Hsin-Hsin Ming IX: All Is One

Scott Bradley

"Each thing reveals the One, / the One manifests as all things. / To live in this Realization / is not to worry about perfection and non-perfection. / To put your trust in the Heart-Mind is to live without separation, / and in this non-duality you are one with your Life-Source." (Clarke)

This wonderful summation is the second to last stanza of the Hsin-Hsin Ming and will also introduce the final post in this series. The final stanza is the familiar declaration that words cannot convey Reality. It is as if his final words were "this message will now self-immolate."

As I recall, the first line quoted above consists of four characters: All One, One All. An idea, to be sure, but one if realized, Seng-ts'an tells us, frees us from the burden of striving to be. We already are. Here is a liberation to make the heart weep for joy. There are no conditions to meet. All is well.

We return to the heart. "Put your trust in the Heart-Mind." Perhaps Seng-ts'an has realized the Universal Heart-Mind, but if he has, it was through trust in his own heart. It can be found nowhere else. It can be realized nowhere else. It is simply who we are.

I have my own image of what this 'heart' is, and I have shared it often in different ways. It is only an imaginative model, an approximation intended to direct my attention in a certain direction. This is because, above all else, we are mystery.

We are as ungraspable as any imagined Tao. It is my belief that liberation is had in trustful surrender into Mystery as manifest in the mystery of me. 'Heart' is that mystery. And to discover it, we need not look far. Only we need find that from which all the concretions of our imagined egoic identity arise. But it is not a 'thing'. It is an event, a happening, an arising, a coming-to-be, a not-yet-anything. It is Source arising. It is Mystery as mystery. And to vanish here, to become the emptiness we are, is to realize the other shore.

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