The Perfection of Wisdom

This is the sixth in a series of six talks on Wisdom given at the London Buddhist Centre in 2000

“Call forth as much as you can of love, of respect and of faith!

Remove the obstructing defilements and clear away all your taints!

Listen to the Perfect Wisdom of the gentle Buddhas,

Taught for the weal of the world, for heroic spirits intended!”

(The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines,trans. E. Conze, p.9)

This is how the teaching of the Ratnagunasamchayagatha begins. The Ratnagunasamchayagatha is one of about thirty five Perfection of Wisdom texts. This verse is important because it tells us how we should approach the whole topic of Perfect Wisdom, in fact, how we should approach the Dharma.

It asks us to cultivate receptivity and to purify ourselves. This applies when we are engaging in study, reading, discussion or listening to talks. “Call forth as much as you can of love, of respect and of faith!” The love, respect and faith are already there, you just need to contact them and bring them to bear in the situation. You already love the Dharma, you already respect its profundity, and you already have faith in its effectiveness. That is why you are practising, that is why you are reading this. You need to contact “as much as you can” of that love, respect and faith. This is what constitutes your receptivity. When you are receptive you can gain much more than when you are in a state of doubt or cynicism. So, the first thing is to be as receptive as possible. Open your heart to the Dharma. What you are really calling forth is positive emotion. You don’t need to be a scholar, you don’t need to have a master’s degree, you don’t need to be highly intelligent, you don’t even need to be literate. But you do need to have sufficient positive emotion to listen to the Dharma. Your heart needs to be open enough to allow the Dharma to enter. For this to happen, you need to purify yourself of unskilful mental states. If you are in a state of ill will or anger or neurotic craving, you need to at least be aware of it and if possible put it to one side while engaging with the Dharma teaching. Even better is to prepare yourself before study or listening to a talk or reading a text by meditating and endeavouring to transform any negative emotions.

When you are prepared, then you can “listen to the Perfect Wisdom of the gentle Buddhas”. You can really listen, that is not just with your ears but also with your heart. This is the advice of the “gentle Buddhas”, the Compassionate Buddhas who want to help you to overcome all suffering. They teach the Dharma, “for the weal of the world”. And finally, the verse says this Perfect Wisdom is “for heroic spirits intended”.

The Dharma changes people, it affects every aspect of your life, no corner is left untouched. This can be a frightening prospect, it can make us feel insecure. Is there not something we can hold on to? Something that can stay unchanged? No, there isn’t. And that’s why we need courage to really listen to and engage with the Dharma. We have to be prepared for anything to happen. We have to be prepared to make unpalatable discoveries about ourselves, we have to be prepared to have our most cherished views and opinions challenged and shattered, we have to be prepared to live by values that the world may ridicule, we have to be prepared to upset people by not living our lives as they want us to, we have to be prepared for radical change in every area of our lives, we have to be prepared for the ego destroying explosion of Perfect Wisdom. This is why the Dharma is “for heroic spirits intended”.

What is the Perfection of Wisdom? Well, on one level it is a whole body of literature comprising, as I said, about thirty five texts. Perhaps the most well known Prajnaparamita texts are the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. There is also the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, which is rendered into verse as the Ratnagunasamcayagatha from which I quoted at the beginning. There are other texts ranging from the Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines to the Perfection of Wisdom in one letter. This Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom literature has all been translated into English due to the efforts of one man, the great scholar Dr. Edward Conze.

The main characteristic of the Prajnaparamita literature is that is totally non-rational. It consists of paradox after paradox and is most frustrating to the rational mind. And this is its intention. It is an all-out attack on literalism. It sets out to destroy all conceptualisation and to thwart the rational mind at every turn. The rational mind will get angry with the Perfection of Wisdom or dismiss it as rubbish. This is another reason why we need to “call forth as much as we can of love, of respect and of faith”. The Diamond Sutra was the first ever printed book, printed in China. It seems fitting that the first text put into print should be the highest teaching known to mankind. It was on hearing the Diamond Sutra being recited in the market place that Hui Neng gained Enlightenment. Hui Neng became the sixth patriarch of the Zen or Chan tradition. He was an illiterate young man at the time but the Diamond Sutra awakened him to the nature of Reality. And it was the Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng which Sangharakshita read at the age of sixteen. And he too experienced an awakening. He says,

“…..when I read the Diamond Sutra I knew that I was a Buddhist. Though this book epitomizes teaching of such rarefied sublimity that even Arahants are said to become confused and afraid when they hear it for the first time, I at once joyfully embraced it with an unqualified acceptance and assent. To me the Diamond Sutra was not new. I had known it and believed it and realized it ages before and the reading of the Sutra as it were awoke me to the existence of something I had forgotten.”

(Sangharakshita, Complete Works, vol.20, p.85)

So, we in the Triratna Buddhist Order and Community can be very grateful to the Perfection of Wisdom and especially to the Diamond Sutra. Our whole Order and Movement is a part of the unfolding of that realisation Sangharakshita had at the age of sixteen. We are spiritual children of the Perfection of Wisdom.

