What This Concept Is Saying
If you asked a Chinese Chan master of the twelfth century where the sense of "us versus them" lives, they would not point to politics, geography, or even to the people in front of you. They would point to something much more intimate and much harder to see: the *operation* of discrimination itself, the way any mind that knows also divides. The classical definition given in the *Hongzhi Chanshi Guanglu* (《宏智禪師廣錄》, T2001) is deceptively simple — 彼此: 此方與彼方之對待分別,屬妄想差別之相 — "this-side and that-side, the paired opposition of self and other, belonging to the category of delusive discriminations." But this one line does considerable work, because it is not naming a relationship between two people. It is naming a *structure* inside the discriminating mind.
To see why this matters, notice what Hongzhi does in his recorded sayings. He does not analyze "this" (此) and "that" (彼) as if they were independent things to be examined. Instead he places 彼此 in a constellation of similar splits:
- 向背 — toward and away from, the geometry of like and dislike - 物我 — things and self, the boundary between "me" and "not-me" - 是非 — right and wrong, the moral edge that turns opinions into verdicts - 名字 — names, the labels that freeze living process into fixed nouns
All of these are listed as 妄想差別之相 — features of delusive discrimination. In other words, 彼此 is not one kind of division among many. It is the *template* of division itself: the simplest, most fundamental gesture by which awareness takes a seamless field and draws a line through it, calling one side "this" and the other "that."
Hongzhi develops this from three angles, and each one needs to be held in the hand separately.
First angle: discrimination rests on discriminative mind. "妄想心盡,差別事消,當下逕直行,不墮第二念,無向背,無物我,有甚麼彼此?" — "When the mind of delusive thinking is exhausted, the matter of discrimination dissolves; going straight ahead in the present, not falling into a second thought, there is no toward or away, no thing or self — *what* this-and-that could there possibly be?" The rhetorical force of "有甚麼彼此" is important. It is not a polite suggestion that maybe the distinction is unimportant. It is a reversal: once you look for 彼此 *after* the discriminating mind has quieted, you cannot find it. The two poles — 此 and 彼 — depend on the dividing act. Take away the act, the poles vanish together. This is not the same as saying "everyone is one" or "differences are fake." It is saying: the *grid* through which differences appear is itself a mental formation.
Second angle: joy that does not split. The verse "妄立是非徒喻馬,樂同彼此解觀魚" pairs "falsely positing right-and-wrong" (a useless parable about a horse) with "joyfully sharing the same this-and-that" (understanding the fish in the water). The first phrase uses 妄立 — *falsely establish* — to mark the constructed nature of moral verdicts. The second uses 樂同 — *joyfully sharing* — to suggest a way of being with others that does not first carve them into "this side" and "that side." The line ends with "身雲心月本如如" — body like cloud, mind like moon, originally thus. What is "originally thus" (如如) is not a state produced by effort; it is what is already there when the splitting layer is not added.
Third angle: do not divide 彼此 according to conditions. "二儀同根,萬物一體,……莫向諸緣分彼此" — "Heaven and earth share the same root, the ten thousand things are one body, … do not divide this-and-that according to conditions." This is the most practically direct of the three. 彼此 is here the *object* of a verb: 分 (to divide). And the conditions (諸緣) are everything — the people you meet, the news you see, the way an afternoon tilts, the comment that prickles you. The instruction is not "ignore the conditions" but "do not let the conditions become the occasion for the dividing act."
Across all three, one phrase keeps reappearing and must be held carefully: 惺惺歷歷 — vividly clear, unobstructed, lucid. Hongzhi is emphatic that the state in which 彼此 dissolves is *not* a fog. It is not drowsiness, not vague goodwill, not "everything-is-fine" relativism. It is closer to what a person feels on a clear winter morning when the world is *legible* without being *threatening* — things appear distinctly, and they do not automatically sort themselves into friend and foe, mine and not-mine, on my side and on your side. This is crucial, because the most common misunderstanding of any teaching about non-duality is to imagine that it prescribes mental mush. Hongzhi is at pains to say: the opposite. Without the splitting, perception becomes *more* articulate, not less.
