Hsin1

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Introduction
Page One ... Page Two ... 
Page Three ... Without Commentary ... Cleary Translation ... Shinjin-No-Mei D.T.Suzuki
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A translation known as Faith Mind by Clark is a W.I.P.
as is the original Chinese
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:::::HsinHsinMing
:::::(with commentary)
 
:THERE IS NOTHING DIFFICULT ABOUT THE GREAT WAY,
:BUT, AVOID CHOOSING!
:We suffer, at one and the same time, from excessive pride and 
:excessive humility. On the one hand, our intellect rushes in 
:where angels fear to tread. On the other hand, we are too humble 
:before the Buddhas and saints, not realizing that we too are the 
:Buddha, as the "Avatamsaka" ("Kegonkyo") declares: 
:The mind, the Buddha, living creatures, -- 
:these are not three different things. 
:Haiku are divided, rather arbitrarily, into seven sections: 
:The Season, Sky and Elements, Fields and Mountains, Gods and Buddhas, 
:Human Affairs, Animals and Birds, Trees and Flowers. 
:With all these but one, the fifth, in the petals of the barley leaf, 
:the tender smile on the lips of Kwannon, the moonlight on the valley 
:stream, the voices of insects in autumn, the coldness of winter, 
:we can see the Great Way that stretches out in every direction, 
:throughout past, present and future. 
:But when we come to man, to ourselves, it is a different story. 
:So, beneath the starry dome 
:And the floor of plains and seas, 
:I have never felt at home, 
:Never wholly been at ease. 
:The First Day of the Year: 
:I remember 
:A lonely autumn evening. 
:~ Basho ~ 
:Scattering rice too, 
:This is a sin: 
:The fowls are fighting each other. 
:~ Issa ~ 
:In "The Sphinx", Emerson tells us: 
:Erect as a sunbeam, 
:Upspringeth the palm; 
:The elephant browses, 
:Undaunted and calm. 
:But man crouches and blushes, 
:Absconds and conceals; 
:He creepeth and peepeth, 
:He palters and steals. 
:In other words, Sengtsan, in declaring that the Way in not 
:difficult, is flatly contradicting the experience of mankind both 
:in regard to the complexities of ordinary life and the perception 
:of the natural poetry of apparently unpoetical things. 
:His meaning is faintly adumbrated by the well known verse of Yamazaki 
:Sokan, d. 1553, included in a collection of poems he made called 
:"Inutsukuba": 
:How I wish to kill! 
:How I wish 
:Not to kill! 
:The thief I have caught 
:Is my own son. 
:This corresponds to the English proverb, 
:He who follows truth too closely, will have dirt kicked into his face. 
:It is the very search, and the excessive zeal of it, which causes the 
:truth to disappear. In our hot grasp the truth wilts away. 
:There is no one 
:Who dyes them, 
:But of themselves 
:The willow is green, 
:The flowers red. 
:If we just remain quiet, and live in all simplicity, no problems arise. 
:Were I a king, pensively 
:Would I pace the corridors of the palace. 
:The path I walk goes through the pine-trees; 
:The sea is blue, a butterfly flits by. ~ Miyoshi Tatsuji 
:Sengtsan attributes all our uneasiness, our dissatisfaction with 
:ourselves and other people, our inability to understand why we are 
:alive at all, to one great cause: choosing this and rejecting that, 
:clinging to the one and loathing the other. 
:There is a profound saying: 
:The flowers fall, for all our yearning; 
:Grasses grow, regardless of our dislike.
 
:Other verses that express this fact of the life that comes from 
:the death of self and its wants and distastes, are the following: 
:Just get rid 
:Of that small mind 
:That is called "self", 
:And there is nothing in the universe 
:That can harm or hinder you. 
:How delightful it is 
:To make all space 
:Our dwelling place! 
:Our hearts and minds 
:Are perfectly at ease. 
:D.H.Lawrence says the same thing in "Kangaroo": 
:Home again. But what was home? The fish has vast ocean for home. 
:And man has timelessness and nowhere. "I won't delude myself with 
:the fallacy of home", he said to himself. "The four walls are a 
:blanket I wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to 
:sleep". 
 
