What this concept is saying
The Chan (Chinese Zen) term 明暗 — "bright and dark," literally "light and darkness" — is far more than an observation about lamps and shadows. It is the classical Chan shorthand for any pair of relative states that face each other, contain each other, and yet cannot be seized as having any fixed self-nature. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, clarity and confusion, awakening and delusion, presence and absence — all of these are 明暗 in the deeper sense. The teaching is not that one side is true and the other false. It is that the entire structure of "this versus that" is something to be seen through, not solved.
The classical material draws this out in several distinct moves. They are layered, and the layers matter — flattening them into a single idea loses the teaching.
1. 明暗各相對，比如前後步 — "Bright and dark are mutually opposed, like front and back steps." The first thing to get right is that brightness and darkness *are* genuinely different. Quoting Shítou Xīqiān (石頭希遷), the *Record of Transmitted Lamps* and other collections say: "When there is brightness, do not meet it with darkness; when there is darkness, do not meet it with brightness. Bright and dark each stand opposed, like front and back steps." The Chan teaching refuses the lazy "everything is one" that pretends the differences don't matter. They are 相對 (xiāngduì) — relatively opposed. Each has its place; each does its work. The front step and the back step are not the same step, but you cannot walk without both alternating.
2. 明中有暗，暗中有明 — "Within brightness there is darkness, within darkness there is brightness." But the opposition is not external. The brighter the moment, the more its shadow is already implicit in it; the darker the moment, the more the possibility of light is implicit in it. The *Ancient Worthy Record* quotes Shítou: when brightness is present, darkness is present; when darkness is present, brightness is present. They are mutually contained. And yet — and this is the part that is easy to misread — Shítou immediately adds: "Do not meet it with the other." *Because* the two are mutually contained, you do not get to use the one as the medicine for the other. That is the warning 勿以暗相覩 (wù yǐ àn xiāng dǔ) and 勿以明相遇 (wù yǐ míng xiāng yù). More on this below; the warning is not a footnote.
3. 明暗覿體不可得 — "When brightness and darkness are confronted directly, their substance cannot be obtained." This is the heart of the teaching. The *Ancient Worthy Record* records a question: "Now that it is bright, where has the dark gone?" — and the answer is "Precisely this brightness *is* the dark" (祇者明便是暗). Not "the dark is somewhere else," not "darkness is an illusion." This very brightness, when you look right at it, *is* the dark. And conversely. The conclusion is given as "明暗覿體不可得" — when you go to seize the 覿體 (dí-tǐ), the "directly confronted substance" of either brightness or darkness, you cannot get hold of it. Neither is a thing. Neither is a substance. Neither is a place you can stand. This is not nihilism. It is the experience of looking for the "self" of a relative state and finding it as ungraspable as trying to grab the edge of a color or the tip of a mood.
4. 明暗元不二 — "Bright and dark are originally not two." The *Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp* phrases the breakthrough: "迷悟如隱顯，明暗不相離" — "Delusion and awakening are like hidden and manifest; brightness and darkness are not separate from each other." And again: "隱顯即本法，明暗元不二" — "Hidden and manifest are already the dharma itself; brightness and darkness are originally non-dual." The non-duality here is not a third thing that contains both. It is the recognition that the duality was never a duality of substances, only a duality of aspects. The Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya Sūtra) says it in its own way: "色不異空，空不異色；色即是空，空即是色" — "Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form; form is emptiness, emptiness is form." The structure is the same. Two-sidedness is not resolved by adding a third side; it is resolved by seeing that the two sides never had independent existence to begin with.
5. 不滯兩端，偏歸正中 — "Do not dwell on either end; from the partial, return to the centered." The *Extensive Record of Chan Master Hongzhi* (宏智禪師廣錄) is most explicit about the practice implication: "不坐兩頭明暗路，偏中歸去正中來" — "Do not sit on either end of the bright-and-dark road; from the partial side, return to the centered." This is *not* a balance metaphor. "Balance" suggests a 50-50 split between two things. Hongzhi's 正 (zhèng, "centered") is the middle that is not *between* the two extremes but is what the two extremes, when not clung to, open *into*. To "return to the centered" is not to find a third place; it is to stop occupying either pole as if it were where you lived.