Where, then, does 彼此 sit in the overall map of liberation? It is not a peripheral social concept. It belongs to a deep layer of the path: the layer at which the practitioner begins to notice that the *apparatus* of comparison and opposition is itself a fabrication, and that this fabrication is operative in every moment of ordinary experience. In the broader Mahāyāna landscape, this is the same insight given classical form in the *Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra*'s teaching of the 不二法門 (the dharma gate of non-duality), and in the Prajñāpāramitā literature's recurring deconstruction of the "self-and-other" (自他) pair. Hongzhi's specific contribution is to take a very ordinary pair of Chinese characters — 彼此, two of the most common words in daily speech — and pull them out of grammar and into contemplative scrutiny. He is saying: every time you say "we" and mean it, the "we" is doing something. Every time you say "they" and feel the texture of "they," the 彼此 is operating. The work is not to abolish pronouns. The work is to see the operation.
Walking Through in Life
Let's bring this down to the floor of an ordinary day and walk it step by step. I'll try to map each piece of the classical definition onto something you might have felt this week, and I'll flag where people most often map the concept *incorrectly*.
Scene 1: The morning feed. You open your phone. Within ninety seconds, you have been sorted — not by any person, but by an algorithm that has been watching you for months. A political clip. A lifestyle piece. A friend's vacation. A news item about a group you already feel something about. Now watch what happens internally. The mind does not receive all four pieces equally. It immediately, automatically, does something: it draws a line. *This is my kind of people. That is not.* The line may be drawn along politics, taste, class, age, humor — the content varies, but the *operation* is identical. This is 彼此 in its contemporary, algorithmic form: a this-and-that assembled by recommendation engines, then inhabited by the discriminating mind as if it were the natural shape of the world. The classical line "莫向諸緣分彼此" speaks precisely here. The 諸緣 (conditions) are the posts, the comments, the people in them. The 彼此 is the divide. The instruction is not to throw the phone away, but to notice the act of division as it occurs.
Scene 2: The meeting at work. You are in a meeting. Someone proposes an idea. You find yourself constructing, almost without trying, a quiet internal geometry: *us* (the people who see the problem my way) and *them* (the people who don't). The geometry may be invisible to others, but it shapes who you look at, whose nods you track, whose objections you rehearse a counter for. This is not merely professional disagreement. It is 彼此 as 物我 — things and self — running beneath the surface, with "my idea" functioning as a small extension of "me." A common misread at this point is to think the teaching is asking you to *agree with everyone*, to stop having a position. That is not it. You can still have a view, and even a strong one. What is being pointed at is the *self-extending* quality — the way a position becomes a possession, and a possession becomes a side, and a side becomes an identity. The discriminating function (this is a good idea / that is a bad one) is one thing; the 彼此 (we are the people who see this, you are the people who don't) is another. Hongzhi's phrase "惺惺歷歷" applies even here: the discrimination can be vivid, the lucidity intact, without the *us-and-them* overlay.
Scene 3: The family dinner. An older relative says something about young people, or about the world, that you find painful. Inside, a quick 彼此 assembles: *my generation, their generation.* Or: *the people who understand, the people who don't.* This is 彼此 as 是非 — the verdict structure — being laid down over what is, in fact, just one person at one table. The classical line "妄立是非徒喻馬" — "falsely positing right-and-wrong is a useless parable about a horse" — lands here. The verb 妄立 (falsely establish) does not deny that there are real disagreements. It says the *positing* of a fixed side is the unnecessary addition. The relative still said what they said. You can still respond. The teaching is about not letting the response become the construction of a permanent "them" that then colors every future interaction.
Scene 4: The intimate relationship. This is where 彼此 can be both most visible and most disguised. Partners often develop a private language of "we versus the problem" — which is healthy. They also often develop a more covert language of "me versus you" — *I am the one who cares, you are the one who doesn't; I am the reasonable one, you are the reactive one* — which is 彼此 in a very particular form. Note that this is not the same as having a conflict. Conflict can be honest, direct, and free of 彼此. What makes something 彼此 is the *structural* feature: each side has become a kind of character in a recurring drama, and the characters have begun to feel more real than the people. This is the moment in relationships when "I" and "you" stop being pronouns referring to two actual human beings and become roles in a script. The teaching here is not sentimental ("just love each other"). It is the somewhat disorienting suggestion: notice the script. The script is made of 彼此.
