What this concept is saying（这个概念在说什么）
*Wu-wo* (物我, “things and self”) names a relationship before it names two entities. *Wu* (物) means the things, events, persons, and circumstances appearing as “outside”; *wo* (我) means the experiencing and appropriating subject that says “I see,” “I want,” “this affects me,” or “this is mine.” Together, 物我 describes the oppositional structure in which a self stands over against a world.
In the *Extensive Record of Chan Master Hongzhi* (《宏智禪師廣錄》, T2001), this is not presented as a philosophical theory to be constructed. It is a division to be seen through. Hongzhi Zhengjue approaches its dissolution from several distinct but related angles:
1. 無心分物我 — “No mind divides things and self.”
The line continues, “何處著根塵”—“Where could sense faculties and their objects be lodged?” The underlying pair is *gen-chen* (根塵): the sensory faculties and the objects encountered by them. Seeing and color, hearing and sound, and the other sensory pairings still function; what falls away is the mind’s installation of an independently standing observer on one side and an alien, appropriable, or threatening world on the other. Hongzhi’s verse immediately returns to people, movement, willows, orioles, flowers, and the liveliness of spring. The world has not vanished. It is encountered without an additional wall being erected through it. [The wording and its surrounding verse are preserved in the CBETA edition of T2001](https://deerpark.app/download/cbeta-2021Q1/pdf/T/T2001.pdf).
Here *wuxin* (無心, “no-mind” or “non-grasping mind”) does not mean unconsciousness, mental blankness, or the destruction of thought. It means that the mind does not seize its discriminations and turn them into fixed camps. Practical discernment remains: one can distinguish a red light from a green one, medicine from poison, kindness from abuse. What ceases is the compulsive addition: “This stands against me; therefore I must possess it, reject it, defeat it, or defend myself through it.”
2. 物我情忘 — “The affective attachment to things and self is forgotten.”
Hongzhi writes: “物我情忘兮誰分爾汝”—when the emotionally invested division of object and self is forgotten, who divides “you” from “me”? This is not a conceptual merger in which everything is declared to be one substance. The decisive word is *qing* (情): the affectively charged investment that continually measures experience as for me or against me, confirming me or diminishing me. “Forgotten” does not mean suppressed. It means that this investment has become inoperative, as a quarrel may become impossible once one no longer needs the disputed identity. [The complete verse appears in the received text of T2001](https://web.ss.ncu.edu.tw/~calin/scripture/t48/T48n2001.pdf).
3. 自得混成物我 — “Things and self naturally become undivided.”
*Huncheng* (混成) should not be understood as a confused mixture. It indicates an unforced wholeness in which the encounter can no longer be broken into an isolated perceiver and an independently established perceived thing. Hongzhi’s accompanying question—who could “break apart” the faculties and their objects?—is important. Ordinary experience seems to begin with two finished pieces that are later connected: “I am here; the world is there; perception carries information across the gap.” Chan instead asks us to inspect the living event before thought cuts it into pieces. In hearing, can one find a separate hearing apart from sound, or a sound-as-heard apart from hearing? The distinction can be made for conventional purposes, but the immediate event does not arrive with the boundary already engraved in it.
4. 物我普融，自他平出 — “Things and self universally interpenetrate; self and other emerge on equal ground.”
This is the most comprehensive formulation. *Purong* (普融) is universal融通—unobstructed interpenetration—rather than the conquest of one side by the other. Hongzhi does not discard the world to preserve a pure inner self, nor erase the self in favor of an all-consuming external totality. “Self” and “other” appear evenly, neither made metaphysically absolute nor reduced to the property of the other.
The corresponding images must be kept distinct: “珠受色而不痕”—a pearl receives colors without retaining a scar; “劍揮空而何跡”—a sword passes through space, leaving what trace? The pearl image concerns receptive responsiveness: appearances are vividly reflected, but do not congeal into residue. The sword image concerns activity: functioning is decisive, yet it leaves no track of possessive fixation. These images belong to the verse containing “物我普融，自他平出” in T2001. [The transmitted verse can also be checked here](https://www.guoxuemeng.com/gushici/307672.html).
These are not four separate doctrines. They illuminate one release from four sides:
- 無心: the mind does not manufacture a fixed division. - 情忘: emotional appropriation no longer sustains that division. - 混成: experience is discovered as originally undivided rather than forcibly recombined. - 普融、平出: within this openness, things, self, and others can all appear and function without domination.
The supplied material adds a necessary safeguard: the exhaustion of delusive thought and divisive fixation is accompanied by *xingxing lili* (惺惺歷歷), lucid and unmistakable awareness. Nonduality is not fog. If one becomes dull, dissociated, careless, or incapable of responding, that is not the realization being described.