 
:ONLY WHEN YOU NEITHER LOVE NOR HATE
:DOES IT APPEAR IN ALL CLARITY
:There is love and Love, but only hate; there is no such thing as 
:Hate. In Love is included that which might be called Hate, what 
:Lawrence calls "the dark side of love". In so far as we love, in 
:the sense of being attached to a thing, we hate. In so far as we 
:Love, whether it be with pain or joy, the Way is walked in by us, 
:we are the Way. Ryoto, a pupil of Basho, says: 
 
:Yield to the willow 
:All the loathing, 
:All the desire of your heart. 
:Another didactic verse is the following: 
:In my hut this spring, 
:There is nothing, 
:There is everything. 
:~ Sodo ~ (1641-1716) 
 
 
:A HAIR'S BREADTH OF DEVIATION FROM IT, 
:AND A DEEP GULF IS SET BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH.
:A miss is as good as a mile. The slightest thought of self, that 
:is, by self, and the Great Way is irretrievably lost. A drop of 
:ink, and a glass of clear water is all clouded. Once we think, 
:"This flower is blooming for me; this insect is a hateful 
:nuisance and nothing else; that man is a useful rascal; that 
:woman is a good mother, and she must therefore be a good wife", 
:-- when such thoughts arise in our minds, all the cohesion 
:between things disappear; they rattle about in a meaningless and 
:irritating way. Instead of being united into a whole by virtue of 
:their own interpenetrated suchness, they are pulled hither and 
:thither by our arbitrary and ever-changing preferences, out whims 
:and prejudices. We suppose this particular man to be a Buddha, 
:ourselves to be ordinary people, this action to be charming, that 
:to be odious, and fail to see how "All things work for good" 
:(Romans VIII, 28). In actual fact, Heaven and Earth cannot be 
:separated; one cannot exist without the other. 
:Together they are the Great Way. 
:The two points to bear in mind are first the nearness of the Way 
:and second, its corollary, the fact that we and the Way are not 
:two things. It seems so far that we can never attain to it: 
:Far, far from here 
:Is the Heavenly Land, 
:A million million miles away; 
:We can hardly get there 
:On just one pair of straw sandals. 
:But as Ikkyu punningly says: 
:Paradise is in the West; 
:It is in the East also. 
:Look for it in the North 
:That you came through, 
:It is all in yourself (the South). 
:[There is a pun on the Japanese words 
: *minami*, south, and *mina mi*, all oneself.]
:The moment you place your happiness in the fulfillment of any want 
:or wish, that is, outside yourself, outside the Way, in anything 
:but the thing as it is, as it is becoming, at that moment your 
:balance is lost and you fall straight from Heaven to Hell. 
:Things are one; things are many. The intellect cannot grasp these 
:two simultaneously, but experience can, if it will. If we fall, 
:only by a hair's breadth, into the error of supposing that we are 
:different, weariness and envy and triumph and shame and fear 
:succeed one another in an endless train. We must be in the 
:condition that Paul describes: 
:Who is weak and I am not weak? 
:Who is offended and I burn not? (Corinthians, XI, 29) 
:If this state could only be attained, we can say of man with 
:Matthew Arnold in "A Summer Night": 
:How boundless might his soul's horizons be, 
:How vast, yet of what clear transparency.
 
:IF YOU WANT TO GET HOLD OF WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE,
:DO NOT BE ANTI OR PRO ANYTHING.
:Since the Great Way is one, it is impossible for us to be for 
:this, and aiding that which needs no aid. There is a certain 
:current, a Flow of the universe. We may swim with it or against 
:it, float in the middle of the stream or stagnate in a 
:back-water, but nothing we can do will accelerate or retard that 
:Flow. Yet his Flow is not something separate from ourselves; it 
:is our own flowing; we are not corks bobbing up and down on a 
:stream of inevitability. It is not as Fitzgerald says: 
:The Ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes, 
:But Here or There as strikes the Player goes. 
:Or rather, it would be better to say that this is true, and that 
:Henley's words are equally true, not in alternation but 
:synchronously: 
:I am the master of my fate; 
:I am the captain of my soul. 
:This submergence and assertion of self, this living fully without 
:taking sides which Sengtsan urges upon us, is the poetical life. 
:The unpoetical life is of two kinds. First, by aversion, we live 
:in a limited world, a half-world. Second, by infatuation, we 
:exaggerate, sentimentalize, weary by repetition.
 
