And from the perspective of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or worldview with new ground rules. These interpretations not only miss the meaning of emptiness but also keep the mind from getting into the proper mode. So in all these scenarios, the whole idea of training the mind seems futile and pointless. By focusing on the question of whether or not there really is something behind experience, they entangle the mind in issues that keep it from getting into the present mode.
Now, stories and worldviews do serve a purpose. The Buddha employed them when teaching people, but he never used the word emptiness when speaking in these modes. And he described the basic principles that underlie the round of rebirth to show how bad intentional actions lead to pain within that round, good ones lead to pleasure, while really skillful actions can rake you beyond the round altogether.
In all these cases, these teachings were aimed at getting people to focus on the quality of the perceptions and intentions in their minds in the present—in other words, to get them into the emptiness mode. Once there, they could use the teachings on emptiness for their intended purpose: to loosen all attachments to views, stories, and assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all the greed, anger; and delusion, and thus empty of suffering and stress.
A tree is a dharma. A cloud is a dharma. The sunshine is a dharma. Everything that can be conceived of is a dharma. There is a lot of joy in this statement. It means nothing can be born, nothing can die.
Avalokita has said something extremely important. Every day in our lives, we see birth and we see death. When a person is born, a birth certificate is printed for them. After they die, a death certificate is made. These certificates confirm the existence of birth and death. What is the date on which you were born, your birth date? Before that date, did you already exist? Were you already there before you were born?
Let me help you. To be born means from nothing you become something. My question is, before you were born, were you already there? Suppose a hen is about to lay an egg. Before she gives birth, do you think the egg is already there?
Yes, of course. It is inside. You also were inside before you were outside. That means that before you were born, you already existed—inside your mother. The fact is that if something is already there, it does not need to be born.
If you are already something, what is the use of being born? So, your so-called birthday is really your continuation day. If we go back nine months to the time of our conception, we have a better date to put on our birth certificates.
In China, and also in Vietnam, when you are born, you are already considered one year old. But the question remains: Even before that date, did you exist or not? Before your conception, you were there already, maybe half in your father, half in your mother. Because from nothing, we can never become something.
Can you name one thing that was once a nothing? A cloud? Do you think that a cloud can be born out of nothing? Before becoming a cloud, it was water, maybe flowing as a river. It was not nothing. Do you agree? We cannot conceive of the birth of anything. There is only continuation. Please look back even further and you will see that you not only exist in your father and mother, but you also exist in your grandparents and your great-grandparents.
As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. This is not poetry; it is science. Why do I say that in a former life I was a cloud? Because I am still a cloud. Without the cloud, I cannot be here. I am the cloud, the river, and the air at this very moment, so I know that in the past I have been a cloud, a river, and the air.
And I was a rock. I was the minerals in the water. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on Earth. We have been gas, sunshine, water, fungi, and plants.
We have been single-celled beings. The Buddha said that in one of his former lives, he was a tree. He was a fish; he was a deer. These are not superstitious things. Every one of us has been a cloud, a deer, a bird, a fish, and we continue to be these things, not just in former lives.
This is not just the case with birth. Nothing can be born, and also nothing can die. That is what Avalokita said. Do you think that a cloud can die? To die means that from something you become nothing. Do you think that we can make something a nothing? Let us go back to our sheet of paper. We may have the illusion that to destroy it, all we have to do is light a match and burn it up.
But if we burn a sheet of paper, some of it will become smoke, and the smoke will rise and continue to be. The heat that is caused by the burning paper will enter into the cosmos and penetrate other things. The heat is the next life of the paper. The ash that is formed will become part of the soil, and the sheet of paper, in his or her next life, might be a cloud and a rose at the same time. We have to be very careful and attentive in order to realize that this sheet of paper has never been born and it will never die.
It can take on other forms of being, but we are not capable of transforming a sheet of paper into nothingness. Everything is like that, even you and I.
We are not subject to birth and death. One autumn day I was in a park, absorbed in the contemplation of a very small but beautiful leaf in the shape of a heart. Its color was almost red, and it was barely hanging on the branch, nearly ready to fall down.
I spent a long time with it, and I asked the leaf a lot of questions. I found out the leaf had been a mother to the tree. Usually we think that the tree is the mother and the leaves are just children, but as I looked at the leaf I saw that the leaf is also a mother to the tree. The sap that the roots take up is only water and minerals, not good enough to nourish the tree, so the tree distributes that sap to the leaves.
The leaves take the responsibility of transforming that rough sap into refined sap and, with the help of the sun and gas, sending it back in order to nourish the tree. Therefore, the leaves are also the mother to the tree. And since the leaf is linked to the tree by a stem, the communication between them is easy to see. We do not have a stem linking us to our mother anymore, but when we were in her womb we had a very long stem, an umbilical cord. The oxygen and the nourishment we needed came to us through that stem.
Unfortunately, on the day we call our birthday, it was cut and we received the illusion that we are independent. Actually emptiness is not a state of mind at all; it is, as the Dalai Lama says, simply "the true nature of things and events. Whether the mind of the meditator is full of thoughts or empty of them, this true nature holds. Finally, since emptiness seems so difficult to understand, why did the Buddha teach it at all?
It is because of his profound insight into why we suffer. Ultimately we suffer because we grasp after things thinking they are fixed, substantial, real and capable of being possessed by ego. It is only when we can see through this illusion and open ourselves, in Ari Goldfield's words, "to the reality of flux and fluidity that is ultimately ungraspable and inconceivable" that we can relax into clarity, compassion and courage. That lofty goal is what makes the effort to understand emptiness so worthwhile.
News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. Part of HuffPost Religion.
0コメント