Its place on the path of liberation is therefore practical. The opposition between “me in here” and “the world out there” becomes the stage on which craving, aversion, pride, fear, and comparison perform. A pleasant object seems to promise completion of me; an unpleasant event seems to threaten me; another person becomes a judge, rival, instrument, or possession. Seeing through the rigidity of 物我 removes the architecture supporting these reactions. It does not abolish every conventional distinction, but it loosens the appropriation through which distinctions become bondage.
This should not be equated without qualification with *wuwo* (無我, “not-self”). The expressions sound alike in romanization but are different: 物我 concerns the opposition of “things and self,” whereas 無我 denies that a permanent, independent self can be found in conditioned experience. They converge in practice because a self that cannot be independently established also cannot stand as an absolute owner over an independently established world. But Hongzhi’s 物我 language emphasizes lived non-obstruction, not merely a proposition about personal identity.
A walk-through in ordinary life（生活里的走查）
Imagine commuting on a crowded train while looking at your phone.
A message from your manager appears: “We need to talk about yesterday’s presentation.” Your body tightens before you have finished reading.
First there is 根塵, faculties and objects. Eyes and visible words meet; bodily sensitivity registers pressure in the chest; the mind encounters remembered scenes and anticipated conversations. “Object” here is not only the physical phone. In Buddhist analysis, remembered and imagined content can also become an object of mind. Conversely, “self” is not simply the body. It is the subjective position that appropriates these events: “This message is about me; my standing is at risk.”
This is where a common mapping goes wrong. It would be inaccurate to label the body “我” and everything outside the skin “物.” Bodily sensations can be experienced as objects—“my tight chest”—while a remembered managerial voice, though not physically present, participates in the apparently external pressure. 物我 is a structure of opposition and appropriation, not a line drawn at the skin.
Next, notice the formation of 物我分判, the division between thing and self. The message becomes a hostile object “over there”; the reader becomes an endangered subject “in here.” Neither designation is wholly imaginary—the manager did send a message, and consequences may follow. The bondage begins when the practical situation is overlaid with fixed identities: “They are attacking me”; “I am a failure”; “I must control how they see me.”
Now consider 無心分物我. This does not require refusing to think about the meeting. You still read the words accurately, remember the presentation, and decide whether a response is needed. But for a moment you do not add the second layer of self-defense. There is seeing, tension, train noise, uncertainty, and the need to reply. No separate inner commander has to own them all.
Then 物我情忘 becomes intelligible. You do not repress anxiety or pretend to be serene. You stop feeding the affective claim that the message possesses the power to establish or destroy who you are. Anxiety may remain as sensation, but it is no longer a verdict. The manager is also no longer reduced to “the threatening other.” Self and other begin to *pingchu* (平出), emerge evenly: two people, with different roles and incomplete information, meeting within one situation.
In 混成物我, the event is no longer experienced as an isolated ego defending itself against an invading message. Train, phone, bodily contraction, workplace history, the manager’s expectations, and your possible response form one conditioned occasion. “Mixed into one” would be misleading: the manager does not become you, and responsibility does not disappear. Rather, the supposedly independent pieces are recognized as mutually implicated from the beginning.
Finally, 物我普融 appears as unobstructed response. You might type: “I’m available at ten. I’ve reviewed the issue and can walk through what happened.” The response is clear and accountable, but it need not carry a residue of humiliation or counterattack. Like the pearl, awareness receives the message without being permanently marked by it. Like the sword moving through space, action occurs without carving an identity—“victim,” “failure,” or “perfect employee”—into the encounter.
The same pattern can be seen while scrolling social media. An image appears; comparison contracts the mind; another person becomes “the one who has what I lack”; the self becomes “the deficient observer.” Algorithms may repeatedly supply material likely to retain attention, but the algorithm does not single-handedly create 物我. The split is completed through appropriation: “This image tells me what I am worth.” Seeing the process does not require denying the real influence of platform design. It means neither blaming an omnipotent external machine nor imagining a sovereign inner user untouched by conditions.
AI offers another limited analogy. A system can classify inputs as user, environment, tool result, or internal state, and those distinctions can be operationally useful. But such computational partitioning is not the same as sentient grasping, and current scientific or philosophical debates do not establish that machine processing possesses the lived subjectivity addressed by Chan. The comparison can clarify the difference between useful discrimination and existential appropriation; it cannot prove Buddhist teachings or settle the nature of consciousness.
Why contemporary people need it（当代人为什么需要它）
Contemporary life continually invites us to fortify the two sides of 物我.
Personalization systems construct a world “for me.” Professional culture asks the self to become a measurable project. Social platforms turn other persons into images before an evaluating spectator. Consumer culture presents things as instruments for completing an incomplete identity. Even spiritual practice can be absorbed into the same structure: “I will acquire calm, insight, or awakening as an improvement to me.”
