The Xin-Xin Ming X: Trust Is Mind

Scott Bradley

Each thing reveals the One, the One manifests as all things. To live in this Realization is not to worry about perfection or 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)

One in all, All in one — If only this is realized; No more worry about your not being perfect! The believing mind is not divided, and undivided is the believing mind.
(D.T. Suzuki)

Yes, these are translations of the same verses. Makes you wonder. I have included Suzuki's rendering because I believe it to be less interpretive and more literal.

Last night, with the encouragement of too many beers, I got into a heated political discussion with a friend, which this morning makes me thankful that I need not worry about perfection. I would otherwise be unable to write this post.

As for the 'why' of our not needing to worry about perfection, I will leave it to those with the necessary interest to find it in the verses themselves.

What I wish to speak to here is what it means to trust in mind.

On the most cognitive level, it seems to me, trust in mind is the understanding that this mind, your mind and my mind, is our reality. In theory we can affirm or reject it, though we find that to use it is to affirm it. Life is trust. Trust is mind.

Trust in mind implies that this reality and only this reality determines our being in the world, and whatever transformation or transcendence one might seek not only happens here, but also has its source here. There is nowhere else to look. "The way out is in."

This treatise is all about Oneness, and here at its end Seng-Ts'an tells us that this Oneness is realized within the mind itself. We are not united with some objective Source, something 'out there', but with ourselves. And this unity is facilitated by a trust so deep as to be the equivalent of complete surrender. It is a Yes! so visceral as to leave no gap within us. It is an absolute affirmation of all that is or that would seem to be, and which finds no need to differentiate between them. And it turns out that we are the Source and the Source is us.

This is essentially the Daoist vision though its emphasis on mind is more an expression of Zen. Zhuangzi suggests a complete surrender into the totality of our human experience and a complete release into the Mystery that we are and that surrounds us on every side. They are both simply trust. And trust is affirmation. And affirmation requires no ‘proof’ beyond our being thus.

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