6. 晦而彌明，隱而愈顯 — "Being in obscurity, all the more bright; being hidden, all the more manifest." Hongzhi also says: "居晦而彌明" — "Dwelling in obscurity, one becomes all the more bright." And: "隱顯磨礱入混融" — "Hidden and manifest grind against each other and enter a unified fusion." This is the experience side of the teaching. There are times — most times in a real life — when the "dark" is where you are. The Chan instruction is not to flee the dark for the bright, and not to romanticize the dark as depth, but to notice that, paradoxically, the dark itself can become a kind of luminosity when you stop using it as an excuse to fight. This is not a technique. It is what happens when the mind stops trying to brighten or darken what is already present. The Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) puts it: "應無所住而生其心" — "One should give rise to a mind that does not dwell anywhere." The "dwelling" is the seizing of either pole; the "not dwelling" is what the obscuring becomes luminous through.
7. 默照理圓 — "Silent illumination perfects the principle." Hongzhi's signature teaching is 默照 (mò-zhào), "silent illumination." The word is precise. 默 is not silence as quietness, but silence as the absence of the grasping mind. 照 is not a thought, but the unobstructed awareness already there when the grasping stops. Together, 默照 is the practice in which seeing and resting are no longer two. Hongzhi says: "默說一句，明暗全該" — "In one word of silent speech, brightness and darkness are wholly included." This is not a special experience. It is the ordinary function of awareness when it is not busy defending or attacking any state. In 默照, 明暗 do not need to be solved because they were never a problem; they are the texture of the world when seen without a self riding on top of it.
8. 明暗盡時俱不照 — "When brightness and darkness are exhausted, neither illuminates." The *Jingde Record* also has: "明暗盡時俱不照，日輪午後見全身" — "When brightness and darkness are exhausted, neither illuminates; the sun at noon shows the whole body." A wild image. At noon, the sun is so bright there is no shadow — but it is also not "bright" in the way a lamp in a dark room is bright, because there is no darkness to contrast it with. The 俱不照 — "neither illuminates" — is the exhaustion of the *function* of the pair, the way the function of "up" disappears when there is no longer any "down." This is not blankness. It is the function that has no opposite and so cannot be named as either of the pair.
9. 明暗自爾，何勞心神 — "Bright and dark are self-so; why trouble the mind-heart over them?" The closing note in the *Ancient Worthy Record*: "明暗皆自爾，寂然天地空" — "Bright and dark are each thus of themselves; the world, of its own stillness, is empty." And: "明暗自爾，何勞心神" — "Bright and dark are thus of themselves; no need to exert the mind-heart on them." This is the tone at the end: not triumph, not achievement, but a kind of resting. After the analysis, the question, the cutting through, the moment of breakthrough, the final instruction is to stop working on it. The pair continues to appear; the mind is no longer added on top of it.
How the three classic records differ in emphasis:
- The *Ancient Worthy Record* (古尊宿語錄, X1315) uses 明暗 as a 機鋒 (jīfēng, "sharp-edge" / koan-word) and concentrates on the question-answer form that cuts off conceptual proliferation: "明暗兩字，截斷眾流" — "The two words 'bright and dark' cut off the flowing stream [of conceptual mind]." The teaching here is often delivered not as explanation but as a shout, a clap, or a "precisely so" — the body of the answer, not the analysis. ("明來暗謝，智起惑亡" — "When brightness comes, darkness departs; when wisdom arises, delusion dies" — is used in this record, but the very next move is to question it: where did the dark go when the bright came? Precisely this brightness *is* the dark.) - The *Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp* (景德傳燈錄, T2076) places 明暗 next to 色空 (sè-kōng, "form and emptiness") and 迷悟 (mí-wù, "delusion and awakening") and frames it in the doctrine of 迴互不迴互 (huí-hù bù huí-hù, "mutual interpenetration and non-interpenetration"): 明暗 both interpenetrate and each have their place. The image "東屋裏點燈，西屋裏暗坐" ("lighting a lamp in the east room, sitting in the dark in the west room") makes this concrete; the rhetorical "寶劍暉時豈該明暗" ("when the treasured sword gleams, can it be contained by bright and dark?") reverses it. This is the most philosophically articulated treatment. - The *Extensive Record of Chan Master Hongzhi* (T2001) uses 明暗 along with 晦明 (huì-míng, "obscurity and brightness"), 隱顯 (yǐn-xiǎn, "hidden and manifest"), 正偏 (zhèng-piān, "centered and partial"), and 默照 itself, and treats 明暗 as dynamic inter-transformation: "晦而彌明，隱而愈顯." This is the most experiential, practice-oriented treatment, and Hongzhi is the historical figure of 默照禪 (Silent Illumination Chan).
