[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio – the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. So we need to see the song-scritter as it is. And the last teaching is a teaching not of ideas, not of dialectic, not of metaphysic. It's a teaching just using simile metaphor, using vivid, natural, even beautiful images. And it's a classic Buddhist verse, this, memorise it, use it in your meditation, use it in your life. Then you'll start living in the Diamond Sutra. And actually these reflections, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, the meditation on them is, is inexhaustible, but a few pointers. So as stars, as lovely isn't it at night at the moment? Last night, it's fantastic after the poogee, looking up at the stars, you know, in that lovely velvet night. You know, it's so clear, you know, those lovely, sparkling, glowing pinpoints of light. But they're unreachable, ungraspable, ungettable. And all things are like that, no matter how hard you try, you can never grasp them and hold on to them. Not really, including people, including our very selves. We can't hold on to them. And stars fade, they vanish when the light comes, when the dawn comes. All things are utterly impermanent and ungraspable. Fazu Bandhu sees a deeper meaning than this. He says, "When the sun of Pregniar shines, all notions, all ideas, all perceptions of how things are vanish like the stars at dawn." As it says in the sutra, perceptions, perceptions, perceptions forsaken and gone. It's interesting, isn't it, that the Buddha gained enlightenment, it said, traditionally meditating on the dawn star. And then secondly, a faulted vision, word here is timira. We are so utterly convinced of the reality, the existence, the veracity of our experience. Utterly convinced of the veracity of people, things, states, moods, ourselves. We are so sure of our perspective, our point of view, our vision. But actually, we're like men with a cataract or with an eye disease. We don't see what is actually there. What we see is a hallucination, an image, a projection of our desires, a projection of our fears, of our likes and of our dislikes. Hucinations are very strange things, very strange experience with my father. Not one before he died, his eyesight had gone. It was just very blurred. And one day we were sitting together and he said, "What's that baby doing on the floor there? Well, there was no baby in the house. What's that baby doing on the floor there?" And I said, "Well, what baby is that dad?" "On the floor, just over there." And he wasn't frightened. He was just kind of commenting. He wasn't asleep. He was seeing a baby on the floor. It was quite clear. My dad was a very down-to-earth fellow. But he was seeing a baby and was very strange, quite spooky experience. And I actually wondered, you know, you've got to go away and be specular. If he was sort of seeing his future, seeing his birth, if you like. It was so vivid and so real to him. And it just passed. And we ever talked about it, you know, just sort of arose and vanished. But for him, it was there. Well, actually, our whole experience is like that, like a hallucination. In the Yoga Chara, they say that what we suffer from is what we have, is a Buddha, Parikalpa, the unreal imagination. That nothing is real. Everything is imagined. Everything is a sort of projection of our ignorance and of our desires and so on. And we have to remove that cataract of ignorance and these sort of biases, emotional biases, to see what is actually there. I think the Metabarjana is particularly good for this. To remove our kind of, especially our emotional veils, our prejudices and so on. To see what is. Thirdly, a lamp. By a lamp is meant an old, you know, an Indian oil lamp. A wick in a bowl of oil, lighting up the dark in a shallow bowl. A flame, a naked flame glowing, sometimes flickering in the gloom, flickering in the wind. The flame only lasts as long as the fuel is there. It's contingent, dependent upon the fuel. All things, all beings, our life, ourselves are utterly dependent on conditions. When the supports and the conditions break down, the flame is extinguished. And the flame is so fragile. You know, just flickering there in the gloom, in the wind. It's so fragile. A gust of wind can snuff it out. Life is so precarious, so insubstantial, easily extinguished. So here we need to meditate on the impermanence of things. We need to light another kind of lamp, the inexhaustible lamp of the dharma, and light up things as they are for the benefit of all. And thought fourthly, a mock show. Mock show is translation of Maya, the magician's illusion. They love this image and the perfection of wisdom. The Indian musician, the musician, the kundra, comes to town, comes to the crossroads near the village, and somehow, incredibly, he conjures up a scene with armies and charging elephants and people cutting each other down. An incredible scene in the whole audience is just amazed at this extraordinary display. And then it all vanishes. There's just the magician, the kundra, just there. And they've gone through this whole thing, completely drawn in. But then it all vanishes. We shouldn't push the simile too far and think of, you know, the magician as some sort of creator god or something like that. That's not the point. The simile is really concerned with the unreality of what is produced, or rather the display, the magical display of what's produced. We're convinced of the solidity, the veracity of ourselves, our world, and our experiences, inner and outer. But if we examine closely, if we really look, if we look with that eye of appreciation, we won't find a substance. What we'll see is a magical display. The word "maya" also has associations with art. And in Buddhism, it's in Hinduism. Maya is often used to translate as delusion. It's associated with delusion. But, "Mayana, don't see it like that." They don't see it like that. They say, "Well, that's just the way it is." It's like an art, a magnificent display, which you can enjoy and appreciate, but you don't buy into it. You don't get caught up with it. You sort of play in this, with this wonderful arising and seizing, which, of course, is really a no arising at all. And here, in your instructive, particularly in the Vadriyana with the visualization practice, you see the deity, the Buddha or Bodhisattva, as like a magician's illusion, as real as possible, completely vivid, powerfully vivid, but luminous, transparent, insubstantial, and after the meditation you're instructed to see everything like that. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
