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"J. Wagner Browy" wrote: <<Mundane is all that you can see, hear, smell, feel,
touch, taste, and breath. Supramundane is all that you can see, hear, smell,
feel, touch, taste, and breath along with everything else.  Mundane eyes see life
divided into parts. Supramunda eyes see.>>

Excellent, Jeff!

There are many self-calling Buddhists (and many who refuse to call themselves
Buddhists though with Buddhist pretensions, why would they otherwise post on
Buddhist NGs?) who keep insisting on an ultimate that totally transcends our six
senses -- that is totally above and beyond *our* world, totally beyond time and
space, totally beyond particularity and differentiation, etc.

But in Buddhism, all there is that is morally relevant is perceptible to us
(though there are realms of existence, like the heavens and hells, that require
meditative abilities to become perceptible). Atoms and the whole universe in its
whole history are not morally relevant and are not perceptible to us with our
bare senses (though atoms become perceptible to adequate machines). It is in this
fathom-long body that we can attain liberation from the world, and this
liberation is nothing other than not being attached to anything (the world and
ourselves) while still in this world.

The supramundane is nothing other than the mundane but freed of the veil of
desire (and of thought, which is driven by desire, including the self that desire
creates to coordinate the activities to gratify itself).

Hui-neng awakened simply on hearing the phrase from the Diamond Scripture: "the
bodhi-sattva maha-sattva ought to give rise to an un-supported thought
(a-pratisthitam cittam), to a thought unsupported by anything (na
kvacit-pratisthitam cittam), to a thought unsupported by form, sound, scent,
flavour, tangible, object-of-mind." After he awakened, he still perceived those
six sense-fields like before, only now he was no longer supported by them, in
that he no longer faked up a concept for them and then took his stand on those
concepts. (All delusional activities are tautological, they stroke themselves to
keep themselves going).

As the Buddha says: "In the seen there is just the seen". That is all there is to
awakening, that is all there is to the supramundane. Awakening has no positive
content, but is purely purgative. All it does is doing away with desire (and with
thought, which is driven by desire, including the self that desire creates to
coordinate the activities to gratify itself). Nothing more, and nothing less.

Tang Huyen