Related pairs that share the same structure (and to which the same logic applies):
- 色空 (form-emptiness) — most often placed beside 明暗. Sentient beings are obstructed by "色空、明暗隔礙" — the separation of form and emptiness, of bright and dark — and from this obstruction build views of arising and ceasing. - 迷悟 (delusion-awakening) — same structure, in the register of practice. - 隱顯 (hidden-manifest) — same structure, in the register of how the dharma appears. - 正偏 (centered-partial) — same structure, in the register of where one stands. - 迴互不迴互 — the meta-principle: all such pairs both interpenetrate and each maintain their position.
Life examination: walking 明暗 through the day
Take these scenes not as illustrations imposed on the teaching, but as places where 明暗 is *already* operating, whether or not we notice.
Scene 1 — The elevator pitch that goes well, and the crash after
You give a presentation. It goes unusually well. People laugh at the right moments; the client leans in; you walk out feeling luminous — a bright moment. You go to the bathroom, look at your face in the mirror, and an hour later, in the cab home, you feel inexplicably flat. Many people experience this. The standard reading is: "the high crashed, dopamine dropped, that's just biology." Partly right. The Chan reading is more specific.
The brightness of the pitch *contained* the dark of the impending drop, *as part of its structure*. If you are riding the high, the drop is already in the high, as the back step is in the front step. The mistake is not feeling the high. The mistake is *meeting* the high with the dark — that is, immediately trying to even it out, dampen it, prepare for the fall, "not get too excited." Shítou's warning — "勿以暗相覩" — applies here exactly. To dampen the high with anticipatory dark is to use the dark *as* a defense, and in doing so the dark is no longer the dark; it is just the bright's bodyguard, and you have re-coupled them. The brightness is allowed to be brightness, even as the dark is *immanent* in it. That is what 明中有暗 means experientially.
The post-pitch flatness, when it comes, is its own bright-dark pair. Don't *meet* the flatness with the brightness of "remember the good thing that happened" — that is 勿以明相遇. Let the flatness be flat. The teaching is not "be balanced" or "be detached." It is: do not pile the opposite on top of what is present. When brightness and darkness are each allowed to *be themselves*, 覿體不可得 — when you go to grab the substance of "good day" or "bad crash," you cannot find it. The day was a day. The crash was a crash. The pair was the texture of experience, not a thing.
Where people most easily mis-map this scene: they treat the post-pitch flatness as a "problem to fix" with positive memory. That is the bright meeting the dark as a cure. Chan would say: let the flatness be the 明暗 pair's natural alternation. The brightness did not "go away"; the brightness *was* the dark, when you look right at it. 明暗覿體不可得.
Scene 2 — The doomscroll at 1 a.m.
The phone glows. The room is dark. The two are the most obvious 明暗 in the room, and they are also the *form* of the activity itself. Inside the activity, the 明暗 keeps generating: a cute video (bright), a comparison with someone's life (dark), a notification from a friend (bright), a piece of news (dark). They alternate. They each contain the other (the cute video contains the moment it will end; the news contains the possibility of something helping). They each try to *fix* the other: you scroll to get more bright to dispel the dark; you scroll because the dark is there and you cannot stop.
This is the 明暗 cycle at its most literal. The classical instruction is not "stop scrolling" (though one might). It is to see that the cycle is *self-so* (明暗自爾). It runs itself. Once you see it is running itself, you are no longer adding the "I" that is being pulled between them. You are not in the 明, you are not in the 暗, you are the one seeing the 明暗 cycle *as* 明暗. This is what Hongzhi means by 默照: the silent awareness that does not grab bright or dark. It is not detachment. It is the natural awareness that has always been there, and that you are not adding anything to.
Where people most easily mis-map this scene: they treat the bright/dark alternation as a "decision" they are failing to make ("I should put the phone down"). That very "I should" is itself a bright direction meeting the dark of "I cannot," and they keep generating each other. The Chan move is to notice that the generation is *itself* 明暗自爾 — it is running itself. Once seen, the I-that-is-failing is no longer a substantial thing, and the alternation has a different texture. Not solved, but no longer fed by the second arrow.
