if got time slowly read Shurangama sutra :
http://www.buddhistinformation.com/shurangama_sutra.htm
or better still if cannot understand read with commentry by Master
Hsuan Hua
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/Shurangama/Shurangama.htm
Shurangama sutra is said to be wisdom opener.
i extract a 'teaser':
The Buddha told the Great King, "By watching the ceaseless
changes of these transformations, you awaken and know of your
perishing, but do you also know that at the time of perishing there
is something in your body which does not become extinct?"
King Prasenajit put his palms together and said to the Buddha, "I
really do not know."
The Buddha said, "I will now show you the nature which is
neither produced and nor extinguished.
"Great King, how old were you when you saw the waters of the
Ganges? The King said, "When I was three years old my
compassionate mother led me to visit the goddess Jiva. We passed a
river, and at the time I knew it was the waters of the
Ganges."
The Buddha said, "Great King, you have said that when you were
twenty you had deteriorated from when you were ten. Day by day,
month-by-month, year by year until you reached sixty, in thought
after thought there has been change. Yet when you saw the Ganges
River at the age of three, how was it different from when you were
thirteen?"
The King said, "It was no different from when I was three, and even
now when I am sixty-two it is still no different."
The Buddha said, "Now you are mournful that your hair is white and
your face wrinkled. In the same way that your face is definitely
more wrinkled then it was in your youth, has the seeing with which
you look at the Ganges aged, so that it is old now but was young
when you looked at the river as a child in the past?"
The King said, "No, World Honored One."
The Buddha said, "Great King, your face is wrinkled, but the
essential nature of your seeing will never wrinkle. What wrinkles
is subject to change. What does not wrinkle does not change.
"What changes will perish, but what does not change is
fundamentally free of production and extinction. How could it be
subject to your birth and death?
---shurangama_sutra
http://www.buddhistinformation.com/shurangama_sutra.htm
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