Most of Samsara is organized around relieving its own suffering. For example, medicines relieve minor symptoms, sometimes major ones, but then have side effects that can leads to other sicknesses or even death. Commonly experienced sex is another one, creating tremendous carvings, jealousy, hatred—‘crimes and misdemeanors’ of passion. In reality, these ‘attacks,’ both internal and external, are opportunities for the transformation and rediscovery of the five abhisambodas (Wisdom Buddhas), negatively imagined as five causal sufferings related to the five skandhas. These five are form (of the four elements), feelings, perceptions, thoughts and ideas, and awareness of the other three mental aggregates.
The trick is to catch afflictions at their primary stage. Example, a stuttering child starts out with this problem, the causes of which are unknown, but soon develops a secondary psychological blocking after family members, or kids at school, tease and attack him or her about having halted speech. The envisioning of a world were such problems arise, one on top of each other, or doubled and tripled in their complexity and strengthening, is remedied by having the right view which is the correct envisioning of one’s existence at the primordial level. There is of course a collective karma at work as well causing such suffering, the purification of which, through supplication, mantra recitation, and confession can be neutralized by the ‘Sixth Buddha,’ Vajrasattva.
Such maps of reverse engineering of one’s every day bad habits, ingrained in stubborn predispositions stemming from poisoned perceptions, are found in root teachings like the Sakya Lam dre, the Gelugpa/Kagyu Mahamudra Text and Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament of Liberation, the Nyingma Lam rim Yeshe Nyingpo by Longchempa, and so forth. The Sakya pith teaching of the Omniscient One stems from from Mahasiddha’s Virupa engagement with the Buddha Nairatmya Yogini, generating, at first, three lines of teaching that later evolved, through the Sakya Masters, into the current Lam dre. It’s instructive to focus on the arrangement of this root teaching as it, like the others mentioned above, promotes a graduated path to the spontaneous arising Mahamudra experience that are both dependently and independently connected. The preliminary, and quite necessary, Mahayana conditioning at Lam dre’s start is called The Three Visions and relates to Virupa’s kernel teaching about what reality is to 1) the afflicted, 2) the correctly practicing yogi, and 3) a Fully Enlightened Buddha. Out of this ‘Path with the Result’ came a teaching on a triple tantra, a unique dialectic, which in its entirety is the gyud sum or Three Continua, comprising the esoteric, second part, of the Lam dre.
Continuums, or ceaselessly sustaining ‘through lines,’ are hopeful vehicles of relief within the dire existential dilemma Buddha recognized as having a threefold mark: anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering), anatta (without a lasting essence). Even the miserable ‘worldling,’ always derided in a spiritual context, clings to life as if its at some point it will provide a secret cure to the above ‘marked’ existential condition. Conventional life for most is the medium of ‘hopes and dreams.’ Hope, per se, in most wisdom traditions, and some quite secular, is often equated with delusion. Embedded in the epigraphic, imagistic, and laconic cantos of the twentieth century, American ex-patriot poet, Ezra Pound, is this seminal coda: nec spe, nec metu, ‘beyond hope and fear.’
From the Buddhist point of view, human life is preciously ‘hopeful’ because it is phenomenally rare and provides a unique juncture and auspicious conjunction of causes and conditions facilitating fully enlightened Buddhahood if a person’s continuum meets with the correct dependent connection in the form of an authentic Guru, who then teaches one of the nine systems of Buddhist root tantric ‘wisdom and mean,’ some of which are mentioned above. But, as one should know, in the beginning stages of meditation, and throughout the entirety of the path, hope and fear, regarding one’s efforts, is eschewed. Genuine attainment, however, whether one’s own or others, are rejoiced and in this sense ‘pride’ is legitimately taken.
There’s an internet program, mostly watched by kids, in which the narrator never stops talking, nor even pauses. Any necessary emphasis of words and sentences is produced by stretching or slowing down his speech. In any event, there is never a soundless space. (It’s very un-Poundian.) Most of the audience however becomes and remains glued to it, as it provides an instance, immediate alternate reality. Which is really a live, all-inclusive continuum, absolutely ceaseless—at least until an irritated parent or sibling shuts it down.
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