can be met with compassion. You have to believe that it is within them.
The main point is that when you see an evil person, you stop believing that this thing exists within them; you think they are evil and do not believe in their heart. If you do not believe that there is something sacred and transcendent in their heart, how can you believe that they are Buddha?
But this point is your clinging to appearances, because this is how you are. It does not mean that you are evil; you simply believe that, because people are selfish by nature, they are evil. Because there is a self, there is selfishness; once there is selfishness, a person is evil; because there is no love, a person is ugly and violent… In fact, once you fix on this point, it becomes precisely a series of appearances—a series of appearances caused by the self. Then you acknowledge that this person has a self. That is one of your fundamental views.
You think: if he has a self, he must be selfish. And if he is selfish, he must have greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, and doubt. If he is selfish, how could he have selfless love? Without selfless love, his love is defiled; if his love is defiled, it is ugly; if it is ugly, he may become evil and violent… This is a chain of reasoning. This is the real world as you understand it, the human world as you see it. But this is not the world seen through a Buddha’s eyes; it is the world seen through an ordinary person’s eyes.
But in the Buddha’s eyes, it is wrong from the very beginning. There is no self; he is no-self. He has become lost in the self, and a series of reactions has appeared. The self itself is illusory. So whatever people do in this world, they remain lost in love and always want to find this love.
This is what I wrote at the beginning of The Heart of the Dharma Realm: everyone comes from love, and everyone only wants to obtain this love. All the bumps and collisions in this world, all our yearnings, are because we still do not know what the Dao is or what the Tathagata is.
In this world, the Tathagata manifests through love. In the human realm, the Tathagata manifests through love in a real and concrete way, so this world is very real. When the Tathagata finally manifests love, manifests this universal love, there is no trace of it; perhaps every possible way is manifesting this love. Whatever way he uses, he is guiding you back into this love, and this is humanity’s most fundamental yearning. Everyone has it.
Everyone is seeking love—look at so many young women now, in Shenzhen perhaps. Whether male or female, the hardest thing is that inwardly they feel unloved. Everyone has an unmoving love within, especially in the realm of emotion. To find this love, you must believe that everyone has it in their heart. This is a cultivation method, a way of practice, just like believing that everyone is Buddha.
Everyone is loving; they just do not know it. Everyone is loving selflessly; they simply do not know. They think they have greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, and doubt; they think they hate, think they are furious, think they are evil… In fact, they are simply loving.
This is a theoretical point, but you must first proceed this way at the level of concepts, and then practice. None of your problems are really problems; they all come from clinging to the appearance of the self at the root. If a Bodhisattva is to practice the Bodhisattva Path, if you do not believe that everyone has eternal love in their heart, how could you possibly practice the Bodhisattva Path? You have no way to liberate sentient beings.
Their evil can truly be more than you can bear, because when sentient beings’ illness flares up, it is severe; sentient beings are poisoned, and the poison cannot be undone. When the illness flares and the poison takes hold—when they really hit you—you have to run quickly. After running, you still have to come back and liberate them.
In other words, when his poison truly flares up, he recognizes no one, not even his closest family, because he has been contaminated; sentient beings are poisoned. But the more someone is like this, the more they suffer and the more exhausting their life is. And when they cycle through samsara, who knows how long it will take them to return? So the more someone is like this, the more they suffer, and the deeper your compassion becomes. Facing such a person, your compassion becomes deeper.
A Bodhisattva must first possess these qualities before being able to liberate him. If you do not liberate him, he may truly find it very hard to free himself. A person in too much pain finds it very hard to free themselves. Someone deeply trapped in emotion and suffering has no inner strength to pull themselves out; they may understand everything in theory, but asking them to let go is too difficult.
Sometimes it is easy for you to be tolerant toward someone, and easy not to hate them, but I have found that it is very hard for you to let go of what you love. Tolerance is easy; patience is easy too. But you cannot let go of the person or thing you love. In fact, if you cannot let go of what you love, you cannot let go of your habitual tendencies and desires. Then we know that some things must not be done, yet we insist on doing them, struggling and struggling within them.
