In the following essay I will undergo a close examination of Hui Neng's Platform Sutra wherein I draw out the implications of his notions of True Nature, the three No’s, and practice. Utilizing the work of Mou Zongsan, I will examine the dialectical origins of our limited “epistemic self” from the depths of our True Nature. Subsequently, I will analysis Hui Neng’s teaching on meditation, or, as he terms it, practice, as an inner dialectical realization of our true nature within self-consciousness. Finally, in dialogue with Immanual Kant, I will draw out the aesthetic significance in regard to our true being in world.

1.) Dialectical Becoming of the Epistemic Self from Our True Nature

In his Transcendental Analysis and Dialectical Synthesis, Mou Zongsan writes

          “The highest stage of spiritual effort is that of ‘the flowing of the heavenly principle’,
            wherein spiritual effort completely manifests being-in-itself and the two merge together.
            This can be called ‘dialectical synthesis’. Looked at in this sense, the question of dialectics
            is a question of spiritual practice”

            (Late Works of Mou Zongsan, 117)

 

In other words, the principal aim of any spiritual effort is the inner work that brings about the overcoming of a rigged dualism between a formal cognizing “self”, and an extraneous objective world alienated from the life of that “self”. What Hui Neng, in the Platform Sutra, thus offers, is the very spiritual work needed to enable a return of the alienated self back to its Original Nature-- or, the dialectical realization of Original Buddhahood.

 

           Good friends, my teaching of the Dharma takes meditation

           and wisdom as its basis. Never under any circumstances say

           mistakenly that meditation and wisdom are different; they are a unity,

           not two things. Meditation itself is the substance of wisdom; wisdom

           itself is the function of meditation At the very moment when there is wisdom, then meditation exists in wisdom; at the very moment when

           there is meditation, then wisdom exists in meditation. Good friends,

           this means that meditation and wisdom are alike.

           (Platform Sutra, 135)

 

Here, quite explicitly, Hui Neng expounds that the very basis of his Dharma is the synthesis of meditation (active spiritual effort) with that of wisdom (manifestation of being-in-itself) that results in the overcoming of ruptured dualisms and the total integration of the falsely perceived split of “inner” and “outer”, “If the mind and speech are both good, then the internal and the external are the same and meditation and wisdom are alike” (Platform Sutra, 135-136).

For Hui Neng, meditation is “act” wherein wisdom is manifest; where Original Nature is brought to full illumination within the very “act of spiritual practice. More precisely, one ought to define “act” as “flow”, or that which moves uninhibited, lively, vigorous, and, most importantly, unceasingly creative, “Tao must be something that circulates freely; why should he impede it?” (Platform Sutra, 136) Therefore, the impetus for true spiritual practice is the realization of Tao in its true state of unimpeded flow, where the word “flow” signifies True reality in free-moving circulation. There are many instances wherein Hui Neng states the vigorous, creative generating flow of True Nature; for example, in passage 25 Hui Neng declares, “"Self-nature contains the ten thousand things-this is 'great.' The ten thousand things are all in self-nature" , and in passage 28,

           Because of the nature of wisdom [within man] it has been possible, therefore, to

           postulate them. If we were without this wisdom, all things would,

           from the outset, have no existence in themselves. Therefore, it is clear

           that all things were originally given rise to by man, and that all the

           sutras exist because they are spoken by man.

 

True substance, being-in-itself, is spontaneous creative generation that unceasingly bears forth the ten thousand things into existence. Yet, what is most extraordinary in the above passages, and what is most significant, is Hui Neng's identification of this ceaseless, original ground, or rather, original ocean of generative creativity, with that of our own original nature. The state of liberated humanity unencumbered by fixation, distinction, and static mentation, is, astonishingly, the original fecundate source of all-possibility. Our minds, once awakened, manifests this true reality; it merges the creative all-possibility seen from the objective side (onto-existentiating act), with the subjective side of freedom and liberation. Seen from a Western Theological perspective, Hui Neng is indicating that man, once free from illusion, from his own self limitations, is indeed the boundless spirt of the God-Head (truly an image and a likeness).

 

Yet, such realization is not simply given, nor divinely bestowed from the heights of a transcendent absolute. For Hui Neng, we are not mere passive subjects waiting on the appropriation of a revelation externally given,

 

         “Even if I see for myself I cannot take the place of your delusion; even if you see for

          yourself, you cannot take the place of my delusion. Why don't you practice for yourself and then

          ask me whether I see or not?"

          (Platform Sutra, 169).

