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By Root 762 0

Light,” Susila confirmed. “Why do people speak of Mind in terms of Light? Is it because they’ve seen the sunshine and found it so beautiful that it seems only natural to identify the Buddha Nature with the clearest of all possible Clear Lights? Or do they find the sunshine beautiful because, consciously or unconsciously, they’ve been having revelations of Mind in the form of Light ever since they were born? I was the first to answer,” said Susila, smiling to herself. “And as I’d just been reading something by some American behaviorist, I didn’t stop to think—I just gave you the (quote, unquote) ‘scientific point of view.’ People equate Mind (whatever that may be) with hallucinations of light, because they’ve looked at a lot of sunsets and found them very impressive. But Robert and Dugald would have none of it. The Clear Light, they insisted, comes first. You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what’s always been going on, whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time. You agreed with them, Lakshmi—do you remember? You said, ‘I’d like to be on your side, Susila, if only because it isn’t good for these men of ours to be right all the time. But in this case—surely it’s pretty obvious—in this case they are right.’ Of course they were right, and of course I was hopelessly wrong. And, needless to say, you had known the right answer before you asked the question.”

“I never knew anything,” Lakshmi whispered. “I could only see.”

“I remember your telling me about seeing the Clear Light,” said Susila. “Would you like me to remind you of it?”

The sick woman nodded her head.

“When you were eight years old,” said Susila. “That was the first time. An orange butterfly on a leaf, opening and shutting its wings in the sunshine—and suddenly there was the Clear Light of pure Suchness blazing through it, like another sun.”

“Much brighter than the sun,” Lakshmi whispered.

“But much gentler. You can look into the Clear Light and not be blinded. And now remember it. A butterfly on a green leaf, opening and shutting its wings—and it’s the Buddha Nature totally present, it’s the Clear Light outshining the sun. And you were only eight years old.”

“What had I done to deserve it?”

Will found himself remembering that evening, a week or so before her death, when Aunt Mary had talked about the wonderful times they had had together in her little Regency house near Arundel where he had spent the better part of all his holidays. Smoking out the wasps’ nests with fire and brimstone, having picnics on the downs or under the beeches. And then the sausage rolls at Bognor, the gypsy fortuneteller who had prophesied that he would end up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the black-robed, red-nosed verger who had chased them out of Chichester Cathedral because they had laughed too much. “Laughed too much,” Aunt Mary had repeated bitterly. “Laughed too much…”

“And now,” Susila was saying, “think of that view from the Shiva temple. Think of those lights and shadows on the sea, those blue spaces between the clouds. Think of them, and then let go of your thinking. Let go of it, so that the not-Thought can come through. Things into Emptiness. Emptiness into Suchness. Suchness into things again, into your own mind. Remember what it says in the Sutra. ‘Your own consciousness shining, void, inseparable from the great Body of Radiance, is subject neither to birth nor death, but is the same as the immutable Light, Buddha Amitabha.’”

“The same as the light,” Lakshmi repeated. “And yet it’s all dark again.”

“It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,” said Susila. “Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.’ I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I