As long as you keep struggling, it is hard to become clear and hard to become pure. At the beginning, we have only that much concentration. Once you struggle, you lose clarity, then become lost in it again and again—constantly lost, constantly lost… You may become clear for a few seconds, then become lost again; the poison flares again and again.
So at the beginning, we sometimes use precepts simply to make the intervals between flare-ups of your illness a little longer. Because as soon as you struggle within the affairs of life, you become lost at the beginning. Whether there is suffering or joy, good or evil, you become lost. At the beginning everyone clings to appearances because there is a self. The reason for clinging to appearances is that there is a self. And no one knows what they are really seeking in this life. Do you truly know what you are yearning for?
In fact, everyone is truly yearning for love—that thing—because we come from there; the source of life comes from there. It is a very simple need: yearning for an unmoving love. When someone has an unmoving love in their heart, they are happy even if they live in poverty. It really does not depend on whether they have money. If their heart is full of love, they are willing to live in a crude place and eat poor food; their whole body is full of love.
If we still cling to appearances, if there are the appearances of good and evil, if there is a self; if you do not acknowledge that everyone has a sacred love within, whatever someone may be, they have simply been unable to return. They are only struggling because they cannot return, and think they have been poisoned… Then we will not be able to raise hope for this world.
Because this world is too evil, everyone has a self and is selfish. You turn this way and that, and everywhere you see selfish things—how could you give rise to the aspiration to liberate all sentient beings? You are disappointed and desperate about this world; this world has no hope, humanity has no hope, and you have no hope of saving them.
But precisely when you see the truth, you know that every one of them has something sacred stored within, and everyone yearns for it. Then it is OK, because they already have it. It is OK: they have it; it only needs to emerge. As long as they have it, you can tell them, “You have it; you can find it.” OK, there is no need to search outside. Through the external world, they can gradually return to their inner selves and achieve it. Then it is OK; this world becomes full of hope.
Then, when you liberate sentient beings, you will feel gratitude, practice the Bodhisattva Path, do everything, and feel happy, because sentient beings are love by nature. If you deny this, you will become more and more desperate and lose your motivation.
Sentient beings in this era are indeed deeply poisoned, especially in the Dharma-Ending Age. When the poison flares up, they really are evil and ugly, like a dark mass from within to without, with thick clouds overhead. If you do not recognize that they are good, there is truly no way to save them. You save them wearing a gas mask—it really is like that, because you know they suffer more and hurt more.
Your view must still be clear. Once your view is clear, your inner psychological journey can break through every obstacle. Once you break through every obstacle inwardly, your energy channels can open and transform.
If you feel you cannot do it, if you feel that doing these things still requires cultivation and realization, then your faith is not yet deep. You truly have to believe deeply from the intention within, because this is how things originally are. You do not need to sit on a cushion for three years before you can understand it.
It is like this: the book is here; it is yellow; it is a book. It is simply that straightforward. Why do we doubt? Because you say, “I have not felt it yet,” or “I have not seen it yet.” But are feeling and seeing not the self’s own sensations? That thing is in your heart. It does not need to be seen or felt; it is right there.
From a compassionate view, you should see every appearance as compassionate. How could every appearance be evil? How could every appearance be selfish? How could every appearance be the self? Without selfishness and a self, how could something be evil? How could evil become human nature? They are all illusory, whether good or evil; you also know there is no absolute good or evil.
Precisely because it is illusory, evil can become good as conditions and causes change; good can become evil as conditions and causes change. You may love someone and hate them two days later; you may hate someone and, perhaps two days later, understand them and come to love them. They are always transforming into each other, so the self is illusory.
