Clouds in the sky
I was doing my Gong practice on the patio and noticed the azure sky dotted with a few clusters of drifting white clouds. The everchanging themes, tones and shapes of the clouds in the sky has always amazed me ever since I was a child. Apparently clouds have been an universal inspiration for many artists for centuries. But despite people's fasination with them, clouds in themselves do not have any substance - they are transient, they disperse, they come and go; thought they sometimes obscure the sunlight from us during the day and produce various weather conditions for us, we always know that the sky and the sun are there behind the clouds and will eventually break out unsullied.
Our thoughts and emotions may be comparied to the clouds in the sky; they come and go and go through different phases. But our consciousness, like the sky itself, should be unsullied by the activities of our mind which like drifting clouds. Or better still, why can't we identify our mind with the sky instead of with the clouds? If we do so, the mind will stay infinite, unconditioned and un-marred by daily activities and events.
When the patriarch of Zen Buddhism Bodhi Dharma first went to China, he had no follower apart from Shen Guang. Shen Guang approached his master one day with such an earnest request, 'Master, I'm so greatly troubled by my mind. I beg you to help me settle this turbulent mind of mine?' To this Bodhi Dharma replied, 'I'll be able to settle your mind for you only if you could show me your mind.'
If the 'I' ceases to be, where would that leave the mind which is attached to it?
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