:THE CONFLICT OF LONGING AND LOATHING, 
:THIS IS JUST THE DISEASE OF THE MIND. 
:Something arises which pleases the mind, which fits in with our 
:notions of what is profitable for us, -- and we love it. 
:Something arises which thwarts us, which conflicts with our 
:wants, and we hate it. So long as we possess this individual 
:mind, enlightenment and delusion, pain and pleasure, accepting 
:and rejecting, good and bad toss us up and down on the waves of 
:existence, never moving onwards, always the same restlessness and 
:wabbling, the same fear of woe and insecurity of joy. So 
:Wordsworth say, in the "Ode to Duty": 
:My hopes must no more change their name. 
:In addition, the mirror of our mind being distorted, nothing 
:appears in its natural, its original form. The louse appears a 
:dirty, loathsome thing, the lion a noble creature. But when we 
:see the louse as it really is, it is not merely neutral thing; it 
:is something to be accepted as inevitable in our mortal life, as 
:in Basho's verse: 
:Fleas, lice, 
:The horse pissing 
:By my pillow. 
:It may be seen as something charming and meaningful as in Issa's haiku: 
:Giving the breast, 
:While counting 
:The flea-bites. 
:There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical about 
:the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for 
:the latter is full of life and warmth and energy. 
:The "Vaipulya-mahavyuha Sutra" says: 
:The lotus arises form the mud, but is not dyed therewith. 
:This is expressed less ambitiously in the following waka: 
:Just get rid of 
:The mind that thinks 
:"This is good, that is bad", 
:And without any special effort, 
:Wherever we live is good to live in. 
:Quite devoid of sententiousness or literary ambition, with no 
:longing or loathing, Basho's verse on the mountain violets: 
:Coming along the path, 
:There is something touching 
:About these violets. 
 
:NOT KNOWING THE PROFOUND MEANING OF THINGS,
:WE DISTURB OUR (ORIGINAL) PEACE OF MIND TO NO PURPOSE.
:When we are in the Way, when we act without live or hate, hope or 
:despair of indifference, the meaning of things if self-evident, 
:not merely impossible but unnecessary to express. Conversely, 
:while we are looking for the significance of things, it is 
:non-existent. Our original nature is one of perfect harmony with 
:the universe, a harmony not of similarity or correspondence nut of 
:identity. The "Tsaikentan" ("Seikontan") [By Hung Yingming. fl. 
:1600 A.D. A compound of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.] 
:says: 
:The mind that is free form itself, -- why should it look within? 
:This introspection taught by Buddha only increases the 
:obstruction. Things are originally one; why then should we 
:endeavour to unite them? Chuangtse preached the identity of 
:contraries, thus dividing up that unity.
 
:PERFECT LIKE GREAT SPACE, 
:THE WAY HAS NOTHING LACKING, NOTHING IN EXCESS. 
:Without beginning, without end, without increase or decrease, the 
:Great Way is perfect, like a circle, with nothing too small in 
:the smallest thing, nothing too large in the largest. And this 
:perfection in the dew-drop and in the solar system we are 
:enabled to see, we are driven to see, by the perfection in 
:ourselves. Beyond all this confusion and asymmetry there is a 
:deep harmony and proportion without us and within us that 
:satisfies us when we submit to it, when we take it as it is, but 
:can never be perceived or conceived intellectually. This supreme 
:Form of Things is called "Formlessness" in the "Hannyashingyo": 
:All things are formless, without growth or decay, without purity 
:or sin, without increase or decrease. 
:In poetry the three are expressed as follows: 
:Age cannot wither her not custom stale 
:Her infinite variety. 
:("Anthony and Cleopatra", II, 2) 
:The young girl 
:Blew her nose 
:In the evening glory. 
:~ Issa ~
:The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; 
:the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall. 
:(Bacon, "Of Goodness") 
:In poetry as in life, too much soon wearies. This is why we turn 
:to Virgil, to Chaucer, to Basho. The circle expresses this 
:moderation however large or small it may be. In the Oxherding 
:pictures used in Zen, it portrays serenity. The circular mirror 
:is used in Shinto. Emerson has an essay on Circles.
:TRULY, BECAUSE OF OUR ACCEPTING AND REJECTING, 
:WE HAVE NOT THE SUCHNESS OF THINGS. 
:Our state of mind is not to be fatalistic, saying of bad things, 
:"It can't be helped", and of good things, "What difference does 
:it make?" It must be to want what the universe wants, in the way 
:it wants it, in that place, at that time. This wanting *is* the 
:Way, this wanting *is* the suchness of things; there is no Way, 
:no suchness apart from it. 
:The suchness of things is what the poet is looking for, listening 
:to, smelling, and tasting. And in so far as he and we listen and 
:touch and see, the suchness has an existence, a meaning, a value. 
:Unless we taste the world, it is tasteless; it is void of 
:suchness. But this tasting is not to be a choosing, tasting some 
:and not tasting others. Hung Yingming, following Chuangtse, and 
:using almost the same words as Sengtsan, says: 
:All the things in heaven and earth, all human emotions, 
:all the things that happen in the world, when looked at 
:by the unenlightened eye, are seen as multifarious and 
:disparate. When viewed by the Eye of the Way, all this 
:variety is uniformity; why should we distinguish them, 
:why accept these and reject those?
 
