The First Condition for Liberation
The greatest blessing available to human beings is perhaps liberation. Although anyone can attain it, it is not something everyone reaches easily. Liberation is like hearing a singer on a recording and then meeting that singer in person—an entirely different dimension of experience.
Even so, you need not consider it impossibly difficult. If someone has already attained liberation, there is no reason you cannot attain it as well.
This very stance is the first gateway to liberation. Without such a spirit, one should not even seek liberation. This is the first condition for entering the path.
Meditation and Liberation
Many people believe that sitting in full lotus and meditating will lead them to liberation—or at least to an understanding of the universe’s fundamental reality.
Certainly, if we compare that fundamental reality to “water” and our present mind to boiling water, meditation does calm the boiling. But even if the mind becomes quiet, you still do not come to know the “water” itself.
A mind calmed through meditation is simply a mind in which conscious activity has subsided. In that state, you cannot be aware of yourself. Water remains water, but you do not recognize that essence.
For this reason, ever since Shakyamuni, many Zen masters have insisted that one cannot realize the fundamental reality through meditation alone. Meditation is not liberation—it is merely rest. To use an analogy, someone who sits perfectly still in meditation is not a Buddha but a stone Buddha.
Even so, we cannot be grateful enough for Shakyamuni’s existence. Without him, countless meditators would have believed they had reached liberation when they had not, never recognizing their actual condition.
Meditation becomes necessary only after liberation—to gather the mind or to allow it to rest. It is never the method for attaining liberation itself.
The Fundamental Energy of the Universe
The fundamental energy of the universe corresponds to our mind. Through it, we can become free from the influence of actions—and this freedom is precisely what liberation means.
This fundamental energy possesses both an expansive force that radiates outward and an attractive force that draws things in. When the attractive force gathers particles, they take form and appear as the objects before us. When the expansive force scatters them, they break apart and vanish.
Our mind operates in the same way. When the attractive force draws the external world into the body, we see, hear, smell, and cognize. When consciousness arises within what has been taken in, that is the “self-consciousness” with which you think and judge.
Conversely, the expansive force moves our body. The core of this expansive momentum is known as the “soul.” The soul simply reacts and acts; it does not think or judge. For this reason, it is also called the “unconscious.”
The “self-consciousness” that thinks and judges and the “soul” that reacts and acts are not two separate entities—they are one. That is why, when self-consciousness decides “Go there,” the soul moves the body accordingly.
The Afterlife and Rebirth
When an action is repeated many times, it becomes imprinted on the “soul,” causing that action to be repeated automatically. This is nothing other than the soul binding itself.
At death, the “self-consciousness” that thinks and judges disappears, but the soul does not; it persists and is reborn.
This is why we sometimes see three-year-olds on television who play the guitar amazingly well or sing with great skill. Such abilities appear because someone who lived that kind of life in a previous existence has been reborn.
A young child playing music beautifully may seem like a delightful “prodigy,” but in truth, something deeply engraved on the soul is constraining that individual. It is like casually starting to smoke, becoming addicted, having it etched into the soul, and then being unable to stop. Such engravings are the very forces that bind and limit a person.
Even so, if you wish to be reborn with exceptional talent and achieve success early in your next life, all you need to do is diligently engrave that ability onto your soul now. Talent is simply a function carved into the soul—and that same function becomes a form of bondage.
Freedom from Bondage — Liberation
The founders of the great religions originally taught a way to break free from such bondage, because freedom from bondage is precisely what “liberation” means. However, their later followers, unable to attain liberation themselves, merely preserved the words and built up rules and doctrines. As a result, people became bound by those very rules.
For example:
“If you don’t go to church on Sunday, you’ll go to hell.”
“If you don’t chant sutras while striking the wooden fish, you won’t reach paradise.”
Such teachings do not free people from bondage; they function instead to bind them to religious institutions.
Liberation means transcending the bound soul and realizing the fundamental energy of the universe. In Buddhism, this realization is called sudden enlightenment.
Once this fundamental energy is realized, no external obstacle can affect you. Yet the actions of the soul you have accumulated up to that point still appear. Buddhism calls this habit energy—the habits engraved within the soul.
Long ago in China, Confucius visited Laozi. Laozi asked him:
“What is the difference between answering ‘yes’ and answering ‘mm-hmm’?”
Confucius taught people to answer “yes” as part of proper etiquette.
In reality, “yes” and “mm-hmm” convey the same meaning. But if you live bound to the rule of saying “yes,” your life loses its freedom. That is why Laozi posed the question.
Etiquette may be useful in human society, but if such conditioning remains even after death, how will one escape it? This is the point Laozi was raising.
What we call etiquette in human society can ultimately become bondage in the realm beyond.
