Welcome to the first installment of our new Dharmabytes podcast, where Free Buddhist Audio serves up a bite-sized portion of Dharma from the wealth of audio talks in our archives. In this excerpt from Sangharakshitaand#8217;s talk and#8220;The Buddha, God and#038; Reality,and#8221; he clarifies the gap between the clouded lenses of space and time through which we see the world and the and#8216;clear visionand#8217; that comes with Enlightenment, as achieved by the Buddha.
Talk given in 1966. Part of the series Introducing Buddhism.
[music] Dharma Vites 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] Now to come back to another very important reflection of Buddhist thought, and even a metaphysical thought in the West, time and space are not things in themselves. We usually think of time and space as things in themselves. We think of spaces as a sort of box within which things move about. We think of time as a sort of tunnel along which things move. But they're not really like that. Time and space are really forms of our perception. We see things, we perceive things under the form of time. We perceive them under the form of space and so on. And things, when we see them or phenomena, when we see them through the spectacles of space, through the spectacles of time, when we experience them through these dimensions, then we speak of these things as a phenomena. And these phenomena make up the world of relative existence, of conditioned existence, or what Buddhist call the samsara. But when we enter this outer dimension, when we enter the dimension of eternity, then we go beyond time and beyond space. And therefore we go beyond phenomena, which are only realities as seen under the forms of space and time. So we go beyond the world, we go beyond samsara, and in the Buddhist idiom, we enter nirvana, or in the Hindu idiom, we go from darkness to light, from the unreal to the real, from death to immortality. Now often, enlightenment is described as awakening to the truth of things, described in terms of knowledge and vision of reality, seeing things as they really are, not as they appear, seeing things in their truth, seeing things free from any veils, free from any obscurations, seeing them without being influenced or affected by our own assumptions, our own psychological conditionings, just seeing them with perfect objectivity as they are, not only seeing them, but if you like, becoming one with them, becoming one with reality, or one with the reality of things. So the Buddha, the one who is awoken to this truth, the one who, as it were, exists out of time, in this dimension of eternity, may be regarded therefore as reality itself in human form. The form is human, but the substance, if you like, is reality itself. And this is what is meant by saying that the Buddha is an enlightened human being. The form is human, there's a human form, but there isn't the orderly, conditioned human mind, in the places it were, if we can use as an expression, in the place as it were of the conditioned human mind, with all its prejudices and preconceptions and limitations, in the place of that there is reality itself, or the experience, or the awareness of reality. Therefore we say that the Buddha, the enlightened one, is reality in human form, or symbolizes or represents that in human form. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freeBuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
