Monday, April 26, 2010

Lankavatara Sutra Chapter 3, Section LXIV

I'm using the translation here, and as usual, and I'm just doing this as myself, to get myself to read this stuff...

The point of this section is: to what kind of thought is the term wrong discrimination applicable?

These thoughts arise when people are grasping, and when discrimination is evolving.

These are thoughts that have not been thought in light of the point that the nature of the objective world which is no more than the Mind itself, and thus manifest as dualistic views of being and nonbeing, and are effects of the habit-energy of "philosophers," and take external objects as "real."

However, "discrimination does not evolve, nor is it put away. But, Mahamati, for the sake of the ignorant who are addicted to discriminating the multiplicity of things which are of their own Mind, it is said by me that discrimination whose first function is to produce effects takes its rise owing to the attachment to the aspect of multiplicity as characteristic of objects. How otherwise, Mahamati, can the ignorant and simple-minded have an insight into the Mind itself which they discriminate, and see themselves freed from the notion of an ego and what belongs to it, and also freed from the wrong conception of cause and effect? "


These notions of non-duality are far from trivial, despite the fact that the concepts here have been repeated numerous times throughout the text. But evidently the distortion of discrimination gives rise to distortions of the views of the Mind, as the relationship between Mind and perceptions is distorted via the very act of discrimination.

 

  

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