Buddhas required – apply within

In general, the mind of enlightenment (Skt. bodhichitta) is the wish to attain enlightenment in order to free all living beings permanently from their suffering. Sitting here in the Rockies last week, like you do, reading The Mirror of Dharma, I was struck by how Venerable Geshe Kelsang described it:

Bodhichitta is the mind that spontaneously wishes to attain enlightenment to benefit each and every living being every day.

We need to have a sense of what that might mean and how it could work, I was thinking, in order to develop bodhichitta. And how can we imagine ourself benefiting each and every living being every day if – still fast asleep in the dreams of mistaken appearances – we believe that we are all inherently existent? How could a real suffering person ever benefit all the other real suffering people, let alone every day? Where would you even begin? There are way too many of them, for a start.

Carrying on from this article: Wake up and stay awake.

Once we come to understand emptiness, we understand that living beings, most thankfully, are not inherently existent. Not even an atom of them exists from its own side or objectively.  Living beings exist only in dependence upon the mind imputing them, they exist for thought.

If we use our wisdom to go looking for an inherently existent living being, suffering or otherwise, we’ll find only their absence, as explained more here for example. This doesn’t mean that living beings are not experiencing suffering – they are, and that’s why compassion is imperative. But, as Venerable Geshe-la has explained, there are no inherently existent suffering beings.

Omniscient wisdom

From the section called “The Union of the Two Truths” in How to Transform Your Life:

When something such as our body appears to us, both the body and the inherently existent body appear simultaneously. This is dualistic appearance, which is subtle mistaken appearance. Only Buddhas are free from such mistaken appearances.

For someone who has gotten rid of all traces of mistaken appearance and is abiding in reality,  all living beings are mere appearance to their mind of great bliss and emptiness. Living beings do not falsely seem to exist in any way above and beyond mere name, from their own side, or objectively. Within that omniscient wisdom is both the universal compassion and the ability to reach each and every living being every day with blessings and emanations. Indeed, it is impossible for a Buddha to ever be separated from any living being, even for a nano-second.

The view from here

 Whenever I’m not feeling lazy or attached, etc, there isn’t anything I’d rather do with my life than figure this all out and become someone who can reach each and every living being every day. It’s hard to come up with a more meaningful job, wouldn’t you say? But to pull this off I first need to wake myself up and not keep falling back to sleep. I need to wake up and stay awake. And I have to try to be immensely skillful and patient and not jump the gun because most people, unsurprisingly, don’t react very well to being told, “Wake up! This isn’t real!” Better to lead with breathing meditation, Buddha nature, compassion, and so on 😆

Though having said that, I already have an exception to that rule … weirdly enough I was writing this yesterday at an AirBnB where I had gone for a couple of days solitude and meditation in the mountains. But it was a room in a shared house and I soon found myself – at first a bit reluctantly to be ironic (given that I literally just said I want to reach each and every living being every day) – pulled into what was going on with my host and fellow guests. All of whom, I might say, made me feel like a couch potato by comparison. Pretty much half my age (that’s my excuse), one of them had come from Houston to race his bike up and down miles of steep mountainside as a rather vigorous July 4 celebration, and the other couple from Parker were hiking the 12,000 feet-tall Five Peaks outside Breckenridge with 35lb rucksacks on their back (complete with tough bear-proof containers and knives). And to think I’d been feeling adventurous for stuffing my bike into the car, driving comfortably into the mountains, and pootling around town …

Anyway, I digress … on my day “off”, one of the two guests called Ryan saw a picture of Geshe-la on my screen just as I was about to write this article surreptitiously on the deck. “Who’s that?” Turns out Parker Ryan (as I shall call him) studied Tibetan Buddhism for a little while and likes to meditate on everything being one. Then he sat down and peppered me with questions and his own ideas, including the possible sentience of trees and fungi; and before long I was taking another deep dive with two perfect strangers into how everything is interrelated and the nature of consciousness. All to the accompaniment of a very spacey mountain view. After a while, Houston Ryan came outside: “That’s some pretty deep conversations going on out here, man! I was trying to do some stuff on the computer but was listening to you instead.” Like Parker Ryan said, no coincidences that he and Loren and me all booked last minute yesterday into the same guest house. (If you’re reading this, hello).

Not quite the trip I’d anticipated, but wonderfully interconnected nonetheless. Like fungi.

Talk about deep …

In Request to the Lord of all Lineages, there are a few incredibly deep verses on emptiness. To understand these fully requires us to study the long chapters on emptiness in the other books; but here is one of them anyway:

The phenomena that I normally see or perceive
Are deceptive – created by mistaken minds.
If I search for the reality of what I see,
There is nothing there that exists – I perceive only empty like space.

When people first hear Buddha’s wisdom teachings, many assume that there’s an objective world that we’re all being subjective about. That’s a start, but Buddha is being far more radical than that – there is no objective world (or self or mind or even emptiness) anywhere at all. Everything is mere appearance to mind. And that means that it IS possible to help each and every living being every day.

Realizing emptiness is going to be sheer bliss. As Venerable Geshe-la says in Essential Insights into the Avalokiteshvara Sadhana:

With this experience, throughout our life we will always be relaxed, experience joy and peace, and everything will be wonderful.

If you get a chance to read that whole section in The Mirror of Dharma, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Out of time. Final installment is here: Is there anybody out there?! I’d love to read your comments.