Post Vajrayana in Kampuchea

   Before reading this entry, ideally one has cultivated the perception of visualizing tantric deities and other ‘purities’ while diligently meditating upon the yidam and retinue in the two processes, generation and completion, of a Highest Yoga Tantra sadhana. Through these transic absorptions, one’s subtle levels of consciousness are employed, and eventually the experience of three empty conditions arise: no causation, no elaboration, and no conceptual significance. With this experience of the true emptiness, one’s body becomes a clear light liquefaction of bodhicitta and the objects of one’s surroundings individually transform into ‘luminous and empty’ icons of the resultant stage. If this happens collectively, or all at once, there’s a ‘dawning’ within and without one and this is Mahamudra—a simultaneous arising of the highest gesture, mudra or icon—lasting as long as one’s accumulation of merit and wisdom assures its presence over a counter volition. This union of clarity...

I’m writing about the current Israeli crisis on this site for two reasons. First, I feel my bodhisattva vows require I try to ‘engage’ them, as in the French existential sense of engagé, by entering the conversation on Gaza. “A literature of praxis is coming into being in the age of the unfindable public,” wrote Sartre in, What is Literature? Is this what moved both Reverends Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton to become holy participants in the Anti-War Movement? If by philosophical extension, the undefinable public is composed of Nagarjuna’s sentient beings who are ‘anonymous vacuity,’ then what drives the Bodhisattva, beyond the limited view of a Kantian golden rule, to help anyone—what to say everyone—especially after training in advanced meditation stages upon an ‘objectless’ compassion? The answer is a previous sacred commitment to do so. Or else live in the Buddhists’s equivalent of the existentialist’s ‘bad faith.’  The second reason (usually I don’t need any)—is because much...