In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Emptiness and#8211; A Strategy for Being,and#8221; Samantabhadri expertly and imaginatively tackles the theme of Wisdom, using the verses in the third section of Tsongkhapaand#8217;s short text on the and#8220;Three Principle Aspects of the Pathand#8221;.
Excerpted from the talk, and#8216;The Path of the Buddhaand#8217;s Delightand#8217;, this is part of a three part series all based on Tsongkhapaand#8217;s text, and given on the 2009 UK Womenand#8217;s Order Mitra Event.
Given at Taraloka, May 2009
[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. For the third verse, the apparent, the infallible condition, co-production, and the void, free of predication, the two understandings, as long as they appear separate, as so long as the sages thought still unrealized. And this sounds complicated, but beyond the complication, it takes us into the mystery of life itself. The apparent is form, the void is shunyatta, which we tend to translate as emptiness, not the best translation, and it can make us at once remember the line from the heart sutra. Form is only emptiness, emptiness only form, so they are not separate. And I felt we glimpsed a bit of this when we were looking at those cards on the first morning, and I was remembering Mokshilila and the cobweb. And you talked about magic and mystery, didn't you, and held up this picture of this cobweb? It was quite real, but also quite sort of translucent. And as we have a deeper response to our experience, we see these things more. So things are vividly present, truly there, and yet there's nothing there. So we can see all the beauty of a flower, of a cobweb, it's so real, it's so alive, it's what life is, but simultaneously it has no fixed existence, it's there, and it's not there. And that's the mystery of life itself, and it's here, now, every moment. And sometimes we do glimpse a little bit more. You actually see, you see the beauty more, you see the vibrancy more, the poppies are brighter, the cobweb is a little more luminous, and we have that sense that form is only emptiness, emptiness only form. A couple of times I'm engaged with a teaching, or interpretation which comes from Sagramati, he's probably one of our main scholars in the movement, and he talks about conditionality as a mystery. And he talks about the mystery of change, he calls it magic, it's his phrase as well. Because we can produce all the scientific analysis we might like, we can describe the fact, but fundamentally we can never actually explain change, how a leaf withers and forces the ground, how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, how a tiny seed in a stagnant pool becomes a lotus blossom. That's magic, just magic, and we cannot really explain that. But in some way, shunny et al holds that. And within that magic we can also say how a human being becomes enlightened, because we have the spiritual or transcendental name as well. So I'm ranging round a bit, I haven't got onto this thread, I mean the truths of impermanence and insubstantiality do mean that our potential is eternal, because there are no endings, and our potential is endless because there are no boundaries. And only the endings and the boundaries that we fabricate for ourselves. And so shunny et al, which is a kind of infinite network of changing, mutually supporting conditions. And that is also conditionality, so it's that vast network that we can't quite understand, or can't at all understand actually, holding it all, holding all those nearness, holding all those connections, whatever is beyond and beyond, and beyond is shunny et al. But fortunately Banter gives some descriptions of this in an excellent essay called The Way of Entiness in Crossing the Stream. He describes it, "Each into all, all into each, and all into all, like the unimpeded interpenetration of innumerable beings of light." And he says that this is penetrating everything that exists and being penetrated by everything. And he says, "This mutual penetration is liberation, is happiness." There's a whole emotional content there as well. And then one more quotation. "The universe no longer appears as an unchanging system of static things and rigid relations, but as a delightfully free and fluid interplay of constantly changing terms. It is not so much that reality changes, but that reality is change. Reality is change. Reality is condition-coop reduction." And again we have glimpses, won't we? The mist lying on the field in the early morning. The bell resonating in the shrine room until the tone just fades out and fades out and fades out in the atmosphere. Plates passing between hands, washing up on a good day, looking into someone's eyes at a moment of forgiveness. You know we have glimpses of meaning, and those glimpses mean a lot. And as an ultimate, very subtle, very refined level, this is the emptiness as a clear blue sky, where the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas appear in the subtlest of forms. Translucent, rare and not there, the thousand armed application of green tower. And they are manifesting out of compassion for the world. So, well where are we now in all of this? Because it is a very big fish, and where are we now in all of this? They are probably still trying to define me, mine, still coming to terms of just being a heap. And the useful, well, such an important figure to go back to here is Nagarjina, an absolutely primary thinker, it's very strong influence on Sankarpar, and also in the perfection of wisdom tradition, so the same tradition as the heart sutra. And he says some really, really helpful things, yeah. So he says, well, all we have are experiences, all we have is that something happens, you know, the cobweb happens, the caterpillar happens, all we have are experiences, which he calls contingencies. So, Shunya Ta is not a state, it's not a thing, and it's not nothing. And he describes it as a way of being, a strategy for living, a way of seeing and feeling. And I'm taking this really from the analysis given by Stephen Bakshala, and the introduction to verses from the centre, where he's talking about Nagarjina. And within that, I mean, is an effective working model. And of course, we have a kind of existence, of course there's something there. It's not a fixed self, and it's not no self. And Nagarjina's interpretation is that it's a relational self, we exist in relationship. So we definitely have a sense of being, but we need to carry it lightly. And he says, "Shunya Ta is living in a world of ease, living in a world of ease, and that happiness which Banti mentioned in the previous quotation." We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebutestaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