Scene 3 — The argument with your partner that turns tender
You are fighting. The 明 of your grievance is sharp; the 暗 of the other person's silence is sharp. Then something shifts — a small memory surfaces, a phrase of theirs you suddenly hear, and the 暗 brightens. The whole room changes. You may even laugh. Many people interpret this as "we just needed to blow off steam." The Chan reading is finer.
The brightness that emerges is *not the opposite of* the darkness; it is what was in it the whole time. "晦而彌明" — being in obscurity, all the more bright. The 暗 of the silence contained the 明 of the tenderness. They were never two different things; they were one texture, alternating in appearance. The moment you try to "stay in the good feeling" and "not go back to the fight," you are now meeting the 明 with 暗 — preparing the return of the fight as a counterweight — and the cycle continues. The instruction is not to remain tender. It is to notice that the tender and the hurt were never two substances. They are the same situation seen with and without the armor of a self that needs to be right.
Where people most easily mis-map this scene: they treat the tender moment as a "win" to be consolidated, and the return of the fight later as a "failure." Chan would say: both the win and the failure are 明暗 alternation. The 明暗元不二 — they were never two. To try to consolidate the tender is to fix it as substance, which is precisely 覿體可得, the thing the teaching refuses.
Scene 4 — Parenting the tantrum
A child is melting down. You are the parent. There is your own 明 of "I am a good parent, I know what to do," and your own 暗 of "I am failing, I do not know what to do," and the child's own 明暗 cycle raging in the body. If you meet the child's dark with your bright, you escalate. If you meet the child's dark with your dark, you collapse. The Chan instruction here, again, is not balance. It is 默照: be the one who is not *adding* 明 or 暗 to what is happening. Not suppressing yours, not inflating yours, just not adding. When you can do that — usually only for a moment at first — the 明 and 暗 stop being two opposing forces in the room and become the texture of one event. The tantrum is not solved. It is *no longer a fight*. Then something can actually happen, because the child is not getting a bright/dark pair back as a mirror, but is getting 默照 — a presence that does not oppose.
Where people most easily mis-map this scene: they think "calm presence" is a technique, and they try to perform it. The performance is itself a 明 (calm parent) meeting the child's 暗 (the tantrum), and the bright *is* meeting the dark. Hongzhi's 默 is not the achieved quiet; it is the absence of the grasping mind, which cannot be performed, only allowed.
Scene 5 — The job loss, and the "meaningful" project
You lose a job. The 暗 is enormous. Friends advise you to "see the bright side," to "find the new beginning in the ending." This is the most common misapplication. To meet the 暗 with 明 in this way is exactly 勿以明相遇 — meeting darkness with brightness as if brightness were its cure. The Chan teaching is the opposite: let the 暗 be 暗. Do not try to brighten it. This is "居晦而彌明" in its truest form — dwelling in the obscuring, becoming all the more bright. Not the performative "I am using this as growth" bright, but the bright that *comes from* the dark, when the dark is not fought. The greatest insights, the rest of a life's meaning, the questions you would never have asked — these are the 明 that is *in* the 暗, not the 明 you impose on it. The classical "明暗元不二" means you do not have to inject light into the dark. The dark is the light, in another aspect.
Where people most easily mis-map this scene: they think "letting the dark be dark" means wallowing. Wallowing is meeting the 暗 with 暗 — making it into a substance, an identity, a 覿體可得 ("I am the broken one"). Chan would say: the 暗 is not a thing to be either fixed or embraced. It is an aspect. When you stop meeting it with 明, the 明 that is in it can arise on its own — that is the 明暗自爾, the self-so 明暗 that does not need your labor.
Why contemporary people need this
The contemporary situation is, in a sense, a historical amplification of the 明暗 pair. Five things make it more intense than in earlier times:
1. The bright/dark pair is being algorithmically produced and sold. The phone, the news cycle, the social feed, the dating app, the workplace dashboard — all of these are designed to produce rapid alternation between high-arousal bright moments and low-arousal or anxious dark moments, because the alternation itself is what keeps you engaged. This is not a metaphor; it is the design intent of attention-economy systems. From the perspective of 明暗 as Chan describes it, this is an industrial-scale effort to make 明 and 暗 each *more graspable as themselves*, more vivid, more separate, so that the alternation is more gripping. The classical teaching is the precise remedy, because it goes to the place where 明 and 暗 as separate substances are produced in the first place. Chan does not say "delete the app." It says: see the 明暗 cycle as a self-running process, not as something you are choosing. The moment you see it as a process, the grip changes. (A small caveat: the literature on attention and reward prediction is real and growing, but it is largely *correlational* and largely about behavior; the Chan point is about the *structure of the grasping itself*, which is a different kind of claim and cannot be "proven" by behavioral data alone.)
