Since everything is a reflection of our minds, everything can be changed by our minds. ~ Bud… tmblr.co/Zgqa1xRKUy2z
— My Yoga On (@myyogaon) August 13, 2012
This one was passed on to me by Shira, who is on Tumblr. Does that make her a “Tumblrer”?
She was rightly suspicious, and wrote:
The first half reminds me of the Dhammapada (“Mind precedes all things” … at least in some translations.) The second half is wackville though, and I’m pretty sure the Buddha didn’t say it.
“Wackville” just about summed this one up. I’ve also found it on Twitter, incidentally.
It didn’t take me long to track this down to page 350 of a Taiwanese publication called “The Collected Works of Venerable Master Chin Kung.”
Shira wrote up this same quote on her Tumblr.
As I said to Shira, Venerable Master Chin Kung‘s line of thought (and I’ve only seen a snippet in Google, so I may be misinterpreting) finds a home in Tibetan Buddhism as well. One of the worst books on Buddhism I’ve ever read was Geshe Michael Roach’s “The Diamond Cutter,” in which he argues that the pollution we see in the outside world, from cars and factories, doesn’t have an objective existence. Rather, we merely perceive pollution because our minds are contaminated by dirty (by which he meant sexual) thoughts. I thought, “This guy is off his trolley!”
I don’t know if you’ve followed Geshe Michael Roach’s recent misadventures, but I suspect I was on to something.
It is not true that everything is a reflection of our mind. Everything we see is a creation of our mind and is only in our mind. It seems to be part of the reality of what is outside ourself but is actually a picture created by the mind, is not outside the body but is only in the mind but is projected by the mind to make it seem to be a part of reality outside the body. It is in that sense that everything we see is unreal and that the entire Universe we see is unreal because everything we think we see is a picture created by the mind that exists only in the mind.
If we could still the mind for a long enough period of time we would see that we are separate from the mind. When Roach says that the polution that we “See” in the outside world has no objective existance that is only true of the image our mind has created has no objective reality but He is off his Rocker to say that because of this we don’t have to do anything about polution. It is only the image our mind creates and projects that has no objective Reality. The actual polution that is in the world does haveobjective reality and the only way to get rid of it is to stop poluting and clean up the polutiuon that has already been produced.