When a moonless rainy night is not present, close eyes and find blackness before you. Opening eyes, see blackness. So faults disappear forever.
- For use when no actual dark night is available; harder than the first technique because it begins with fabricated inner darkness rather than real outer darkness.
- Method: close eyes → generate inner blackness → suddenly open eyes → project that same blackness outward, trying to see it outside. If it vanishes the moment the eyes open, the inner darkness was false — a mental negative (the afterimage of light in a light-accustomed mind), not real positive darkness.
- Cycle this close-open-project practice for three to six weeks; one day the inner darkness will hold even with open eyes in a fully lit room. The real can be projected outward; the false cannot — that is the test and the turning point.
- Once the real inner darkness is found it can be spread even in full sunlight: ‘the darkness is always there even while the sun is there — only covered.’ Uncovering it produces a visible patch of darkness in a bright room or outdoors.
- Why ‘faults disappear forever’: an inner pool of darkness makes one inexcitable and absorptive — an insult falls in and triggers no reaction (a Buddha can simply swallow and digest it). When desire or passion flares, close the eyes for a single moment and feel the inner darkness: it dissolves into the vacuum. Faults exist only through excitability; darkness extinguishes excitability at the root.