Conquering One's Own Mind Is Equivalent to Conquering the World

The world is established within empty space, and empty space exists within the tathāgatagarbha, like a wisp of cloud adorning the vast clear sky. The Saha world and the land of bliss (Sukhāvatī) are the closest to each other, yet they are still separated by a hundred thousand buddha-lands—how vast the trichiliocosm, the sand of worlds, must be. Conquer your own mind, and you have conquered the universe, conquered the worlds of the ten directions, conquered the one true dharma realm. Dig out your mind and come to understand all the dharmas within it, and the immeasurable worlds will belong to you. In fact, conquering the world is nothing other than conquering your own mind, for outside the mind there are fundamentally no dharmas.

Yet every day we still cling to petty worldly dharmas, giving rise to thoughts and mental activity over trivial matters—how insignificant this makes us appear. If you stand in the midst of the universe and empty space and observe, what affair in the world could even count as an affair? The moment you expand your mind's capacity to be the same as the tathāgatagarbha, that is the moment you possess the ocean of worlds of the ten directions. The Buddha said: “譬如澄清百千大海弃之。唯认一浮沤体。目为全潮。穷尽瀛渤。汝等即是迷中倍人。” Upon hearing these words of the Buddha, we truly ought to wake up quickly and stop clinging to delusion.