If the self is illusory, then nothing else matters, and that thing in your heart emerges. All the suffering you have experienced, everything you went through since childhood, does not matter. Because you are illusory, no one is undergoing it. No one truly wronged you; no one truly did anything to you, said “I’m sorry” to you, or truly gave you a favor.
Everything is governed by cause and effect; it is all cause and condition, dependent origination. It is only your attachment—your attachment to there being a you—that causes so many connections to appear around you. They are all illusory. The only thing that can remain with you eternally and unchangingly is that love. In this world there is only one love, there between you and everyone else. No matter what they look like to you now, they are also looking for their own love—and you have now found yours.
Your family is included. Wherever they go, they are only seeking their own love. Everyone wants to search; whatever they do, everyone is also seeking that love. They have lost their way and have not found it.
Only by letting go of the self’s sensations can you feel that love. Your mind now remembers everything you have endured and everything you have clung to, because all of that belongs to the self. There is no need for gratitude or forgiveness in it; none of these things are there. It is only an imprint, an illusory imprint; when you cling to appearances, it becomes real, though all of it is illusory.
You are not like that. You are complete in every way, endowed with everything, and filled with eternal love. You are all-capable and complete in merit; you are the Tathagata; you are a person in this world filled with love. Carry eternal love and remain in this world. The rest is not you at all; whatever remains is your illusion. Look how rich you are: you are a Tathagata complete in merit and endowed with everything, here in this world simply to manifest love. How complete, how rich.
You only need to manifest your love and gratitude, bit by bit. Whoever they are, whether they hate or love you, they are all helping you become fulfilled. They are also seeking their love; it is simply that your connection with this world is like this. Your connection with all your relatives is like this.
These connections do not mean that they wronged you in this life. Perhaps you wronged them in a previous life; cause and effect are there. You do not know what you did in a previous life. Over countless lives, perhaps you have wronged others more than they have wronged you. Everything has causes and conditions.
Why do we have the same eyes and are alike, yet our life experiences in this world differ so greatly? We created it ourselves; you created it over lifetime after lifetime. So we do not need to complain, because after learning Buddhism we know that the cause and effect of lifetime after lifetime is simply like this.
You have some imprints; there are imprints in your mind. Although you are not attached and understand it in theory, you still have imprints and traces. It is like being burned and still having a little scar. The wound will slowly heal, but your view must first be in place. Set your sensations aside for now; do not let your mind become trapped in them. Do you understand? You are Buddha. Right now you are so complete, so endowed with merit; everything is complete. The Sixth Patriarch said: “How wondrous is self-nature—it can give rise to all phenomena.”
Your energy, everything in you, cannot burst forth, and what is yours cannot emerge, only because you are trapped in your sensations, trapped in those imprints. You still care about your sensations. If you acknowledge their evil, then that evil harms you. As soon as you acknowledge it, it is hurting you. And if you acknowledge this evil and feel that they have harmed you, your self is there; your self and your selfishness are there.
I know you do not care, but you cling to appearances—you cling to the appearances of good and evil. There is no good or evil, yet you cling to both sides; you are defining good and evil. There is no good or evil, so not clinging to appearances is in your heart; there is no absolute good or evil.
Good and evil arise through dependent origination: why he is evil has its causes and conditions; why he is good also has its causes and conditions. You see only this one life. This definition of good and evil is a definition made by the self. There must be someone there before there can be good and evil. You have already affirmed that this person has a self; only with a self are there good and evil. From this view, you were already wrong from the beginning.
Your definition is wrong, and your cognition is wrong. If you can regard evil as real, why can you not regard goodness as real? Why do you doubt the goodness in this person and assume it is not good? Why do you have this doubt?
Although everyone has many scattered thoughts and a self, sometimes goodness is real. Why do you not acknowledge this goodness? Must all goodness really be false? Goodness can give rise to evil—that is no problem. But good and evil work the same way; why do you not stand on the side of goodness and affirm it, instead of affirming that evil will give rise to goodness?
