Q.—But they have also been called non-sentient: how can they be called sentient?
A.—In all substance from the beginning exists the impress of the wisdom-nature of the Nyōrai (Tathâgata): therefore to call such things sentient is not error.
“Potentially sentient,” the reader might conclude; but this conclusion would be wrong. The Shingon thought is not of a potential sentiency, but of a latent sentiency which although to us non-apparent and non-imaginable, is nevertheless both real and actual. Commenting upon the words of Kōbōdaishi above cited, the great priest Yū-kai not only reiterates the opinion of his master, but asserts that it is absurd to deny that plants, trees, and what we call inanimate objects, can practise virtue! “Since Mind,” he declares, “pervades the whole World of Law, the grasses, plants, trees, and earth pervaded by it must all have mind, and must turn their mind to Buddhahood and practise virtue. Do not doubt the doctrine of our sect, regarding the Non-Duality of the Pervading and the Pervaded, merely because of the distinction made in common parlance between Matter and Mind.” As for how plants or stones can practise virtue, the sûtras indeed have nothing to say. But that is because the sûtras, being intended for man, teach only what man should know and do.
The reader will now, perhaps, be better able to follow out the really startling Buddhist hypothesis of the nature of matter to its more than startling conclusion. (It must not be contemned because of the fantasy of five elements; for these are declared to be only modes of one ultimate.) All forms of what we call matter are really but aggregates of spiritual units; and all apparent differences of substance represent only differences of combination among these units. The differences of combination are caused by special tendencies and affinities of the units;—the tendency of each being the necessary result of its particular evolutional history—(using the term “evolutional” in a purely ethical sense). All integrations of apparent substance,—the million suns and planets of the universe,—represent only the affinities of such ghostly ultimates; and every human act or thought registers itself through enormous time by some knitting or loosening of forces working for good or evil.
Grass, trees, earth, and all things seem to us what they are not, simply because the eye of flesh is blind. Life itself is a curtain hiding reality,—somewhat as the vast veil of day conceals from our sight the countless orbs of Space. But the texts of the cemeteries proclaim that the purified mind, even while prisoned within the body, may enter for moments of ecstasy into union with the Supreme:—
“The One Bright Moon illuminates the mind in the meditation called Zenjō.”[49]
The “One Bright Moon” is the Supreme Buddha. By the pure of heart He may even be seen:—
“Hail unto the Wondrous Law! By attaining to the state of single-mindedness we behold the Buddha.”[50]
Greater delight there is none:—