 

The impetus of enlightenment is put squarely on the personal, untranslatable, experience of the subject in her own effort. No can take another’s place in the experience of delusion or the experience of realization. What is therefore of the greatest significance is the inner spiritual effort, the inner act, that initiates the process of dialectical synthesis of true realization, where one is awaken through effort of their own mind and can therefore “see” for themselves. The crux of realization is in practice, effort, and the proper use of one’s sentience where thought manifests it’s substance of True Reality.

 

          True Reality is the substance of thoughts; thoughts are the function

           of True Reality. If you give rise to thoughts from your self-nature,

           then, although you see, hear, perceive, and know, you are not stained

            by the manifold environments, and are always free

            (Platform Sutra, 139)

 

To accomplish this realization, Hui Neng offers his three No’s: No-Thought, No-Substance, No-Abiding. ‘No’ as used by Hui Neng is not the negation in the sense of annihilation or destruction; nor is it used in the sense of the stifling of thought to reach some pure empty state. Rather, ‘No’ is used to amend the dualisms that produces passions (Platform Sutra, 139). In No-Thought we have the negation of thought that is primarily defined as a fixation within consciousness at some point in the thinking process where flow is arrested and a thought-form is given a primary status. Thought in this regard is reified into a conceptual unit abstracted from the vital ebb and flow of consciousness, i.e., it's very source and life, and then is set up as the primary vehicle of conveying truth. Dirempted from the vital flow of consciousness, thought as concept-unit makes out the whole world (inner and outer) into its own image; it sets about the world as externalized spatial units, formally organized (by efficient cause, formal law etc.), that are to be conceptually appropriated into a general logical schema of its own organization. World and Self are thereby denaturalized and split into various dualisms where rest, space, and logical-conceptualization are privileged over flow, the cadence of time, and irreplicable aesthetic parity. Ultimately, what No-Thought seeks to cure is a sickened Self: a self split into a formal epistemological subject against an icy backdrop of an already objectivized world. Once the subject-object dualism has been stabilized, the fixations of substance and abiding enviably follow along with their needed cure of No-Substance and No-Abiding. Frozen into an objective being-there, the world becomes overtly substantialized; where conceptual underpinnings are given to the understanding of the epistemological subject, and thus becomes the domain of attachment, or, a repository of abiding.

 

Mou Zongsan says precisely this in his dialectical approach to self-enlightenment, where his Appearance and Thing-In-Itself he writes,

 

           “With the establishment of the understanding (epistemological self), the things (wu 物) in

            creative feeling (Original Nature of All-Possibility) are e-jected as “objects”, and these

            objects are henceforth appearances; no longer are they that suchness or the self-so “in

             itself”, that which is revealed and connected to by enlightenment creative feeling”

             (Late Works of Mou Zongsan, 221)

 

Just as indicated by Hui Neng, the Ten Thousand things, the entirety of the cosmos, in all its aspects, issues forth from our original nature, our true Buddha Nature. This true nature, what Mou designates as Numinous Creative Feeling, and what Hui Neng calls (amongst many other designations) in passage 47 “storehouse consciousness” is of itself completely undetermined, a totally unconditioned in-itself that is unbounded by fixity of state or form, as it is the very creative source of states and forms. Originally, the unboundedness of True Reality, our original Buddha Nature, is a dynamism of feeling and creativity, lacking in illusory dualisms that separates and discriminate items within this dynamic field. Yet, in thinking, consciousness is thus turned; where in that very turning, the dialectical movement from unbounded creativity to a stabilizing logical self, bound up with the surface of things, is initiated.

 

             “Thus the epistemic subject is what enlightened awareness becomes after going through a

              stopping up and then a projection (touying), or enlightened awareness transformed into the

              activity of epistemic discrimination (liaobie) or discursive understanding (sijie)”

              (Late Works of Mou Zongsan, 22).

 

The Epistemic subject, stopping up, discrimination, and discursive understanding: all terminological indicators of a transformation from an inner, free feeling movement within a dynamically interdependent whole, to a bounded logical construct to be grasped in concept, a true stopping up. Therefore, the entirety of the phenomenal world is the result of a of projection of conceptual objectivity onto the environing ambiance; externalizing objects partes-extra-partes, stopping up of mutual ramifying entailments and living dynamic interchanges. True Nature, once turned to this dialectical stage, is thus self-limiting, self-congealing, and self-ejecting – objectified in the very course of its mysterious inner dialect from an open creative feeling, to an enclosed, logically imbued grasping.