The Heart Sutra contains the essence of the Prajnaparamita teachings. That is why it’s called the ‘Heart’ Sutra, it is the heart of the Prajnaparamita. The Heart Sutra is a teaching on Shunyata, it expresses an Insight into Shunyata. That is in fact what the whole Prajnaparamita literature is about. It is all about Shunyata. Sangharakshita, in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, has said that the Sutra consists essentially of six statements. So we will look at these briefly. The Heart Sutra is the dialogue between the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and Sariputra. Avalokitesvara is, of course, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, so we might wonder why he turns up here to deliver the heart of the Perfection of Wisdom teachings. And that is an opportunity for us to reflect yet again on the essential unity of Wisdom and Compassion. Sariputra was one of the chief disciples of the historical Buddha. He was noted for his wisdom. In the later sutras, the Mahayana sutras, Sariputra is often made to represent the degeneration and rigidity of scholastic Buddhism. So here he represents a lesser kind of wisdom, intellectual wisdom or literalistic wisdom and Avalokitesvara represents the Wisdom of the Enlightened mind, the Wisdom of direct experience of Reality. In this conversation, Sariputra, the lesser wisdom, does not say anything. In the face of the Wisdom of the Awakened mind, all lower wisdom is rendered mute. In the Heart Sutra, Avalokitesvara makes six statements.

The first statement is that the five skandhas are empty. The five skandhas are the basic constituents of all existence, whether things or people, and this statement is saying that there is nothing else behind or beyond them, no soul or self. Everything is included in the five skandhas, material form, feelings, perceptions, volitions and consciousness. There is nothing else in the universe apart from these, nothing independent of them and hey are empty of any ‘self’ or ‘soul’. The second statement is that all Dharmas are empty. This needs some explanation. The Abhidharma tradition of Buddhism, which is the more intellectual, analytic tradition, compiled a huge and complex classification of all existence, breaking everything down into ever smaller units and eventually they arrived at what they thought of as the basic units of existence, the irreducible elements, that couldn’t be broken down any further. These units or elements they called dharmas. So when Avalokitesvara says all dharmas are empty, he is dismissing this whole vast compilation, as a delusion; a very subtle delusion but a delusion nevertheless. Basically, he is saying it is not possible to give a systematic philosophic or scientific account of Reality. Reality is beyond and above any ideas about Reality. In our poetic version of the Heart Sutra, this statement is rendered as “All things are by nature void”.

The third statement of Avalokitesvara is that in Shunyata no dharmas exist. This reiterates what has already been said in a slightly different form. It is saying that Reality is devoid of concepts and ideas. Reality is something other than anything we say or think about it. The fourth statement in the Sutra takes various categories of Buddhist thought, various lists and so on and says there is nothing ultimately valid about them. This is again similar to the last two statements. It is saying that all ideas, even Buddhist ideas are not Reality. They are not ends in themselves. The Dharma is a raft to cross to the other shore or a finger pointing at the moon. What the other shore is or what the moon is, is another matter and cannot be squeezed into any categories or lists. The fifth statement says that one becomes a Buddha by relying on Perfect Wisdom, in other words, by having a direct experience of ultimate Reality. The sixth and last statement makes this same point even more strongly by saying that all Buddhas, past, present and future gain Enlightenment through the development of Perfect Wisdom. And the Sutra ends with the Perfection of Wisdom mantra –gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. This mantra is related to the four levels of Shunyata. The mantra is translated by Dr. Conze as meaning, “Gone, Gone, Gone beyond, Gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all hail”.

Let us look at the four levels of Shunyata. The first ‘gate’ refers to the first level of Shunyata, which is called samskrta sunyata. Samskrta means ‘compounded’ or ‘confected’ or simply ‘put together’. Samskrta sunyata means the emptiness of the compounded. Compounded existence is unenlightened existence, also known as Samsara. This level of sunyata is saying that unenlightened existence is empty of the characteristics of Enlightened existence. The characteristics of Enlightened existence are happiness, permanence and ultimate Reality. Compounded or unenlightened existence is empty of these. It is unsatisfactory, impermanent and insubstantial. This level of sunyata says that Samsara is empty of Nirvana and we cannot find in unenlightened existence what only Enlightenment can give us. The second level of sunyata is called asamskrta sunyata. This is the emptiness of the Uncompounded. This is the emptiness of Enlightened existence or of Nirvana. Basically, this is the same as the previous point except from the other side so to speak. It is saying that Nirvana is empty of Samsara, Enlightened existence is empty of the characteristics of unenlightened existence. There is no suffering, no impermanence and no unreality in Enlightened existence.

The third level of sunyata is maha sunyata or ‘great emptiness’. This is the emptiness of any distinction between unenlightened existence and Enlightened existence. It is saying there is just one Reality, not two realities. This means that all dualities between Enlightened and unenlightened, Samsara and Nirvana are provisional and pragmatic but not ultimate.