There is an imprint within the sensations of your heart, and you think goodness must be false. Why do you not acknowledge this goodness? Why do you acknowledge goodness as false? We are good. Even if it comes from the self, it is still precious. Human beings are very selfish; even goodness put on as an act is rare in this world. Why will you not affirm it?
Buddhism begins by saying that one must enter through the path of goodness. Did the Buddha not know that our goodness was false? Did the Buddha not know that our goodness was selfish? It is because only from this initial false goodness can a person’s compassion and love gradually be fulfilled, and can they gradually find their way.
Do you think it is easier to find Buddha-nature through evil? Emptiness? Is it easier to find love? When you see goodness, why do you not find it lovely? Why do you think it is false? Why do you not appreciate it? Why does it have to be fake? Why does this person have to put on an act? Sometimes this false appearance does not… perhaps there are many, many reasons behind it. Evil also has many, many reasons behind it.
In fact, when people act, they are not always plotting for a long time, and there may not be much motive behind it. Some people—especially children or those who are pure—let their goodness flow out naturally. They may not have thought very much, but in that moment they were good. Why can I not affirm that?
This reminds me: yesterday I saw something online about a doctoral student moving house. She moved into a new corridor, and suddenly the lights went out that evening. She lit a candle. Suddenly, the little girl next door knocked on her door—a very young girl.
She opened the door, and the little girl said, “Auntie, do you have a candle?” She thought to herself, “I have just moved in, and this little girl has already come to borrow a candle. If she is like this on the first day, who knows what she will borrow after I have lived here longer?” So she said, “No!”
The little girl said, “I knew you didn’t have one. Mom asked me to bring you a candle. Because I knew you didn’t have one, I told Mom, and Mom said that if you didn’t have one—she was worried you might be afraid—I should bring you a candle.” This is goodness. It is that simple.
Why do adults doubt? Why, at that moment, did this doctoral student actually think that she herself was afraid the little girl would keep asking her to lend things endlessly? She was not being stingy about the candle. She simply thought: if this girl borrows a candle on her first day, perhaps tomorrow she will ask to borrow something else, and everything in the house will be lent out; she did not want to start that way.
And she doubted this world. I believe it never occurred to her that, at that moment, she should bring a candle to the person next door; she only lit her own candle.
But the first thing this little girl thought was that, on her first day in the building, the doctoral student might not have prepared a candle. She told her mother this thought, and her mother said, “Then go get a candle and take it to her. Give it a try. If she does not have one, give it to her.”
This is goodness—human goodness. Why call it false? Why are you not moved? What does our nature believe in? What, ultimately, do we believe in in this world? What have you ever believed in? If you do not believe that there is love in this world, you believe in nothing, and you cannot believe that Buddha is there. This is one small point about love that you need to make up for.
You have no essence and no personality. You say that essentially you have one thing that is love, while in appearance you have another thing consisting of habitual tendencies and desires. That is wrong again; your view is continually clinging to appearances. There is no essential you, and there is no you with habitual tendencies. You are simply that—you are the Tathagata, unmoving in suchness. What it is called does not matter. You are that one thing; everything else is false. You have one thing filled with love. Only that one thing is real; the rest does not matter and is false.
And you only need that one thing. In this life, you only need that one thing; you need nothing else. Only that one thing is what you yearn for most; only that thing can fulfill you—and you have only that thing. Each of us has only that thing. It is right there.
Everything else—realizing this and realizing that, over and over—is just a game you are playing. You have no habitual tendencies or desires, so what habitual tendencies or desires are you going to change? There is nothing real and nothing false; these are all concepts. You have one thing there, and it has never moved.
We can believe in nothing else in this world, but we must believe in love; only it is real. Love—eternal love—must be here, and we must believe it. Everything else is like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow. We have only one thing here, and it is eternal. Everyone loves you, and you love everyone. Everything in the whole world and the whole universe loves you, and you love everyone; there is no separation. You must believe this: the eternal, unchanging, unmoving thing is there.
