Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;The Nearness of Tara,and#8221; is an excerpt from the talk, and#8220;Contemplating the Qualities of the Tathagatasand#8221; by Samantabhadri, given at Taraloka in February, 2010.
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
The Nearness of Tara
[Music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [Music] So I'd like to say something about the leoness of Tara. We're here, it's Tara Loka, Tara as well. Tara could be so close. This is one of the places in the world dedicated to her. I don't know how many there are, but this is one of them, and it's special, and it's Europe, and it's 21st century. So how could she turn away? She is our protector. And there's much that we can contemplate. The roof is here, a tanker, a mantra is charted again and again in this space. It's inscribed in the fabric of the building. There's a meditation cabin in the landscape looking out, looking out in every direction. It's surrounded by greenness. I will open a lot about greenness. The cabin's surrounded by greenness, and that will soon be the vibrant greenness of May and April. But her greenness is more vibrant than that, and less substantial than that. And there's also a little lake among the wildflowers, a lake the shape of a teardrop. And she was born from a lake of tears, in a way she inhabits this landscape. And she is that compassion that is born in response to suffering. She is fearless, the confident raised hand, nothing gets in her way, the foot ready to step out. And she's supremely beautiful, her face expresses her virtues, her eyes are deeply, deeply loving, it's very human. The jeweled hand, the delicately curved foot, the half-spile of compassion, because it holds suffering and it holds love. And this is the human, and it's most beautiful, at its fullest potential. So we can say that green Tara is the faithful one, the saviouress, if you like, rowing across magical waters, heroically ferrying beings from Samsara to Nirvana, to the further shore. And on one level that's not a hairsbreads the way, and on another it's a mythic sea journey with the protectress. And even as daylight can give way to moonlight, she can also become white. So contemplating the virtues, what Banti says are the virtues that are not just ethical, they're spiritual qualities, which means that they arise from insight, similar to Kudaprabha's point about compassion yesterday. This is virtues on a different level. And the word contemplate, well the main meanings of contemplate are to consider, to look at attentively, to meditate on, or study. And the word contemplate, or were contemplative, had the kind of spiritual resonance to it. So with this factor we deeply engage with the qualities of the enlightened ones in the context of our going for refuge, and our faith that enlightened them is real. And I think that contemplation is like the three levels of wisdom. So we initially engage with our senses, we read, we look, we listen, we think, we hear. Padma Samavore says, listen, listen, we start with our senses. And then in some way we reflect, we take this more deeply, so it begins to modify our being. And an idea is at third level, at the deepest level, the level of wisdom, we become one with the experience. And at that level we would merge with the Bodhisattva. So with all of this, all these levels are actually developing something very positive, because we're turning our samskaras towards the good. We're directing our samskaras towards the positive, we're creating very positive samskaras. So we're trying, working to transform our minds. And to do that, we're drawing on our human faculties, and particularly the imagination, the imagination in its fullest meaning, the deepest meaning. So our imagination is the faculty that sees how things are. So it sees ordinary reality, it sees conditioned existence, it sees the suffering of all beings. But it's also more visionary, it sees the whole landscape. It gives us glimpses of how things can be. The possibilities of the transcendental, our potential, what we are, what we can become. So imagination holds samsara and Nirvana. And I think, or I was thinking about this talk, it's probably a close link between imagination and intuition. That deeper knowing, coming from the way that we're in touch with life. And maybe that's the ground swell, maybe that's the undercurrent that Steve in direct imagination checks it out. So this is taking us into the territory of myth and symbol, deeper ways of understanding and realising to reach a deeper truth. And with all of this, well there's a momentum, there's a volition there, because there's a sense of our potential. I think there's a yearning, there's a heart, wish. We know the darkness, we know the unsatisfactorness. But we long to be what we could become, the Bodhisattva into Thargata. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]