88The Surangama: Not Seeing楞嚴不見

Introduction 示眾

有見有不見，日午點燈；無見無不見，夜半潑墨。若信見聞如幻瞖，方知聲色若空花。且道：教中還有衲僧說話麼？

There's seeing and not-seeing: a lamp lit at high noon. There's no seeing and no not-seeing: ink splashed at midnight. Once you trust that everything you see and hear is a film over a sick eye, you finally know that sound and color are flowers in empty air. So tell me: anywhere in the scriptures, does a Zen monk ever once speak?

楞嚴經云：「吾不見時，何不見吾不見之處？若見不見，自然非彼不見之相；若不見吾不見之地，自然非物，云何非汝？」

The Surangama Sutra says: When I am not seeing, why don't you see the place where I am not seeing? If you could see my not-seeing, that plainly isn't the not-seeing itself. And if you can't see the ground of my not-seeing, then it isn't a thing at all — so how could it be anything but you?

Verse 頌

滄海瀝乾，
太虛充滿。
衲僧鼻孔長，
古佛舌頭短。
珠絲度九曲，
玉機纔一轉。
直下相逢誰識渠，
始信斯人不合伴。

The vast ocean wrung dry,
empty space packed full.
The monk's nostrils run long,
the old Buddha's tongue falls short.
A thread of pearls strung through nine bends,
the jade loom turning once.
Meet it head-on: who knows what it is?
Now you trust this one keeps no company.

Pointer

This comes straight from the Surangama Sutra, with the Buddha pressing on what "seeing" actually is. Ordinary logic says: I see things, so seeing is something I aim at objects out there. The Buddha inverts it. He points to "not-seeing" and dares you to spot it, and you can't, because there is no object out there to find. Seeing is not a beam you point; it is you all the way down, with no seam between watcher and watched. The intro drives the same nail, that what you see and hear is like a smudge drifting across a sick eye, so you stop treating sights and sounds as solid things to chase. The whole bind is taking sight as a transaction between a self and a world that were never two. The same sutra furnishes the question that closes this collection (case 100), where mountains and rivers "suddenly arise" from the originally pure.