- kōmyō shingon 873
the religious hierarchy of the mantra cancels the secular, conventional
hierarchy of values so that the equality of emptiness is realized:
Maṇi is the wisdom of equality. It is bright and pure like the maṇi jewel.
This wisdom can purify the defilements of the discriminations of the
two types of innate attachments, namely, to self and to phenomena. It
authenticates the principle of the equal nature of things. (Unno 2004,
158)In this practice, intoning the mantra and empowering the sand become
vehicles of realizing emptiness, in that they are all indistinguishable
and they ultimately lead to Myōe’s realization of the mirrorlike quies-
cent mind-body non-duality.
In another passage, Myōe likens the action of the mantra and sand
to hallucinogenic mushrooms. He describes an episode in which these
mushrooms are brought to a monk by another monk and his mother
(Unno 2004, 217–19). When the first monk ingests the mushrooms, he
awakens from his dream. In an interesting twist in this story, the monk
who ingests the mushrooms sees the other monk and his mother bring-
ing the mushrooms to him in the hallucinogenic vision. Myōe likens
the monk and his mother who brought the mushrooms to Buddha
Śākyamuni and the cosmic buddhas. Following the parable, then, the
cosmic buddhas, the historical Buddha, and the practice of the mantra
and sand are all illusory, like hallucinations caused by the mushrooms
that are themselves illusory. Yet they are illusions that have the power
to awaken, just as the buddhadharma constitutes a set of skillful means
that have the power to awaken.
In both episodes, the mantra of light is attributed with the power to
effect the realization of mind-body emptiness and mind-matter non-
duality in such a way that it acknowledges functional definitions of
reality at the conventional level of separate minds and bodies, of the
interaction between mind and body/matter (teachings and sand), and
of the nonduality of all things.
Mantra as Petitionary Prayer
Myōe’s views recounted above reflect an integrative approach to the
mind-body/mind-matter continuum in a manner that harnesses the
causal power of karma to disclose emptiness and realize awakening.
Discussions of this-worldly benefits reinforce the role of faith and
karma to focus the reader’s attention on the ultimate goal of libera-
tion. Although Myōe is credited with having played a pivotal role in