 

For Hui Neng it is this very turning, this dialectical movement, of the Ture-Nature-Self that gives rise to the confrontations of the natural phenomenon of the external environment (Platform Sutra, 171). It is this crucial turning point where every aspect of the phenomenal environs, as seen from the perspective of discursive understanding, is generated and substantiated. As indicated in passages 45 and 46, Hui Neng expounds his own “dialectical deduction of the categories of understanding” which condition the experience of phenomenal samsara. Here we have what Hui Neng Terms, the twelve confrontations in language and the characteristics of things:

 

              Active and material and inactive and non-material, with characteristics and

              without characteristics, within the flow of birth and death and without

              that flow, matter and emptiness (sunyata),motion and stillness, purity

              and uncleanliness, profane and sacred, monk and layman, old and

              young, large and small, long and short, and high and low.

              (Platform Sutra, 172)

 

Along with the above confrontations, Hui Neng also provides us with the six dusts and six gates of sensory intuition, “what are the six dusts? They are sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and idea. What are the six gates? They are the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind” (Platform Sutra, 171). Laid out in its entirety, Hui Neng describes exactly what Mou Zongsang calls the epistemic self, i.e., a transcendental-self confronting a phenomenal world it sensuously intuits and organizes through the categories of understanding. True Self thus becomes a shadow of its original flourishing; it becomes a formalistic mind, a conceptual mind, where by using concepts to build up a stable world, determines itself in relation to that world. What that determination entails are the separation of self in and world, or, more accurately, a separation of self from the world as noumena, as being-itself. As a self whose primary function now is formalistic thinking, what was originally free, affective, and creative has now become a procedural construction of conceptual formation, essentially cutoff from the being-in-itself of the phenomenon it abstractly construes. Thinking conceptually is therefore the primary “being” of an epistemic self, and thereby it is an essentially abiding self, fixated in thought to its conceptual constructs, dirempted from a world it “knows” only phenomenally, fettered in its attachments as one thought clings to another.

 

2.) Do not Recite, Practice.

 

              Don't rest in objective things and the subjective mind. [If you do

              so] it will be bad enough that you are in error, yet how much
              worse that you encourage others in their mistakes. The deluded man,

              however, does not himself see.

              (Platform Sutra, 138)

 

For Hui Neng, as well as for Mou Zongsan, our current “resting in objective things and the subjective” is not an intransigent fixture of our being; it is not an inescapable transcendental condition of our conscious experience. Rather, the subjective/objective polarity is but one moment in a dialect of self-transformation-- a self-transformation wrought by the inner labor of spiritual effort. As already stated above, the teaching of Hui Neng provides the effective means to assuage the blockage of overly objectivized thought, as well as our overly objectivized being and abiding in the world. “Good friends, in this teaching of mine, from ancient times up to the present, all have set up no-thought as the main doctrine, non-form as the substance, and non-abiding as the basis”. Again, we are given the Three No’s so fundamental to the teaching of Hui Neng. It is through these three No’s that the proper transformation from a limited epistemic self to a boundless self can properly take place. Non-abiding is our original Nature Hei Neng States: it is our proper mode of being, free, uninhibited, flowing like the Tao.

 

                                                            Non-form is to

                be separated from form even when associated with form. No-thought

                is not to think even when involved in thought. Non-abiding is the original

                nature of man.

                (Platfrom Sutra, 138)

 

Just as our Original nature is completely undetermined, so must our disposition in the world. Even in thought, one must have no thought; even in associating with form, one must not be bound to form; and though wedded to substance, we must be decoupled amidst substance. As stated above, The Three No’s mollify relationships conditioned by dualisms and the successive thought forms that follow from such dualisms. The Epistemic Self, whose primary activity is found in the production of discursive thinking, is a diluted self, taking it’s thought constructs as the final terminus for truth and reality. In his delusion, Hui Neng States, man has a false relation with the environment, a heterodox vison, which produces heterodox ideas that cling to one another in iron-locked step, generating the viscous cycle of passions and false views. Therefore, the Three No’s are the solvent used to ease the dualisms that condition self and world in a determinate manner -- transforming thought into the realization of our True Nature,

 

             'Thought' means thinking of the original nature of true Reality.

              True Reality is the substance of thoughts; thoughts are the function

              of True Reality. If you give rise to thoughts from your self-nature,

              then, although you see, hear, perceive, and know, you are not stained

              by the manifold environments, and are always free. 

