Hui-Neng wrote that, once everyone recognized the beautiful as beautiful, ugliness arose.
It's a clever thought. In order to understand the paradox, you must focus on "as beautiful." Hui-Neng isn't saying there isn't beauty. He is saying that we shouldn't think of it as such.
Hui-Neng was one of the early Zen Buddhist patriarchs. He was working within Buddhism's pantheistic monism. The dualism of beauty and ugly, good and bad, true and false, flies in the face of monism, especially of the pantheistic sort.
But regardless, there's something valid in Huing's observation. The sage would just look, enjoy, take in, live. He doesn't focus on beauty. He doesn't even focus on focusing. This habit of "just" [fill in the blank] helps the sage achieve "no mind," and thereby see the oneness of everything.
Obviously, we reject such oneness. I also struggle what good it is to assume a mental disposition that fosters "oneness" when, in reality, the world is full of dualism: mundane and heavenly, God and humans, the transcendentals and their opposites.
Yet there is something assuaging about the "just" looking approach. And I wonder: does it help us to transcend time and space? Time and space, after all, are entirely dualistic: this minute and the one that just passed; this space versus that space. There's less monism in time and space than there are gods in the pagan pantheon (you'll forgive the awkward dissimile).