2. The "positivity culture" is the imposition of 明 onto 暗. The contemporary injunction to "be positive," "look on the bright side," "manifest the good," "high vibe only," "your vibe attracts your tribe" is structurally identical to the classical error of meeting 暗 with 明. It is 明 used as a defense against 暗, and in doing so it makes 暗 into a thing to be defended against. The result is not more brightness; it is a population that has lost the ability to be in 暗 without panic, and that consequently experiences the 明 that does come as fragile and threatened. The Chan teaching is, by contrast, a training in being with 暗 without it being an emergency. Hongzhi's "居晦而彌明" is, in the contemporary context, a kind of medicine for the positivity epidemic: it is precisely the refusal to inject 明 into 暗 that allows 明 to arise from within 暗.
3. The "shadow work" movement is the inverse error. The opposite of positivity culture is the recent fascination with "shadow work," "trauma," "your dark side," "embracing your inner darkness." This is, often, the meeting of 明 with 暗 on the *other* side — letting the 暗 inflate, romanticize itself, become an identity ("I am the dark one," "I am the wounded healer"). It is 覿體可得 — making the 暗 graspable as a fixed self. The Chan teaching applies here with equal force: do not let 暗 become a thing either. The 暗 is not a thing to be integrated; it is an aspect that, when not seized, is not a thing at all. "覿體不可得" applies equally to the trauma identity and to the positivity identity. Neither is the substance.
4. The exhaustion of constant oscillation. Many people in contemporary life describe a state of being "numb" or "tired of feeling." This is, from a Chan perspective, the result of long-running 明暗 alternation in which the mind is always *meeting* each state with the opposite — bracing against the dark, propping up the bright, never letting either be. The result is a kind of protective dullness. 默照 — silent illumination — is, among other things, a return to the kind of awareness that is *not* constantly meeting states with their opposites. It is the natural awareness of being alive. When this returns, the dullness lifts, not because the world has changed, but because the 明 and 暗 are no longer being fought by the mind that adds 明 or 暗 to them.
5. The need for a non-metaphysical escape from dualism. The contemporary secular answers to "how do I stop oscillating" — therapy, meditation, medication, lifestyle change — have their place, and they are often genuinely useful. But none of them, on their own, addresses the *structure* of grasping at 明 and 暗 as substances. Therapies can name the pattern. Meditation can quiet the mind. Medication can dampen the swings. What the Chan teaching offers is the *seeing through* of the grasping itself — the recognition that 明 and 暗 were never grabbable. This is not a substitute for the others. It is a dimension of seeing that they do not typically address, and that becomes especially important for people who have done everything "right" and still feel the alternation, because it points to the one place none of the others quite reach: the implicit assumption that the bright and the dark are *things* to be won or lost.
Common misreadings and clarifications
Misreading 1: "明暗 is about optimism vs. pessimism — so Chan teaches optimism." No. Chan does not teach optimism. Optimism is still 明 used as a defense against 暗. The 明暗 teaching refuses the very project of being on one side. "偏歸正中" is not "be positive." It is to stop sitting on either end. The 正 (centered) is not a third end; it is what each end opens into when not clung to. A person trained in 明暗 can be in a genuinely dark place and not need to "stay positive," and not be defined by the dark, and not be using either as a way to fight the other.
Misreading 2: "明暗 is a balance — half bright, half dark." No. Balance is a metaphor that flattens the teaching. "不坐兩頭明暗路" is not a 50-50 prescription. It is an instruction to *stop sitting* on either end, period. The 正 that remains when you are not sitting on either end is not a midpoint; it is the road itself, no longer seen from one side. This is a different geometry. Balance assumes two things and a midpoint. Chan sees two appearances and the absence of a self that needs a midpoint.