:NEITHER FOLLOW AFTER, NOR DWELL WITH 
:THE DOCTRINE OF THE VOID. 
:We are not to be beguiled by the senses, by the apparent 
:differences of things. 
:Rain, hail and snow, 
:Ice too, are set apart, 
:But when they fall, -- 
:The same water 
:Of the valley stream. 
:On the other hand, we are not to fall into the opposite error of 
:taking all things as unreal and meaningless. This is the basis of 
:much of the poetical thinking of Swinburne, of Shelley and Byron. 
:It tinges the poetry of Matthew Arnold, Clough, Christina 
:Rossetti. It is the basis of all passive, quietistic thought. 
:Both these extreme views are wrong; Yungchia describes the 
:position in the following way: 
:Getting rid of things and clinging to emptiness 
:Is an illness of the same kind; 
:It is just like throwing oneself into a fire 
:To avoid being drowned. 
 
:IF THE MIND IS AT PEACE,
:THESE WRONG VIEWS DISAPPEAR OF THEMSELVES. 
:Dogen has a waka: 
:Ever the same, 
:Unchanged of hue, 
:Cherry blossoms 
:Of my native place: 
:Spring now has gone. 
:Here the eternal and temporal, the unchanged and changing are 
:one, because the flowers are allowed to be the same colour as 
:always; they are allowed to fall as always. The flowers are not 
:separated, in their blooming and in their falling, from the poet 
:himself, nut neither is it a dream world, an eternal world where 
:all is vanity. It is a world of form and colour, of change and 
:decay, yet it is beyond time and place, a world of truth. A verse 
:by Gyosei Shonin, 
:All the various 
:Flowers of spring, 
:Tinted leaves of autumn, 
:Tokens in this world 
:Untainted with falsity. 
:The ordinary world and the world of reality are here one; life 
:and death are Nirvana. The great mistake of life and of poetry 
:is the desire to get away from things, instead of getting into 
:them, escaping form this world into the dream world. Yet even 
:this world of day-dreams, of escapist poetry, Wagnerian music 
:and pictures of Paradise, is also a way of life, is also, when we 
:realize it, the Great Way. Thus it is again that enlightenment is 
:ignorance, salvation is damnation, Heaven and Hell are one self 
:place.
 
:WHEN ACTIVITY IS STOPPED AND THERE IS PASSIVITY, 
:THIS PASSIVITY AGAIN IS A STATE OF ACTIVITY.
:The modern theories of repression may be taken as an example of 
:the meaning of this verse. When we thwart nature, suppress our 
:instincts, control our desires, the energy thus restricted and 
:yet augmented is still active, and may at any time burst forth 
:with volcanic force in some unsuspected direction. 
:Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.
:In the poetic life precisely the same thing happens. Only the 
:charming, picturesque aspects of nature, only innocuous creatures 
:are described. 
:But this is only one half of life or less; this is not the Way at 
:all. But all day and every day, Nature is giving us all kinds of 
:experiences, ghastly as well as pleasant. Germs of disease are 
:attacking us, wives are unfaithful, children ungrateful, the 
:cesspool awaits us, cats catch mice, and men kill one another. In 
:tragic drama, a great deal of this is expressed, but in general 
:poetry, vast tracts are omitted. A glance at the list of subjects 
:for Haiku [See the author's "Haiku", four vols.] shows us how 
:limited they are. Here and there a snake shows its head, a 
:dustbin or a corpse appear, but these are rare until we come to 
:modern times. 
:But whatever the subject may be, there must be what Wordsworth 
:calls "a wise passiveness", that is, an active rest, such as we 
:find described in the following haiku: 
:I came to the flowers; 
:I slept beneath them; 
:This is my leisure.
: ~ Buson ~
:In regard to everything, the double, compensatory use of things 
:must never be lost sight of. In summer, we like airy, spacious 
:rooms. but the ceiling is low and the walls press in on us. Let 
:us bear it gladly: 
:My hut has a low ceiling: 
:What happiness, 
:In this winter seclusion!
: ~ Buson ~
:"Every ceiling is a good ceiling", not merely sometimes, but 
:always, for this means that it is good by the mere fact of being 
:what it is. And what is it? It is a no-ceiling, it is nothing, it 
:is everything, it is what we make it, -- and yet it is a ceiling,
:and a low ceiling at that, in all the four seasons, hot in summer, 
:snug in winter.
 