 

Through the passage of the Three No’s, self no longer abides, nor does it think in an improper manner. Though within manifold environment, true self-nature shines through; and in hearing, perceiving, and knowing, self is no longer fixated in a linear procedure of ratiocentric deliberation, but rather a realization of one’s own true freedom within and without the Ten Thousand Things. Self-Actualization is thus a state of freedom whilst always in relation to self and world; a mobile freedom where thought is a medium of True Reality to manifest itself in ever renewing, ever surprising revelations.

 

Just as Original Nature --a nature of unceasing feeling and creativity -- proceeds freely, we to must procced freely; lest we cling to a false external environment burden by erroneous ideas. To not cling, to not be borne off on the procession of false thought, is to actively workout in practice, the manifestation of being-in-self, True Reality, or the realization of our Buddhahood. Practice is therefore a kind of tension: an active, self-conscious maintaining of our freedom in our rapport with happenings of the Everyday World. That is why Hui Neng puts so much stress in his teaching of “sitting in meditation”, where “sitting” takes on a new significance of total inward detachment, rather than the actual physical act of sitting and quieting the mind. Here, sitting and quieting of the mind takes on a more mobile, flow-like quality where no circumstance – outward or inward – obstructs our true nature,

 

                                                     In this teaching 'sitting'

               means without any obstruction anywhere, outwardly and under all circumstances,

               not to activate thoughts. 'Meditation' is internally to see

               the original nature and not become confused. 

               (Platfrom Sutra, 140)

 

“Meditation” is thus spiritual effort, where the highest form of spiritual effort is, as Mou Zongsan wrote, the free flowing of the Heavenly Principle -- the manifestation of Being-in-itself.

 

                Separation from the outside display of form, and being unstained from within; spiritual

                work, conducted under the circumstances of everyday life, that returns us to the state of

                our truest Tao, “Being 'ch'an' ex-ternally and meditation (ting) internally, it is known as

                ch'an meditation (ch'an-ting)."

               (Platform Sutra, 141)

 

Primordially, and right from the outset, our Natures are pure, and it is through Hui Neng’s Chan practice that we, as dynamic subjectivities, can turn our focus back onto this purity. Self-practice is the very practice of the Buddha; and self-practice is the accomplishment of the Buddha’s Way within ourselves. Through practice, through the constant maintaining and ever renewing actualization of our freedom, we become the Way -- liberation through all, within all, and without all.

 

Practice, is above all, the securing of freedom, the obtaining of truth, through and within self-consciousness. This unique subjectivity is thus the locus of a total actualization within the depths of its own movement, whereby it is properly guided by the practice that it must undergo for itself. And this is why dialectics of inner transformation is of the utmost importance. The subject as epistemic subject, arisen from the depths of original creative feeling, must realize, of its own accord, of its own inward impetus, within the movement of its own subjectivity, that she is of the Buddha Way.

 

                 The sutras say to take refuge in the Buddha

                 within yourselves; they do not say to rely on other Buddhas. If

                 you do not rely upon your own natures, there is nothing else on which

                 to rely.

 

This is why the Original Nature must dialectically transform into an Understanding: a formal, thinking being, separated out from the environment. Once separated out, once established as the subjective pole of the subject/object relation, the self can thereby realize itself as a unique, punctiliar being with an inward world of its own, confronting and availing itself to the external environment without. Once such subjectivity is instantiated, true practice can begin in the fullness of self-consciousness. Precisely in this way, Hui Neng exhorts us to realize the Great Perfection of wisdom; not through recitation, but through true inner effort of fully realized practice,

 

                This Dharma must be practiced; it has nothing to do with recitations.

                If you recite it and do riot practice it, it will be like an illusion

               or a phantom. The Dharma body of the practicer is the equivalent of

               the Buddha

               (Platform Sutra, 146)

 

Hence, practice is the direct engagement of our own unique subjectivity on its way to inner realization. Truth of this kind is fundamentally active, fundamentally alive; and in being so, we must be emphatically alive to realize such truth within ourselves. Therefore, for Hui Neng, Truth of Buddhahood cannot simply be transmitted through word, it cannot be recited ad nauseum on the tip of one’s tongue. True Reality must be fully actualized in a self-consciousness; made ready to cast off her limitations to embrace the vastness of self-nature,

 

               The capacity of the mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky.ll' Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness.

                If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness

                (Platfrom Sutra, 146)

 

Emptiness is not neutral, it is full. Emptiness contains the mountains and rivers, the trees and grass, the stars and moons, all the ordeals of the human world, the heavens and the hells – everything, all are in the midst of emptiness. And it is embracing emptiness that we embrace fullness, a fullness unsummed in its unbounded creativity.