Your parents and everyone around you are all rushing in every direction, searching for this love. They go here and there, circling the world three hundred times, and still cannot find this unmoving thing. They only need love; when they feel that this place has no love, they go looking somewhere else. They are only searching for this love, while you are fortunate enough to be the first to find it.
They think love only comes from outside, that they must obtain it from many things before they can have it, but they have forgotten that everyone has it within. If someone does not believe this, they cannot be tolerant or forgiving. If someone hurts them, they think it is hatred, not love, and they leave. In leaving, they are actually continuing to be hurt.
They do not know that the person who hurts them has love within; it is only that their poison has flared up, and they too are looking for this love. When the poison flares and they are searching for love, they cannot find it; they cling to appearances and become that way, hurting the other person.
Everyone is searching for that thing. You will find it very soon. You do not need to… The rest has no meaning, truly. It is that simple for you. You only need that one point; everything else is no longer a problem. Once you find that point, nothing else is a problem. You will know what the Tathagata is; enter through this point. You do not need to talk about Form and emptiness being not two, or sit here discussing “Form does not differ from emptiness” and “emptiness does not differ from form.” Those are all nonsense. Find that unmoving thing of yours.
Everything is like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow. There is only one thing there, and you must believe it; believing comes first. We spend most of our time still circling around “I” and “mine.” When we seek love, we mostly look for it among those connected with us. When you see a stranger, you cannot feel that love within them. Of course, you cannot bring it forth within yourself either, and you cannot see that sacred thing in their heart.
When you believe this—believe that everyone has a pure, unborn-and-undying, transcendent, sacred, beautiful, romantic love within—you know that everything they do and everything about them is seeking love, revolving around it. Then you know how deeply they are lost. If they struggle very fiercely, you know that their poison is very strong.
When you find this love, what manifests will certainly be compassion. That is compassion; compassion and love are equal. This love has nothing to do with whether there is a blood relationship or any other relationship. It has nothing to do with those things.
Only then can you speak of romantic love in this world. Only then can you marry and have children, and speak of these things. Once you understand love, you can have romantic love and parental care; love permeates all of them. The rest is simply the expression of a relationship, with love permeating it.
Only when you understand the people around you will you forgive, be tolerant, and become broad-minded. For example, try to understand every person around you who has hurt you, or whatever it may be. You know that they too are yearning for this love. Your understanding is based on this: everyone has a very pure love, an unselfish, unstained love, within. It is only because they have become identified with a self that they do not know it and cannot find it. They are in pain, running east, west, north, and south, searching.
So when you see this, you will be happy. Because you believe they are beautiful, you become tolerant and forgiving, generous, and no longer keep score. They are that sick—what is there to keep score over?
You know that every person’s mind is beautiful, not selfish and not evil. Every person’s mind is beautiful; this is their original face. We are Buddha by nature. We are beautiful, sacred, transcendent, and selfless. When each person awakens, their original face is like this, shining brightly.
Everyone is complete in wisdom and complete in merit, endowed with everything, able to give rise to all phenomena. Everyone is like this, so perfect. You are too, and so am I; everyone is. How happy you are! Yet many people are still attached to those false marks and suffering within them. They cling to false marks, you know? Believe this, and you will slowly return to your original state.
If everyone were beautiful, this world would be the Land of Ultimate Bliss. Even if someone takes a knife and kills you, you know that their heart is beautiful, because they want to return to that beauty. Everything about them is simply a matter of having lost their way, fallen ill, taken drugs, and suffered a flare-up of addiction. That is all.
For so long, why have they cycled through drug addiction? Why are they so empty? They eventually become addicted, with greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, and doubt so strong, struggling and struggling… Why? Because lifetime after lifetime they cannot return to that place; lifetime after lifetime they have been separated from love, and so the poison has become so strong. They have been separated for too long, so they are even more pitiable.
