seeing this beautiful horse, knew that he must ride it at any cost, and thinking
thus, he ran to mount it. With the king on its back, the horse ran up and down and
then, gaining speed, it took off from the pasture and flew into the sky. On and on it
flew for thousands of miles until it reached a barren place without grass, a
seeming land of demons; there the king dismounted. The blue horse that had
brought him there then vanished, and the king became worried. What should he
do? He had no supplies with him, nothing to eat, and he had no idea at all of the
way back to his kingdom. While he was musing in this way, he noticed some
smoke far down the valley and decided to go down there in the hope of finding
something to eat and something to wear. As he came nearer, he saw that the
smoke was coming out of a ravine. Descending further, he called out and a
middle-aged woman appeared, and he requested a bed for the night. She agreed to
give him lodging, and he thought that perhaps he would return to his kingdom at
daybreak, but of course he did not know the way back to his far-away kingdom. So
he stayed there for days, which soon became months, which, as time rolled by,
became years. He stayed on with the woman, who in good time gave birth to nine
children. The family depended on the milk from six goats, who became his
responsibility. But these produced so little milk for so large a family that the
children were always crying from hunger. On top of this, their clothes were
threadbare. Eventually the woman grew old and lost her teeth, and her hair
turned grey. Eighteen years passed in this way, and there was only suffering and
misery. But suddenly, without any forewarning, like awakening from sleep, he
found himself back on his throne. He immediately cursed the magician, berating
him for burdening him with so much suffering for so long, and he wept. Then the
magician comforted him. “I have shown you a magical illusion,” he said. “You
have not actually left your throne, nor have eighteen years passed. It was all
illusion, and the tea that your attendant set in front of you is not yet cold. Hearing
this, and seeing the steam still rising from his tea, the king was astonished.
Just as in that story, wherein the king was convinced of the reality of the illusion
of raising a family in a ravine with an old woman, regarding the children as his
own children, and experiencing all kinds of happiness and sufferings, when in
fact he had not moved from his throne, so too we see our world as a concrete
material reality, when in fact it is nothing other than magical illusion. Even the
experiences of seeing and hearing in a dream, which do not depend upon our
actual sense organs, our eyes and ears and so forth, are just imprints conditioning
the mind. Other than by the imposition of labels, not a scintilla exists, and that is
the truth.
1.14 THE CONVICTION THAT ALL IS UNREAL ACCORDS WITH THE SUTRAS
We are told that the projected appearances of delusory mind are nonexistent: let us
look, then, at harm from enemies and help from friends, at the offense rising from
insults, at rampant sexual desire, and so on. As with the dream state, look at them
and search first for the place where they come from, second, the place where they
now abide, and finally, the place where they go to. You will find no specific