Scene 5: The internal self-talk. Perhaps the most pervasive site of 彼此 is one with no other person in it. You recall an incident from ten years ago and, in the remembering, you become "the person I was then" and "the person I am now" — and the two begin to negotiate, accuse, defend. You think about a project and split into "the version of me that wants to do it" and "the version of me that is afraid." This is 彼此 as 自他 — self and other — operating *inside* a single mind. The Chan observation is that this splitting is not less delusive for being internal. It runs on the same engine. Hongzhi's "不墮第二念" — "not falling into a second thought" — is relevant here. The "second thought" is precisely the moment when the present, undivided experience is immediately overlaid by a "this" and a "that" — a self that judges and a self that is judged, a side that approves and a side that fails.
A note on the most common mapping error: people often translate 彼此 as "us-and-them" and stop there, concluding that the Buddhist teaching is about *being nicer to outsiders*. That is a misread. Hongzhi is not running a kindness campaign. He is pointing to a *cognitive structure* that operates regardless of how kind or unkind the content is. You can be hostile to 彼此 and still have it running. You can be aggressively inclusive and still have it running. The dividing act precedes the attitude. The work is at the level of the dividing act, not at the level of what you do with the sides once they are drawn.
Why Contemporaries Need This
There is a particular quality to our present moment that makes 彼此 unusually visible as a problem, and unusually load-bearing as a concept.
The first thing to say is that the conditions of contemporary life have made the *outward apparatus* of 彼此 far more elaborate than it was in twelfth-century China. Recommendation algorithms, social platforms, partisan media, urban-rural divides, generation gaps amplified by different platforms, workplace cultures split into ever-finer sub-tribes — all of these function as *machines for producing 此 and 彼 at scale*. Where a Chan monk might have encountered a manageable handful of "sides" in a day, a contemporary adult scrolls through dozens in an hour. The 人间名字 (human names, human labels) that the Hongzhi verse mentions — "不受人間名字垢" — are now produced and circulated at industrial speed. The "names" (名字) that fix people into categories are no longer the slow product of community memory; they are the fast product of engagement metrics.
A second consideration, often discussed in the language of cognitive science, is the well-documented human tendency toward in-group / out-group categorization. Research in social psychology has repeatedly shown that even arbitrary group assignments produce measurable shifts in empathy, attention, and moral judgment. This is, on one level, simply a description of what Hongzhi was pointing at: the discriminating mind *produces* the group boundary, and then treats what it produced as real. It is fair to say that the empirical observations of contemporary psychology overlap with the classical diagnosis. But — and this matters — the Buddhist analysis goes further in one specific way. Social psychology tends to treat the in-group/out-group mechanism as a *feature* of human cognition, useful for ancestral cooperation, sometimes misfiring in modern conditions. The Chan diagnosis treats the underlying 彼此 as something that can, in principle, be seen *through* — not just managed or counter-biased, but recognized in its constructed nature such that the dividing act itself becomes visible. The two perspectives are not contradictory; the latter simply makes a stronger claim about what is available in contemplative practice. Whether that stronger claim is warranted is, of course, exactly the kind of question a tradition would say cannot be settled by third-person research alone.
A third reason the concept matters now: the cost of 彼此 has changed. When 彼此 is small and local — a household argument, a neighborhood dispute — its consequences are limited. When 彼此 is amplified by platforms, by political economies that monetize outrage, by AI systems trained to maximize engagement through division, the same cognitive structure that once produced a family quarrel can now produce a civic emergency. The structural problem is the same; the stakes have risen.
This is also where the teaching of 惺惺歷歷 becomes most counter-intuitive and most needed. The instinctive response to an oversaturated field of 此-and-彼 is to *exhaust oneself* into one of the sides more firmly — to double down, to find the right team. Hongzhi's suggestion is the opposite: the way through is not louder division, but clearer seeing. Not less awareness, but awareness without the automatic assignment to a side. The contemporary resonance is striking. Whatever one thinks of recent work on attention, mindfulness, or contemplative neuroscience, the basic finding that *fast, reactive categorization* is distinct from *slower, more deliberate perception* is broadly supported — and is exactly the distinction Hongzhi is naming when he contrasts the state of 彼此 (fast, reactive, dividing) with the state of 惺惺歷歷 (vivid, unobstructed, undivided).