Hongzhi’s language interrupts this economy at its root. It asks not only, “How should I manage the things affecting me?” but also, “How is this rigid ‘me-versus-things’ arrangement being produced right now?”
That question matters in at least three ways.
First, it changes our relationship to distress. When pain is immediately appropriated as “my catastrophe,” the event is doubled: there is the difficulty itself and the threatened identity built around it. Dissolving 物我 does not promise the removal of illness, grief, overwork, or injustice. It prevents suffering from being endlessly consolidated into an owner who must carry it as a definition.
Second, it opens ethical attention. If another person is no longer primarily an object in my world—a helper, obstacle, audience, or enemy—their own vivid presence can emerge. “自他平出” does not mean that everyone has the same needs or bears the same responsibility. It means that my standpoint no longer receives automatic metaphysical priority. Compassion becomes less like a superior self extending kindness to an external unfortunate person, and more like an appropriate response within an interdependent situation.
Third, it makes action less sticky. Much exhaustion comes not only from doing things but from continually manufacturing a doer: “I must be recognized as the one who solved this”; “If this fails, I am diminished”; “Because I helped, they owe me.” Hongzhi’s pearl and sword suggest another mode—fully receptive, fully active, yet without accumulating every encounter as evidence for or against a self-image.
This is why the teaching belongs to the path of liberation rather than to aesthetic appreciation alone. It exposes the usually invisible conversion of contact into possession, difference into opposition, and response into identity. As that conversion weakens, craving and aversion lose their most intimate foothold. The result is not withdrawal from conditions but freer participation in them.
Common misreadings and clarifications（常见误读与澄清）
“Things and self dissolve, so nothing exists.” No. Hongzhi’s verses remain crowded with people, roads, spring scenery, colors, and activity. What dissolves is their fixation into mutually independent and antagonistic poles. Phenomena continue to appear; they are no longer taken as self-established possessions or threats.
“Nonduality means everything is literally one thing.” Not necessarily. *Huncheng* and *purong* indicate inseparability and unobstructed functioning, not a theory that all distinctions collapse into one cosmic substance. Tea is not fire; another person’s consent cannot be replaced by one’s own; consequences remain distinct. Nonduality prevents distinctions from hardening into absolute separation—it does not cancel conventional truth.
“No-mind means stopping thought.” No. Planning, remembering, naming, and moral discernment can continue. The material explicitly pairs freedom from opposition with lucid clarity. A blank trance, confused passivity, or inability to discriminate danger from safety would miss the point.
“If self and other emerge equally, boundaries are unspiritual.” This is a dangerous distortion. Functional boundaries can be expressions of wisdom and compassion. Refusing abuse, protecting a child, documenting workplace misconduct, or leaving a harmful relationship does not re-establish an absolute metaphysical ego. One may act firmly without turning oneself and the other person into permanent essences—pure victim and pure monster. Nonduality removes hatred’s claim to ultimate truth; it does not require continued exposure to harm.
“情忘 means emotional numbness.” Here “forgetting emotion” means the fading of affective attachment that enforces “mine versus yours,” not the loss of tenderness, grief, joy, or concern. Numbness reduces contact; Hongzhi’s pearl receives color completely. The point is vivid reception without the scar of appropriation.
“The teaching says external conditions are only in my mind.” That conclusion would secretly enlarge the self instead of releasing it: the external world would become the production of an absolute “my mind.” The supplied T2001 material does not offer that epistemological theory. It points to how the opposition is enacted through attachment to faculties and objects. Conditions are not denied; their alleged independence from the encounter, and the self’s alleged independence from them, are brought into question.
“If there is no fixed doer, responsibility disappears.” The opposite can occur. When action is not spent defending an identity, consequences can be faced more directly. “I made a harmful choice” need not become either “I am eternally bad” or “there is no self, so nobody acted.” Responsibility concerns conditioned action and its effects; it does not require an unchanging owner.
“Understanding the idea is the same as realizing it.” The intellect can describe subject–object construction while the heart continues to defend itself against every criticism. Hongzhi’s language repeatedly points toward direct acquaintance: the division must be noticed where seeing becomes “what I want,” where discomfort becomes “what should not happen to me,” and where another person becomes “what I need them to be.” Conceptual understanding is useful, but the test is whether perception and action become less possessive, less defensive, and more lucid.
物我, then, is not solved by choosing the world over the self, the self over the world, or a vague unity over both. It is released when the mind no longer needs to cut living experience into an owner and what is owned, a threatened center and what threatens it. Things still arrive. The self still answers to its name. Other people remain irreducibly other in conventional life. Yet none needs to be imprisoned in opposition.
That is the quiet force of Hongzhi’s formulations: no-mind does not divide; emotional fixation is forgotten; things and self are naturally undivided; self and other emerge together. Awareness receives every color, action answers each circumstance—and neither has to leave a scar.