How to Understand "Only Mind Appears, Only Sense Changes"

The worldly view is that the earth, mountains and rivers are real. For those who are enlightened, the void shatters and the earth sinks flat. The Sixth Patriarch said there is nothing. This is in accord with the true meaning. This truth used to be the most difficult to understand. Some people often ask the question, "What is this table in front of you? Isn't it clearly here? How can you say it is empty? So this question often became a roadblock. Luckily, nowadays, with the progress of science, scientists have provided us with a lot of favorable language. Scientists realize that the so-called matter is not real, but only due to human illusion. There is no concrete matter, it is just an illusion of human beings. In scientific language, the universe is all about fields and matter, and Einstein went on to add, further, that there is no matter, just fields. In the space of the field, where the intensity of the field is particularly high, is what we think of as matter. To further elaborate, everything in this world is nothing more than a hundred or so atoms that are formed. For water, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom combine to form water. Carbon dioxide is formed by combining two oxygen atoms and one carbon atom. One oxygen and one carbon is carbon monoxide, and if you inhale too much of it, you will be poisoned to death. It's very simple, but it's just a hundred things changing. If you look into the roots of these hundred things, they are just electrons, neutrons, protons, and nothing else. Electrons, neutrons, and protons all have a material duality, a fluctuation, light waves, sound waves, radio waves, electromagnetic waves, all are fluctuations. Just fluctuations don't have anything, but light waves have light, and light waves carry messages and so on. There is nothing material in light waves. The same is true of sound waves, sound travels to everyone's ears. It's a change in my vocal cords drumming up the air, and the fluctuations reach your ears and you hear the sound, it's all fluctuations. Radio waves, which are higher than sound waves, can't be blocked by any wall, ten directions, whether you are in Tokyo or Moscow or London or Paris, the knob is turned and it appears locally. It's very subtle, it's waves. But waves you can't find, you can't see them, you can't touch them, you can't catch them, there's no substance. The first property of all this neutron, proton, electron duality, volatility. Then there is the granularity. Granularity is also just a concentration of energy, not the formation of particles. Energy is action. So these things are nothing but fluctuation and action. In this way matter is formed. It can be seen that matter does not have the substance that everyone thinks it has. This may not be able to believe, I will tell you a very shallow analogy in the world, in the night incense, incense is just a bright point of light, you in the dark room to turn the incense to draw a circle, you will see a luminous circle, this is due to a point of light of the dynamic phase, it is moving. What is the circle of light? It is your illusion. You do see a glowing circle, or not? No! The electrons and neutrons I just mentioned are all moving. The whole universe is moving, and we're not standing still here. We're moving so much, we're rotating with the Earth. We don't feel like we're traveling 80,000 miles a day just sitting here. The earth is spinning by itself, the earth is spinning around the sun, everything is moving. Everything in the body is spinning, everything is moving. The moving phase is like the head of the incense moving. It is said in the sutra, "Like a spinning wheel of fire." Spinning fire, there's a show called fire sticks, two sticks lit with gasoline, and the performer waves his arms and can make all kinds of pleasing light-emitting shapes, but the shapes are not there, just two sticks moving. Therefore, the earth, mountains and rivers, all kinds of things are moving. What exactly is moving? Let's cite another Zen case. When the Sixth Patriarch went to a temple in Guangdong, he heard two monks debating, and one of them said, "Look, this streamer is moving. The other monk said, "No, it's not the streamer that's moving. It is the wind that makes it move. The two debated. The Sixth Patriarch said, "My dear friends, it is not the streamers that move nor the wind that moves, it is the heart of my dear friends that moves. Therefore, the root of motion lies in the motion of our mind. Therefore, we wrongly recognize all kinds of earth, mountains, rivers, and everything, and say that there is something or nothing. From the dynamic phase of the apparent view is that there is ah, if the actual, just incense moving, there is no ring of fire seen.