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THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA
which it is meant to direct and follow. The mental faculty, in all its operations, is but a function of this bodily whole, prejudiced by the peculiar quality of the gross physical substance that enwraps it, as well as by the subtle substance of which it is itself constituted. The mind is a mirror, but obscured by its own darkness; a pond ruffled by the gales of its own passions, by the winds of the transient cmotions, the restlessness of “Him Who Blows." If it were only like a lovely mountain lake, shel. tered against the ruffling breath by hill barriers on every side, crystal clear, unaffected by any turbid affluents to stain its clarity and give a ripple to its surface, fed by only an underground source in its own depth--then it might be capable of mirroring, without distortion, the form of truth. And yet, even then, there would remain this dualistic problem (at least so far as metaphysical arguments and explanations are concerned) of the twofold context of the mirror and the light.
The Buddhist approach to the difficulty was based on a formula of negating rather than affirining an abiding essence beyond or beneath the veiling cloud. The Buddha himself initiated this attitude with his fundamental dictum, “All is without a self," and though his followers, in spite of their Master's repeated refusal to engage in metaphysical discourse, soon enough became involved in discussion, both among themselves and with the Brāhmans, and in the end were practically back in the Hindu fold, 97 their basic tendency to negate was nevertheless carried, in the classic, culminating period of the Mahāyāna, to its own, truly wondrous, theoretical consummation in the “Doctrine of the Void.” The principle of the paradox here was brought from the meditation grove into the very camp of reason, the academy of philosophical verbalization, where the mind then dismembered itself systematically in a series of thoroughgoing demonstrations, dissolving, one by one, its own supports and leaving the consciousness-beyond-cerebration alone in the
A7 Cf. supra, pp. 529-531.
551