:REMAINING IN MOVEMENT OF QUIESCENCE,
:HOW SHALL YOU KNOW THE ONE? 
:Not only movement and quiescence but enlightenment and illusion, 
:life and death and Nirvana, salvation and damnation, profit and 
:loss, this and that, -- all these are our lot and portion from 
:moment to moment, if we do not realize that the Great Way is one 
:and indivisible however we delude ourselves that we have divided it.
 
:NOT THOROUGHLY UNDERSTANDING THE UNITY OF THE WAY, 
:BOTH (ACTIVITY AND QUIESCENCE) ARE FAILURES. 
:In other words, mere activity, activity without quiescence, mere 
:quiescence without its inner activity, are no good, neither has 
:its proper quality and function. Freedom is impossible without 
:law, man is nothing without God, illusion non-existent except for 
:enlightenment, this is this because that is that. ut freedom and 
:law, illusion and enlightenment, this and that are two names of 
:one thing. Unless this is realized (in practical life) none of 
:these is its real self. This is not this until and unless it is 
:that; only when the two are one are they really two. 
:In practical life, this means that the composure we feel at home 
:among our family, is only an illusion that is broken when we go 
:out into the world and meet with vexation and disappointment, 
:becoming irritated and depressed. Our activity when playing chess 
:is not the true activity, as we see when we are beaten and our 
:opponent's face and voice become hateful to us. It lacks the 
:balance that preserves the mind from spite though we properly 
:enough feel gloomy at losing. 
:In the poetical life it is equally important that we realize, 
:through each all of the senses, that true diversity is the unity. 
:Even in the scientific world, the nature, for example, of a 
:many-legged caterpillar is only understood when we know it is a 
:six-legged insect. The nature of feathers, skin, nails, scales, 
:and so on is perceives when we find that they are all one thing. 
:The poet delights is all the many names of things, because he 
:knows in his heart that as Laotse said,
:The name that can be named is not an eternal name. 
:All the various 
:Difficult names, -- 
:Weeds of Spring.
: ~ Shado 
:More specifically referring to the present verse of Sengtsan, we 
:may note that the poet has to regulate his creative and receptive 
:functions, that is, to unify them, otherwise the true fruit of 
:each will be list. On the one hand we get the effusions of 
:Swinburne, of Keats and Shelley, with their kaleidoscope of 
:words; on the other, the didactic and descriptive verses that 
:have nothing of the author in them, only the outside and shell of 
:things. A great many haiku suffer from the absence of the life of 
:the poet himself, whose abnegation is excessive, for example: 
:The thatcher 
:Is treading the fallen leaves 
:Over the bed-room.
: ~ Buson ~ 
 
:IF YOU GET RID OF PHENOMENA, ALL THINGS ARE LOST;
:IF YOU FOLLOW AFTER THE VOID, YOU TURN YOUR BACK 
:ON THE SELF-LESSNESS OF THINGS. 
:In this translation, the first is taken as things as they 
:appear to us, the second as Real Things; the first as 
:Emptiness, unreality, the second as the Real Self-less Nature 
:of things. If we suppose that all things are illusion, that 
:everything is meaningless in the ordinary sense of the word, we 
:are misunderstanding the doctrine that all is mind, and losing 
:our grasp on the reality outside us. The difficulty is to hold 
:firmly in the mind the two contradictory elements. 
:In the early morning we work out into the garden and see a spider 
:finishing its web. With skill and assiduity all is completed, and 
:it sits in the centre, a thing of beauty with its duns and deep 
:blue of arabesque designs. A butterfly flits by, drops too low 
:and is immediately struggling in the mesh. The spider, though not 
:hungry, approaches, seizes it in his jaws and poisons it. He 
:returns to the centre of the web, leaving a mangled creature for 
:a future meal. A nation conquers the then known world and 
:organizes it with intelligence and ability; a great man appears, 
:is caught and nailed to a cross, a spectacle for all ages and 
:generations. These two examples are identical, despite the 
:addition of intelligence, morality, and religion to the second. 
:Both are to be seen exactly in the same way though with differing 
:degrees of intensity. Whether your children are killed by God 
:(allias an earthquake) or by God (allias a robber) or by God 
:(allias old age) the killing is to be received in the same way. 
:One's attitude to the earthquake and to the robber as such is 
:different, since these two things are intrinsically different. 
:In the poetical attitude we must have the same lack of censure. 
:Our response to things must be similar to that of Maupassant, 
:Somerset Maugham, D.H.Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, in so far as they 
:have no hatred for the villains or love of the heroes.
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Introduction
Page One ... Page Two ... 
Page Three ... Without Commentary ... Cleary Translation ... Shinjin-No-Mei D.T.Suzuki
----
A translation known as Faith Mind by Clark is a W.I.P.
as is the original Chinese
----
Category:-ts-