"In the Lankavatara Sutra, the Buddha was asked, “What is meant by a worldly object of enjoyment?” The Buddha responded:
It’s that which can be touched, attracted by, wiped off, handled, tasted. It is that which makes one get attached to an external world and then enter into dualism on account of a wrong view and appear again in the skandhas, where owing to the procreative force of desire there arise all kinds of disasters, such as birth, age, disease, death, sorrow, object of worldly enjoyment.
So when I encounter something, because of that “wrong view” I feel that it’s outside of myself, it’s not me. In that duality, “I” appears again in the skandhas, through the aggregates. I appear once again, I reappear, and am recreated. Then, because of the natural tendency of desires to reproduce themselves, there arise all kinds of “disasters.”"
Take eating for example. Many times we eat even though we’re not hungry. It’s just a way of filling the senses, of feeding ourselves on something, anything. Even though it’s not really food that we’re hungry for, it’s something we can put our hands on, though at some point it doesn’t feel good anymore. So we eat and eat until we start getting sick, but we keep eating. It begins to hurt, and there’s a kind of craziness to it all, and we may ask, “Do I really need to do this anymore?” Yet sometimes even as we are asking, we keep eating. It’s hard to put down the fork.
Dogen says that only when we are free of desire, only when we let go of that discriminating way of being, only when we do not hate life, death, sickness, and old age will we be able to enter the mind of Buddha. But we can’t just ignore these things. That’s not what nondiscrimination is. Ignoring it is exceedingly discriminating. The Buddha says, “What is meant by the attainment of Dharma is when the truth of our self-mind is understood and when the nature of the emptiness of things and persons is seen into. Then automatically, discrimination ceases to assert itself.”
'via Blog this'
