When Fitzgerald found Isidora, no one had imagined things would turn out the way they did.
The Surangama Sutra once said that sentient beings sorrowfully sought deliverance from suffering and looked upward for joy, while Guanyin's great compassion permeated the sorrowful hopes of all sentient beings.
Once one cultivated oneself to the point where the sense organs and their objects became detached, deluded thoughts and consciousness would naturally cease to arise. Without deluded thoughts, the mind became pure; even if one wandered by mistake into the realm of ghosts, one would not be harmed by them.
But reaching that state meant one was nearly extinguished. When the six sense organs faced the six sensory objects, even if one was not as unresponsive to outside stimuli as Isidora's father, one would still look without seeing and listen without hearing. While everyone else looked ahead, you would have no concepts at all—or rather, you would have found the root of reincarnation. The next step was the "mutual disappearance of subject and object." Even with one's eyes open, it was as though they were closed; nothing was seen by the "self."
Below the mountain, slaughter piled corpses into hills and blood into seas, yet the Buddha upon the mountain could still watch without intervening. Blades passed over him as though cutting water, or wind blowing through light. If you went up the mountain only because you wished to escape the sea of suffering, then apart from Kṣitigarbha, none of the Buddhas filling the heavens would take the initiative to save the world. Guanyin would only go to offer protection after hearing someone call upon her.
The Surangama Sutra advocated nirvana. If a person still wished to live, they should not "know and see what has not been seen." To wish to live was