 

3.) Conclusion: Enlightenment as Free Roaming Aesthetic Apperception

 

In the Critique of Judgment, Immanual Kant writes of the function of Beauty, or the Aesthetic, as a symbol for Morality. He writes the beautiful pleases immediately: there is an affective relation between what is perceived as beautiful and the subject that perceives. Furthermore, beauty please apart from any interest: there is a freedom in the pleasure of beauty without recourse to egoistic satisfaction. Beauty speaks of the freedom of the imagination which judges the beautiful as harmonious and resonate with the inner and outer law of Reason. Kant writes that the Beautiful, on account of its inner possibility within the subject, and in correspondence with the its external possibility of nature,

 

               “Finds itself to be referred to something within the subject as well as without him,

                something which is neither [a determinate] nature nor [a limited] freedom, but which yet is

                connected with the supersensible ground of the latter. In this supersensible ground,

                therefore, the theoretical faculty is bound together in unity with the practical”

                (CJ, 565)

 

The beautiful as we perceive and feel it, points to a supersensible ground that binds both theory and practice into wholistic operations. In section 31 of the Platform Sutra, Hui Neng writes,

 

                                               What is no-thought? The Dharma

                 of no-thought means: even though you see all things, you do not attach

                 to them, but, always keeping your own nature pure, cause the six

                 thieves to exit through the six gates. Even though you are in the

                 midst of the six dusts, you do not stand apart from them, yet are not

                 stained by them, and are free to come and go. This is the Prajna sams-

                 dhi, and being free and having achieved release is known as the practice

                 of no-thought

 

For Kant, the Beautiful signifies disinterested satisfaction within nature and the subject that speaks directly to their unity in the supersensible noumena. Beauty is freedom, delight, and transcendent to quotidian interest. Just as Hui Neng expounds, the appreciation of beauty goes beyond the strictures of theoretical reason which necessarily requires no-thought. In no-thought, as in the appreciation of beauty, one is not stained by limited personal interest, but is free to come and go; we are free, by the power of our imagination, to, quite explicitly, “penetrate into all thing thoroughly, and will see the realm of the Buddha” (Platform Sutra, 153),

 

The implications of bringing a passing section of the Kant’s Third Critique, and the Zen-religious teachings of Hui Neng, is that true enlightenment suggests a transformed vision; a vision which delights in the mutual interdependence of the Ten Thousand Things. Beauty and No-Thought both speak of our True Reality that freely delights in a universe that has aesthetic value. A Universe that is aesthetic, rather than logically construed, is a Universe that can directly speak to us like the resonances of a free flowing, improvised musical performance. This is a Universe that not made of discreet items to be systematically cataloged – no, rather, this a Universe of mutually entailing harmonies and dissonances in an unceasing movement. External ejection of an objective world, dominated by the logic efficient causality, is thus transformed into an intentionally dynamic world that must be felt just as much as it seen.

 

                                        That darkness is not darkness by

               itself is because light changes, becoming darkness, and with darkness

              light is revealed. They originate each from the other. The thirty-six

              confrontations are also like this.

              (Platform Sutra, 173).

 

Everything mutually entails everything else; everything contains within itself everything else. In the aesthetic vision attained by the realization of our Buddhahood, heart and mind are equally engaged, and yet are free to leap and bound throughout world that is, in truth, contained within our very nature. As the well spring of creative feeling is free and unbounded, so too are we in our aesthetic participation within that creative wellspring.

 

                             鹿柴
              空山不见人，但闻人语响。

              返景入深林，复照青苔上。

 

The above poem, by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei, perfectly captures the reflexivity of a universe that is proliferated with suggestive meaning. Each character calls out to one another in their aesthetic positions within the poem, gesturing meaning by virtue of intrinsic relationships.

 

           From emptiness – mountain, from no-seeing – man.
           Though not seen, their echoes resonate.
           Returning shadows enters deep forest, the light on the moss.

 

Within this poem is the hint of a pliant world were structure, image, movement, and feeling merge into one experience. Our subjectify, in its specific perspective and particular feelings, submerges itself within the landscape, where the subject and object divide now dissolves, manifesting an objectivity that is expressive, suffused with emotion, and a subjectivity at one with objective form. Enlightenment is free roaming aesthetic apperception -- truly one with the sacred spring of life. Enlightenment is transformed vision, the seeing of a world that as poem rich with the intimacies of meaning. Finally, Enlightenment is freedom, the ultimate realization of the pure unicity of self and world, a world the we first ‘set up’ in order to go towards it in a full embracing openness.