Pure Mind and pious frauds
Pure Mind has nothing whatsoever to do with moral behavior. On the same track, a defiled mind can be mind of the highest moral behavior. This is not so paradoxical when we understand that pure Mind means Mind, itself, its wave-like actions having momentarily ceased. On the other hand, the defiled mind is one in which no such cessation has taken place. Mind does not behold Mind, itself. For it there is only ceaseless waves of disturbed mind, like water being constantly agitated.
The history of morality, in particular, that we should act in pure ways, is a checkered history, replete with many instances of overt cruelty and violence. Moral history, for example, informs us that Nazi Germany regarded itself as a great moral culture almost without peer. From this we would not be off-track to say that moral cultures are often totalitarian and monophasic (i.e, adverse to multiple states of consciousness). Order, obedience, and uniformity are the rule in which strict limits are set with regard to certain kinds of behavior.
The common worldling (prithagjana), who has no nose for the scent of the spiritual world, is often the one caught in the snare of morality; who cries out for a moral culture, one in which the contagion element will be removed and all will become right. This same worldling considers the Ten Commandments or the Buddhist monastic rules to be holy when, in fact, they have nothing whatsoever to do with the realization of pure Mind. For the spiritual adept, such rules are a stumbling block. Related to this, we find this passage in the Pali canon from the Bhaddhali Sutta (M. i. 445).
When beings are deteriorating, when true Dharma is vanishing away, there are more rules of training and fewer monks established in profound knowledge.
We might even be so bold as to say that there is no profound knowledge in a moral culture. The impetus to look within, where true reality is to be searched for, has been substituted with ext! ernal be havior. Ironically, such moral behavior is always hypocritical. How can it not be so since one is pretending to be what is impossible to become? The corporeal body is illusory. For this reason it cannot be perfected. It is something born; soon to be exhausted. Only our spiritual nature is perfect. It is boundless and all pervasive, never comes into being nor does it pass away. But then the common wording has no intention of seeing and perfecting this nature. At best, they much prefer to be pious frauds.
