this affair of enlightenment –

Is like the bright sun in the blue sky, shining clearly, changeless and motionless, without diminishing or increasing. It shines everywhere in the daily activities of everyone, appearing in everything. Though you try to grasp it, you cannot get it; though you try to abandon it, it always remains. It is vast and unobstructed, utterly empty.

These words he must have borrowed, because these are the words of a man who knows. Each single sentence is impeccably true. This affair – the affair of enlightenment or liberation or self-realization – is like the bright sun. It has been the experience of thousands of mystics that when they reach the highest peak of their consciousness there is an explosion of light, something like an atomic explosion.

One of the great mystics, Kabir, says, “It is shining so much that it seems one thousand suns have risen suddenly around me. Wherever I look, the sun that I used to see seems completely paled…the brightness of these one thousand suns is so much. It has purified every fiber and cell of my being, as if I have passed through fire the way gold does. All that is not gold is destroyed by the fire and only the pure gold comes out.

“Passing through this experience of one thousand suns, for the first time I know what purity means – its fragrance, its freshness, its absolute newness. It is never stale, it is never past, it is never present, it is never future. You cannot divide it into time segments. It always is; it is the very nature of existence itself.”

So Ta Hui is quoting these words without quotation marks, which is one of the cunning strategies of all the intellectuals of the world. They go on stealing from every source, and pretending that it is their own experience. But they cannot manage it – sooner or later something immediately shows their stupidity.

This affair is like the bright sun in the blue sky, shining clearly, changeless and motionless, without diminishing or increasing. It shines everywhere in the daily activities of everyone, appearing in everything. Though you try to grasp it, you cannot get it; though you try to abandon it, it always remains. It is vast and unobstructed, utterly empty.