Harding who passed away a few years ago is best known for his book "On Having No Head", which provides a seemingly rather idiosyncratic but actually highly effective account of non-duality. Basically, Harding's method of provoking a non-dual in-sight is quite simply to attend to the vacuity that is right above your shoulders at the centre of the so-called "first-person" perspective. This perspective should indeed be called "no-person" perspective because it obviously has no centre, or preferably, its Centre is an Absence of Self, or No-Self.
Right above your shoulders, if correctly attended to, is both an unsullied and serene Void, Nirvana, and the Samsara of conditioned phenomena, including cogitations, emotions, willings and bodily sensations. Void and Samsara are non-distinct, inseparable like Background and Foreground.
The Void is not (in) the mind, but rather the other way round: the nama-rupa is a flux of dharmas unfolding in the Void. Enlightenment belongs to nobody. It is not the self lifting itself by its own bootstraps, it is the self vanishing like mist on a mirror. To be more precise: the flux of dharmas still unfolds, but the ghost or the spectre of a "head" disappears, at the very least for an instant.
The Void is boundless, clear and blissful; it is Amida, Infinite Light, and the Pure Land. So Amida and the Pure land are "right here", but they are not in the mind, as pointed out earlier on.
The Vow is the potential of the Void to become apparent by making the ego transparent or translucent and finally vanish, every karmic momentum having been exhausted.
The Call is the ephemeral apparition of the Void which brings the ego-mechanism momentarily to a halt. It is the realization of the power of the Vow.
True entrusting is the self-effacing confidence that responds to the Call and is expressed by the Recitation of the Name which is thus also the working of the Vow Power.
The spectre of a "head", the ego, is still there, but has been driven out of the Centre it has usurpated and that belongs to the Buddha alone. Left to its own devices at the periphery, and its engine broken, the ego will trundle on in virtue of the remaining karmic momentum or tanha until its final disaggregation.
Carefully re-read and understood, the account above is perfectly orthodox, though it is clearly reminiscent of Suzuki's view expressed in his "Buddha of Infinite Light". Indeed, neither does it affirm the error of "the Pure Land in the Mind" nor that of "Becoming a Buddha in this Life". But does this assay not contradict the story told in the Larger Sutra ? Well, why shouldn't this story be both an allegory of a non-dual experience and a description of a transcendental, but nonetheless relative reality that is a real analogy of the absolute truth which consists in the very same non-dual experience ?
Why, indeed, should Amida and Sukhavati not be both "right here" and "over there", or better: neither "right here" nor "over there" according to absolute truth, a truth which is not grasped by anybody, but which nevertheless manifests itself in
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