Unawareness Converges, Concealing The True Dhamma, the True Mind

　　This Dhamma talk was given as an answer to a question posed by one of the more important senior monks of our day and age. The gist is as follows:

　　This was when I began to investigate into the converging point of the cycle of defilement — namely, unawareness. While I was investigating, I didn”t know that I was investigating unawareness. I was simply thinking, ”What is this

　　” There was an uncertainty right there, so I focused the mind there, directed my attention to investigate what it was, where it came from, where it was going.

　　It so happened I hit the right spot: I say this because I didn”t know that it was called, or what unawareness was. Actually, unawareness and its name are very different. We see its currents spreading out all over the world, but those are only its branches. It”s like trying to catch an outlaw: At first all we can catch are his henchmen. Whoever we catch is just a henchman. We don”t know where the chief outlaw is, or what he looks like, because we have never seen him.

　　We catch lots of his henchmen, closing in on him, encircling him. This is called laying siege to the outlaw. Our police force is very large and very strong. Each person on the force helps the others, so they have a lot of strength, surrounding the spot where the outlaw lies, catching this person, tying up that one. Ordinarily when they”re asked, outlaws won”t tell who their chief is. Whenever we catch an outlaw, we tie him up until no one is left inside our siege line. The last person left is the chief outlaw. The last person lies in a strategic place, because his henchmen have to guard him well on all sides so that no one can easily slip in to see him.

　　The henchmen keep getting captured one after another until we reach the cave in which the chief outlaw is hiding, and then we kill everyone in there. This is when we know clearly that the wily outlaw has been wiped out for good.

　　This is simply an analogy. To put it in other words, the mind”s involvement with anything is a branch of delusion. Regardless of whether the delusion leads in a good or a bad direction, it”s nothing but an affair of unawareness and the branches of unawareness, but actual unawareness itself doesn”t lie there. So the tactics for investigating it, if we were to use another analogy, are like bailing water out of a pond to catch the fish in it. If there”s a lot of water, we don”t know how many fish it contains. So we keep bailing out the water until it starts receding lower and lower. The fish gather together. Each fish, wherever it is, swims down deeper into the water. The water keeps getting bailed out, and the fish keep gathering together. We can see where each fish is going, because the water keeps receding until at last, when the water is dry, the fish have nowhere to hide, and so we can catch them.

　　Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, together with the mental acts that intermingle with them: These are like the water in which the fish live. To investigate these things is not for the purpose of taking possession of them but for the purpose of killing defilement, in the same way that a person bails out the water, not because he wants the water but because he wants the fish. To investigate these things is not for the purpose of taking possession of them but for the purpose of knowing them, stage by stage. As soon as we know to a certain point, we are no longer concerned with that point. We know the things with which we are involved, as well as the fact that we are the one at fault for being involved, that our own misunderstanding is what deludes us into loving and hating these things.

　　At this point, the scope of our investigation keeps narrowing in, narrowing in, just as the water k…

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