That is why so many mentally ill people, so many people suffering heartbreak, and so many people who take their own lives have only one thing in common: they feel they have lost love, deny this world, and feel that the world is evil, dark, and without hope.
All the Bodhisattvas who do not want to come out and liberate sentient beings have also clung to this appearance; they think humanity is evil, and there is evil in your heart. Human beings have no evil by nature. This is the truth—this is the truth. Human beings are beautiful; they are love. Good and evil are only distinctions. Our hearts are so perfect, pure and unstained within.
If you believe you are Buddha, why do you not believe that your heart is perfect? We are not talking about completeness now; it is perfect, it is beautiful. The good and evil you see are merely appearances you cling to; what is there is beauty. Beauty is not within those appearances; it has nothing to do with appearances or good and evil. Beauty is your heart, and your heart is beauty.
You cling to an appearance of beauty. What do you think beauty looks like? Is it goodness? Is it beauty with flaws? Beauty is something transcendent, sacred, and selfless; it is the most perfect thing the Tathagata manifests in this world. It is not within any appearance and cannot be described through any appearance.
But you must believe that every person’s heart is beautiful, and they want to return to that beauty. It is beautiful; there are no appearances within it. This is the truth, just as everyone is Buddha. You must believe it.
You have to believe in everyone’s perfection. In terms of the human realm, it is simply perfect. This is not saying that completeness includes purity and defilement; it does not. It is perfect and unstained. For now, we are speaking of one side: perfect and unstained. You keep clinging to appearances in whatever way you do.
I am not trying to cause trouble. I know you have not reached this point. This is the final, final completeness. When you emerge from making distinctions between defilement and purity, in the end you must return to the human realm. Returning to the human realm, you manifest perfection. It is that simple. Everything is perfect; within this perfection there are no appearances.
When I say “perfect,” you say that perfection may include defilement and purity, good and evil—but no. Your heart is already unstained, so it does not. Because you have not realized it, you always insist on including defilement and purity, good and evil within it. When I say “perfect,” you always say it contains yin and yang, two sides. No. You have not emptied out; you have not emptied out all appearances.
You must realize it, return, and return to reality. This is the final return. First let go, then pick it up again. Listen carefully; for now, practice in your own way, but you must believe this point. In the end, this is the final, final return. This is the one thing you are missing.
You do not believe that this world is beautiful; you must believe it. You are forever caught in opposition, saying, “Why should I believe?” “I do not even have this matter of believing or not believing; I simply live openly. I have nothing.” OK, but how do you explain anything? How do you express it? How do you communicate? Without concepts, how can you communicate?
I agree too. So what are you uncertain about? I give it a name; you do not have to give it a name, you know? The two of us are different, and that is how we are the same. I want to give it a name, so I put a label on it. You think it is fine not to label it. I also think you are fine; I do not think you are missing anything. What are you puzzled about? You think you are different from me? I put a label on it and you did not?
The truth—the truth: do you think it is an individual case or a common case? You are clinging to the truth again. What is truth? Reality, truth—why cling to these conceptual appearances? I say it is reality, and you say, “Do you mean truth? Truth is an individual case.” What are you clinging to? Truth is not that; truth is commonality, universality. You first clung to the two words “the truth.” You cling to truth, and you are clinging to the mark of written words.
I say that the entire world is a single Mote of Dust. This is reality; this is truth. Do you think that is wrong? I think the earth is a single Mote of Dust. Do you think that is wrong? That too is reality; saying it is not is also so.
In fact, you are clinging to conceptual appearances, the mark of written words. I think it is neither an individual case nor a commonality. Since there is originally no self, how could there be an individual case or a commonality? I am only prescribing medicine for the symptoms. But everyone has this illness in common; everyone generally suffers from it. Not believing this is humanity’s common illness, especially in this era.
Note: This text was prepared from a teaching video by Yang Ning. If it differs from the video, the video takes precedence. Watch the video.