Many beautiful Zen poems by Basho(1644–1694) catch the general spirit of East Asian Buddhism. One of my favorites reads: Old pond A frog jumps in Sound of water.
1. In my understanding, the old pond stands for the original, pure, and tranquil mind, or reality; the frog jumping in represents the arising of the mind or thoughts; and the sound of water symbolizes the defiled or deluded world. This simple poem depicts two layers of reality that are both of great importance to Buddhist practice. The deluded impure world is where we are, whereas the pure unde?led reality is what Buddhists are striving for.
To ensure the possibility of attaining such reality, one stream of Buddhist teaching, known as Tatha¯gatagarbha Thought, stresses that the pure state of mind or reality is one’s “original” state, that which is always already there. What one needs to do is simply to rediscover it. These teachings make sense for soteriological purposes, but, with the development of philosophical sophistication among Buddhists, a pressing issue has emerged: If reality was originally pure and tranquil, then why is there delusion? How does the deluded mind or deluded thoughts arise? This is the so-called problem of delusion among East Asian Buddhists. The mainstream Indian Buddhist schools generally consider it to be irrelevant. According to the Yoga¯ ca¯ra view, for instance, de?led store consciousness (a¯ layavijña¯ na) is conceived in its seed of ignorance in beginningless time, and it therefore makes no sense to speculate about its origin. In Chinese mind-set, however, it is unreasonable for something to have an end but no beginning. Thus, in the history of Chinese and East Asian Buddhism, the issue of the origin of the de?led or deluded mind is considered to be the “puzzle of all history.” To these Buddhists, the issue is similar to the problem of evil that has troubled Christian theologians throughout history.
Basho’s poem hints that the image of the frog’s jump may hold the key to the problem. But where is the frog from? How does she jump into the pond? To ponder these issues in more theoretical terms, we need to examine the concept of yexiang , or karmic appearance, as developed in the Awakening of Faith (Dacheng Qixin Lun ) and further elaborated on by a number of Huayan Buddhist masters, including Zhiyan , Fazang , Zongmi , and Zixuan . This concept illustrates the “sudden arising of deluded thoughts,” and provides us with a paradigm to approach the problem of delusion among East Asian Buddhists.
