The Great Secret of Mind

shape (maybe it is actually like the inside of a coconut), so we should not be
dogmatic! Each year and each season a new concept becomes fashionable. At one
time scientists were sure that the atom was the bedrock of materiality, but now
they know it can be split. Until the mind’s tendency to interfere and control is
exhausted, its probing of the material world will be endless and without any
possibility of settling definitively upon even a single concept.
Only when we realize the nature of mind as taught by Buddha Shakyamuni,
then, and only then, can we acquire final certainty. That kind of certainty is
immutable even in the face of the loud positive or negative arguments filling the
sensual, aesthetic, and formless dimensions. If we do not possess the Buddha’s
absolute certainty, then we cannot be sure of anything and may even tend toward
paranoia.
How, for instance, can we trust the mind that yesterday perceived a woman as a
loving spouse but tomorrow will perceive her as the wife of an enemy who could
kill our loved ones? How can we trust the mind that perceives a girl in her youth
as an alluring goddess, perceives her later in life as suffering from leprosy or lost
limbs, and perceives her in old age as repulsively ugly? The mind is not a single
unchanging reality. When a close friend can turn into an enemy through some
small slight, or when the man who killed my father can become a close friend by
some positive chance gesture, the certainty of changeability is self-evident. We
must look at our own experience and understand!
Some people try to have it both ways: though they can accept that objects
“receive” our varying projections, they nonetheless believe that objects must have
at least some inherent self-existence. Even though they acknowledge that different
people can impute differing qualities to the “same” woman, they insist that her
material body actually exists. The danger here is the positing of two female bodies,
one inherently existent and the other labeled as this or that. Though some people
distinguish between the thing in itself and how it appears (a woman, for example,
may be perceived differently by different people), others hold that the elements
themselves have both inherent existence and properties that cannot be changed by
anyone: that is, the heat of fire, the liquidity of water, the solidity of earth, and the
lightness and motility of air. So how can phenomena just be variable figments of
mind? The question is valid. Certainly, if all phenomena are projections of mind,
then the four elements cannot be exceptions to this rule.
If we consider this problem, examining and investigating phenomena using the
logical reasoning of the Madhyamaka school, by demonstrating that phenomena
have neither unity nor multiplicity, we can show that they have no substantial
existence. For example, we all—high or low, clever or stupid—agree that what we
call a “house” is a single entity. This unity is a nominal fact, universally accepted.
The problem is that the door and the window are also single entities, and these
entities are a part of the single house. A “house” therefore is an aggregation of
many material parts. But if we admit that there exists a multiplicity, then the
unitary whole, “the house,” is nullified. Similarly, if a door, for example, is taken
to be a single entity, no distinction is allowed between its upper and lower parts; if
we posit separate upper and lower parts of the door as distinct entities, then we