Misreading 3: "明暗不二 means everything is one, so differences don't matter." No. This is the perennial non-duality mistake. 明暗 *are* different. They are "各相對, 比如前後步" — relatively opposed, like front and back steps. To say they are not two is not to say they are not different. It is to say their difference is the appearance of one situation, not the boundary between two substances. The Heart Sutra's "色即是空, 空即是色" does not erase form; it relocates form. To treat 明暗不二 as "everything is one big undifferentiated mush" is to lose the front-step/back-step teaching and land in mushy indifference, which is not Chan.
Misreading 4: "默照 is mindfulness meditation." No. Mindfulness apps and MBSR have their own integrity, but they are not 默照. 默 is not "quiet" in the sense of low-stimulation; it is the absence of the grasping mind. 照 is not "noticing" or "observing"; it is the luminous awareness that is already there when the grasping stops. 默照 is not a technique you apply to a state. It is what you discover when you stop applying techniques. To import 默照 as a name for a "silent awareness practice" can subtly miss this and turn it into another bright/dark pair (silent vs. loud; aware vs. unaware). Hongzhi's 默照 is precisely the resolution of that pair, not its reaffirmation.
Misreading 5: "明暗 is a metaphor for yin and yang." Partially overlapping, but not the same. Yin-yang is a cosmology: every yin contains yang, every yang contains yin, they generate each other. This is close to the 明暗互含 (mutual containment) aspect, but Chan 明暗 is not a cosmology; it is a *practice instruction about the structure of relative experience*. The Chan point is not "the universe is made of complementary opposites." The Chan point is "when you look for the self of any relative state, you cannot find it." The cosmological reading can become a comfortable picture. The Chan reading is supposed to be a *cutting through* (截斷眾流) of the very picture-making mind.
Misreading 6: "明暗 is a Buddhist 'everything is suffering' teaching." No. The 明暗 pair itself, when not grasped, is *just* the texture of being alive. It is not dukkha. Dukkha arises from the *grasping* at 明 or 暗 as if they were substances — exactly the 覿體可得 that the teaching refuses. The明亮 of a sunlit day, the 暗 of a quiet room at night, are not problems. The problem is only the addition of "I need this" or "I cannot bear this" on top of them.
Misreading 7: "明暗 is a doctrine about the 'nature of reality.'" Partly, but the Chan use of it is not metaphysical in the academic sense. The *Jingde Record* pairs it with 色空 and 迷悟, which makes it sound metaphysical, but the *function* of the teaching in the records is to cut off conceptual elaboration. "明暗兩字, 截斷眾流" — the two words "bright and dark" cut off the flowing stream. The teaching is not supposed to be added to the flowing stream of concepts as a new concept. It is supposed to *cut* the stream. The metaphysical reading is one possible use. The Chan use is as a 話頭 (huàtóu, "word-head" / koan) that you cannot finish thinking through, and that is the point.
Misreading 8: "明暗 is a form of 'spiritual bypassing' of real pain." A serious and contemporary misreading. To meet someone's genuine grief with "明暗不二" is itself the error of meeting 暗 with 明. The Chan teaching is not a verbal formulation to apply to other people. It is a recognition that the *granting-person* (you) and the *experiencing-person* (the one in grief) are not separate from 明 and 暗, and that to reach someone, the 明暗 pair in *yourself* must first be seen. Real Chan practice is not "I am non-dual so your pain is not real." It is the long training in not adding 明 or 暗 to what is already here — including not adding 明 to someone else's 暗, which is its own bright/dark move. The most basic ethical point of the teaching is: do not use 明暗 as a doctrine of detachment from others.
One final misreading worth naming: that "明暗" is "a concept" in the Western sense. In Chan, 明暗 is not a concept one has; it is a structure one *sees through*. To learn 明暗 is to have a certain kind of seeing become possible — not as a thought, but as the texture of experience when the grasping mind has quieted. The danger of any deep-dive exposition like this one is that it can become another 明 to defend oneself with, another bright thing to use against the dark. If at the end of reading this you find yourself with a "Chan concept of 明暗" that you can name and apply, that itself may be a use of 明 as a defense — a way of *meeting* the 暗 of not-knowing with the 明 of having-an-interpretation.
The classical gesture, again, is the last line of the *Ancient Worthy Record*: "明暗自爾, 何勞心神" — bright and dark are self-so; why trouble the mind-heart over them. The teaching is not something to take hold of. It is what is already the case when the taking hold of has rested.