Depending on one’s orientation, the Buddha supposedly taught two levels of consciousness practice. But, in fact, what the Buddha taught was two perspectives for a single praxis, if we assume that all the pragmatic teachings, as diverse as they are, were actually aimed at a relatively singular goal, namely enlightenment.
            The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana posits the two perspectives as the phenomenal and the absolute. Some insist that these are differing teachings for students of differing capacities. But the Awakening of Faith holds the two perspectives as approaches inherent in the single teaching. From the purely phenomenal, any presumption of the inherently transcendental, of the essential self-nature of objects, is necessarily denied. Objects are inherently ‘empty’. But from the absolute – the tathata or ‘suchness’, the actualities of the experiential moment are imperishable. The ‘essence’ is the actuality.
            While the text assigns these to the ‘one mind’, according to the translation, one assumes that this is essentially a term of convenience, since ‘mind’ itself is general to the point of vagueness in the English language, and the unity is precisely the issue in question. What is the difference, then, between the ‘phenomenon’, which – to use another current term – is ‘relative’, and the ‘suchness’ within which the ‘phenomenon’ assumes ‘absoluteness’, ‘just as it is’?
            Normally, the difference is defined precisely in terms of ‘mind’. That is, the difference is the difference between the object defined as an object and the value which appears in consciousness that prompts its differentiation as ‘an object’. The value is immediate. The ‘perception’ of the value as ‘an object’ is apparently immediate, but in actuality, is not. It is, in fact, an immediate memory. I like the Hegelian word, ‘recognition’. ‘Perception’ involves ‘form’, and form is a created structure in consciousness. It devolves from the moment of self-awareness, the ‘conscious’ recognition of the unity of a perceiver and, by corollary, the unitive possibilities of the perceived. Both the immediate value in awareness and the perception of the perceptual object involve ‘recognition’. But, in our nomenclature, ‘mind’ tends to be the difference between the two modes of recognition.
            Infant and animals – and perhaps sages, too – recognize value immediately. Or, in the case of the sages, so we are led to believe. The structures of self-awareness, specifically the experience of ‘form’, can be engrafted into this moment of truly immediate recognition, so that the appearance of the value automatically prompts the recognition of the value as form, that is, as an ‘object’. But this is in fact a secondary response.

             But the ‘one mind’ the text points to is not simply the ‘empty mind’ of the infant. The paradox is not obviated, but resolved. This is inherent in the bodhisattva vow. The teacher continues to reside in ‘both worlds’, although both worlds are now resolved to the ‘one mind’. Infant and animal have a peculiar detachment. I am reminded of a quote that I cannot place, of a dying old woman, when asked if she were in pain, who said, ‘There is pain somewhere in the room.’ An injured dog may yowl with a bone-searing intensity; yet, commonly, its eyes are clear. Obviously, the bodhisattva is both accessible to us, in our relative or phenomenal world, but also grounded in the ‘one mind’. But it is not simply an ‘appearance’ on the part of the sage. While many of the serious teachers insist that we must become like infants, their assertion is commonly qualified by the specifics of what must be resolved in order to enter into this ‘infant’ state. In fact, it involves what we might call an ‘evolutionary’ state, since it brings the infant or animal detachment into the spheres of self-awareness.
            Zen Buddhist teachers made an art of manifesting the paradox. But they also gave us formal keys that point to the ‘suspended’ nature of the paradox in terms of the consciousness involved. We have Tung-shan’s, ‘He is me, but I am not him’ (which, of course, can also be translated, ‘It is me, but I am not it’, without obviating the paradoxical force, empirically). We also have Lin-chi’s host and guest, or rather his elaboration of a current theme that appears in the root material of both Lin-chi and Ts’ao-tung traditions.
            Perhaps we could refer these to ‘expedient means’, but Tung-shan’s statement crimps the argument. And I like the specificity of ‘he’ instead of ‘it’, because the ‘host’ in this case is defining of the ‘self’ of Tung-shan, whatever that may be in the context of his enlightenment. That is, this is the ‘he’ that speaks in the interview room, supposedly. In other words, it is explicit and directive.

             So we return to the question of the ‘one mind’, and what it signifies. Perhaps we could say that host and guest are ultimately of one mind. This simultaneously points to the specificity of the transaction and its ground in the ‘absolute’ or ‘suchness’. But, again, as I say, this points to the nature of the bodhisattva vow, which is ultimately neither metaphysical, nor ontological, nor epistemological, but solely ethical. Salvation inheres in compassion. The unity is moral and not metaphysical. But it is a ‘morality’ that cannot be defined ‘externally’, that is, in terms of codes or inflexible fiats. It arises, explicitly, in the context of guest and host, whether as purely a ‘subjective’ phenomena, an individual awakening to the ‘two dimensions’ of consciousness, or as explicitly transactional. And yet the final awakening into the paradox cannot escape the initiatory.