Finally, and perhaps most gently: the teaching of 彼此 is not primarily a critique of other people. It is a kindness to oneself. The mind that is constantly drawing 此-and-彼 is a mind that is constantly at war, even when nothing in particular is happening. To see through 彼此 is not to add a new political position. It is to recover some ease.
Common Misreadings and Clarifications
Misreading 1: "This means don't have preferences or take sides." This is the most common misread, and the most corrosive. Hongzhi is explicit that the alternative to 彼此 is not passivity. The alternative is 惺惺歷歷 — vivid lucidity. Discrimination (辨) is not the same as 彼此. You can see clearly that this is good and that is harmful. You can see clearly that this person is kind and that person is not. The discriminating function — which Chan would never ask you to dismantle — is the *seeing* part. What Chan is pointing at is the *positing of sides* that *crystallizes* around the seeing and then takes on a life of its own. To recognize a problem and to have turned the problem into a side are different operations. The teaching concerns the second.
Misreading 2: "This means everything is one, so differences are illusions." Hongzhi does not say this. The verses explicitly acknowledge the reality of the phenomenal field: clouds appear and disappear, conditions (諸緣) arise, heaven and earth have their structures. What is rejected is the *割裂* — the *cutting apart* — that the discriminating mind performs on the field. The 萬物一體 ("ten thousand things are one body") is not a denial of ten thousand things; it is a denial that they are *cut off* from one another. This is a careful distinction, and it matters. The teaching is closer to: differences appear; the divisions we lay over them are added.
Misreading 3: "Without 彼此 I won't know who I am." This concern is real and deserves a careful answer rather than a dismissal. In the Chan framing, the question assumes that *self* and *other* are independent, already-existing things, and that the dividing line is what keeps them in place. Hongzhi's framing is the reverse: the dividing line is what *produces* the apparent self and the apparent other as fixed, opposing entities. What remains when 彼此 is seen through is not a dissolved blob but a more fluid, more responsive, more *articulated* way of being — which is why the language of 惺惺歷歷 is so insistent. The self that emerges from non-此-non-彼 is, paradoxically, more capable of appropriate response, not less, because it is not locked into a script.
Misreading 4: "This is a Chan concept, so it's exotic and probably not practical." The classical material here does happen to come from a Chan text (《宏智禪師廣錄》), but the underlying insight is not confined to Chan. The deconstruction of the self-other pair is a recurring theme across Mahāyāna literature, appearing under different names in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras (as the emptiness of self and other), in the Avataṃsaka tradition (as 事事無礙, the non-obstruction of phenomena), and in the practice literature on 平等 (equanimity) and 無分別智 (non-discriminating wisdom). Chan's particular gift is to take a very ordinary, very common term — 彼此, two words an ordinary Chinese speaker uses dozens of times a day — and turn it into a site of practice. That is not exoticism. It is a precise pointing at the texture of ordinary speech, with the suggestion that the texture is a door, not just a habit.
Misreading 5: "This is about being nice to other people." Kindness may or may not follow from seeing through 彼此; Chan is agnostic on the moral conclusion and emphatic about the seeing. The point is not ethical conduct. The point is the dissolution of a particular cognitive structure that, as a side effect, also happens to produce much of the unnecessary suffering in human life. Ethics is downstream of the seeing, not a substitute for it. This is why the teaching can be honored even by people who, for their own reasons, are not especially drawn to the Buddhist path: the diagnosis of 彼此 as a constructed structure of mind is, on its face, a claim about cognition, not a claim about how to be good.
To bring it home with the original voices: when Hongzhi says "有甚麼彼此?", he is not asking a question he cannot answer. He is pointing the listener back to the place from which the question of 此-and-彼 arises, and suggesting — gently, persistently, across the recorded sayings of a long contemplative life — that the place itself is what matters. Not the two sides. Not how to choose between them. The seeing that does not, on its own, reach for a side.
That, more or less, is what 彼此 is, and what it is for.