8/6 TRANSMISSION of the LIGHT: to Vasumitra

[Seishin the Elder]

Re: 8/6 TRANSMISSION of the LIGHT: to Vasumitra

The line that went "gonnnnnnggggg" with me was from the Cook edition:

"You will receive my Dharma because it is your intrinsic nature. Not one thing is received from someone else, and not one thing is given to another."

So far in these stories of transmission I have noticed that each Master ends up telling the disciple/new master something to the effect that they have always been the same only one neede to rise up to the other and the other needed to flow down to the other. Here we read about how the disciple finds his master's head and the master finds his disciple's feet. One flows into the other, and the other and the other. It is the same Light being transmitted from the beginning, not a new light. It is just that finally the disciple can see it.

Gassho,

Seishin Kyrill

[Stephanie]

Re: 8/6 TRANSMISSION of the LIGHT: to Vasumitra

The imagery of this case calls the Sufis distinctly to mind, from the emphasis on a vessel of wine, a highly significant metaphor in Sufism, to Hixon speaking of the longing between student and teacher, master and successor, like Rumi's longing for Shams.

Rumi wrote:

Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about "what's needed."

Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it's been untied,
and is just ambling about.

The passage in Keizan's teisho that sticks out most for me is

Even if you realize that the mind is the Way and clarify the fact that the body is the Buddha, it is still an impure vessel. In that case, it violates purity. even if you understand that it existed in the past and the present, and realize that it is fundamentally complete, it nevertheless remains an impure vessel.

Even though what Keizan is pointing to is that this impurity, as Hixon writes, is "the subtle impurity of falsely perceived duality," it strikes me too that we always remain "impure" because we cannot transcend the conditions of this world. This makes me think of the koan (I think it may be from the Mumonkan) of the ox passing most of the way through the window, but only the tail won't go through. The tail remains; the vessel nevertheless remains impure. The only impurity exists in the thinking mind... but the thinking mind can never be completely discarded, at least not for extended periods of time. It is part of our natural function.

I think too of all the brilliant teachers of Dharma the world has known who nonetheless had significant flaws, ones that many would consider marks of impurity: exploitative sexual relationships, alcoholism, monetary greed. Some people conclude that people with such flaws had no realization. I do not agree. Delusion and wisdom, samsara and nirvana, must necessarily coexist. "It is still an impure vessel."

It is not that I am saying that we have some fundamental flaw we cannot overcome, some "original sin" that taints us, but that what we, in our loftiest spiritual moments, deem "impure" is a fundamental part of our humanity.

We imagine how we might be better than what we are... but if things were as sterile as they are in our transcendent spiritual fantasies, nothing would function.

This world as we know it functions on impurity. Species develop through mutation, what is a waste product to one organism is a source of food for the next. Stinky, filthy swamps, full of decay, give rise to verdant life.

If it were not for the radioactive decay of light photons in the early universe, matter would never have existed.

What is "impurity"? What is it, that some of our greatest human heroes were saddled with qualities we find distasteful?

"It is still an impure vessel."

We live on a planet changed by the waste products of our burgeoning technology, in a solar system doomed to a final death when the sun expands and dies.

We live in bodies that get sick and die, and don't do what we want them to. No matter what sorcery we use, we can only fend off our eventual decay to a limited degree. We have thoughts we don't like and do things we wish we didn't do. We don't have the discipline and grace we wish we had. We say stupid things and embarrass ourselves. Oh, how much nicer life would be if we had no such impurities.

But would it really?

If everything were in perfect equilibrium, change would never happen. Life could not exist. That one slip, that one wobble, that one spot of chemical disequilibrium, sets the entire show in motion.

We are perfectly, seamlessly, this Earth and this Universe. We are the fulmination of strange and disgusting processes from the entire span of space and time. We do not need a Pure Land because we know we cannot excise ourselves from the fabric of the Whole and plop ourselves somewhere else. "All the way to Heaven is Heaven."

Vasumitra, mad, howling, passionate, full of longing, drunk, was a holy man with a golden aura, whose cup was the Holy Grail and whose drink was the lifeblood of all creation. His golden holiness and his madness, his filth and his resplendence, coexisted. To extract his clean and holy qualities from the impure vessel of drunkenness and madness, to distill and purify... to do so would be to kill the whole being that brought forth Light into the world.

"If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too--and when they leave, they're so hard to find." -Tom Waits

Let us celebrate the absolute lack of need to remove the impurities we perceive in the world and in each other, because...

...it is still an impure vessel.