Lecture Notes on the Sūtra of the Collection of the Father and Son (1–3)

The State of the Equanimous Mind

The equanimous mind (upekṣā-citta) is neither joyful nor distressed; it abides in a middle state free from both extremes, neither craving nor loathing, neither good nor bad, neither painful nor pleasant. At such a time the mind is calm and unruffled, without highs or lows. For example, when you look at a person and feel nothing in particular—neither liking nor disliking them—that is the equanimous mind. If a feeling of liking arises, then there is pleasant feeling; if you find the person disagreeable, that is a painful feeling, and hatred has emerged. Therefore feelings are of three kinds: painful feeling, pleasant feeling, and the neutral feeling (upekṣā-vedanā) that is neither painful nor pleasant.

As for the sound of equanimity, it refers to a sound that belongs neither to the wholesome nor to the unwholesome, but abides in a middle state that is neither good nor bad. If in a dream a person hears others speaking words that do not form coherent sentences—words without meaning—although the mind does not feel anything particular about them, the person takes them as things that truly exist and keeps recollecting them over and over. Even when one clings to this state of equanimity as truly existent and craves this equanimous thought, not knowing that the six sense objects of equanimity are equally false and illusory, one still does not escape birth and death.

The "indefinite statements" (nītārtha) here are different from the "indefinite sūtras" (neyārtha) in the Buddhist scriptures; they are not the same thing. Buddhist sūtras are divided into definitive sūtras (nītārtha) and indefinite sūtras (neyārtha). Definitive sūtras are true, expounding the real Dharma; indefinite sūtras do not expound the real Dharma. Definitive sūtras teach the Mahāyāna scriptures on the ultimate truth of tathāgatagarbha—this is called definitive, the fundamental Dharma, the Dharma of ultimate reality. Other scriptures, those that do not touch upon the tathāgatagarbha Dharma, are not definitive sūtras. Scriptures that do not expound the Dharma of our true mind, the tathāgatagarbha, are indefinite, not fundamental scriptures. Of course, within definitive sūtras there are also indefinite statements, and within indefinite sūtras there are even more indefinite statements.