The fourth level of sunyata is sunyata sunyata, the emptiness of emptiness. This is saying that emptiness itself is only a concept. Sunyata is a concept, a word that is pointing to something, is hinting at something, but it is not the experience itself. The experience cannot be described, it is beyond the reach of language. All that is left is silence, perhaps even a ‘thunderous silence’ like that of Vimalakirti in the Vimalakirti Nirdesa. As Sangharakshita puts it in What is the Dharma, “One may be as eloquent and insightful as one likes, but shunyata will always remain ultimately a mystery, even the greatest of all mysteries, so far as the Buddha’s teaching is concerned. It cannot be explained or even described”. After all the words we have silence. After all the talk of Shunyata, shunyata disappears like a bubble.

The Perfection of Wisdom literature is all about sunyata and it is full of paradox. Prajnaparamita cannot be packaged up in words and concepts and perhaps that’s why Prajnaparamita developed into a goddess, a Bodhisattva in female form.

But before we can go on to talk about the Bodhisattva Prajnaparamita, let us just draw a few lessons from the different levels of sunyata. The first two levels of sunyata make a clear distinction between Samsara and Nirvana, unenlightened existence and Enlightened existence. And this is very necessary. We need to make this distinction, we need to think in this way for practical reasons. If unenlightened existence is here and Enlightenment is over there, then we have to get from one to the other. And to get from one to the other we need to take certain steps, we need to do certain things. We need to progress from here to there, from Samsara to Nirvana. This is quite pragmatic and quite necessary, at least until such time as we have more direct insight into Reality. The danger with this is that we may become overly goal orientated and begin to think of Nirvana as something to get to without actually changing ourselves. The pursuit of Nirvana or spiritual bliss could become a substitute for real spiritual practice. Real spiritual practice involves greater and greater awareness of ourselves and the rest of existence. We need to become deeply aware of our motivations, even our motivation for spiritual practice. We need to become deeply aware of the subtleties and nuances of our responses to other people and our responses to events. We need to become deeply aware of the effect we have on the world and the effect the world has on us. We need to constantly probe deeper and develop more and more awareness. In doing this we are actually approaching nearer to Reality but we are not chasing after Reality as if it were something completely external to our life. This is what the third level of sunyata is telling us. Nirvana is to be found in Samsara. Unenlightened existence and Enlightened existence inhabit the same Reality. As the Song of Meditation says, “apart from water, no ice, outside living beings, no Buddhas.”

The fourth level of sunyata is warning us against the dangers of literalism. The tendency of our rational minds is to grasp concepts and fix them. And the Perfection of Wisdom literature is, as it were, on a crusade against literalism. So we arrive at the emptiness of emptiness and silence.

But when the words run out an image arises. It is the image of a mature woman, golden yellow in colour, wearing a tiara with jewels of five colours. She is seated in full lotus posture on a white moon mat, in the centre of a blue lotus. Her hands are in the mudra of teaching. She holds the stem of a lotus in each hand and the lotuses open into blossoms, one at each shoulder. Resting on each lotus is a volume of the Perfection of Wisdom. This is the Bodhisattva Prajnaparamita. There are other forms of Prajnaparamita. Sometimes she is white and sometimes she has four or six or even eleven arms. She may also have a vajra, a sword, a mala and a begging bowl. The mantra associated with Prajnaparamita, as described above is different from the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra, although that mantra is also sometimes associated with the visualised figure. This mantra is ‘om ah dhih hum svaha’ and it cannot be translated into any conceptual form. It is simply a sound symbol of the Perfection of Wisdom.

This is what Vessantara says about meditation on the Bodhisattva Prajnaparamita, whom he refers to as a goddess.

“Regularly performing a sadhana of Prajnaparamita produces an ever deepening involvement with the Wisdom goddess. To start with the goddess becomes a focus for devotion. For men her practice can often absorb the romantic and other feelings that might be evoked by meeting a beautiful, mature woman. For women she is often a figure with which to identify, the most positive of all role models. Thus for both sexes energy can easily be engaged by the meditation, and hence poured into the contemplation of Wisdom.

If this process continues, the practice enters the realm of the archetypal. In Jungian terms, a man may project the highest aspect of his anima, whilst a woman may encounter the Magna Mater. She becomes for the meditator the archetypal Wisdom goddess – found in many traditions. For the Gnostics she was Sophia, for the Greeks Athena. She is found in the Tarot as the High Priestess, wearing a headdress of the crescent moon, and holding a scroll – corresponding to the book of Prajnaparamita.

Prajnaparamita is the Wisdom goddess of India – once described as staggeringly beautiful to the point of being scorching. Her meditation can become a way of experiencing the archetypal beauty of the refined levels of one’s mind. Finally, with faithful practice, she can become far more than that. She can become the experience of transcendental wisdom itself – the transcendence of the world of subject and object.” (Vessantara, Meeting the Buddhas, p 227)

Before we finish I want to repeat two points which have come up many times. Firstly, Perfect Wisdom or Enlightenment is not a rational experience. It is not a matter of gaining knowledge or getting our ideas right. It is something else altogether. It is a direct face-to-face experience with Prajnaparamita and awareness is the key to unlock the mysteries of this experience.

Secondly, Wisdom and Compassion are not different. When Perfect Wisdom acts the activity is Compassionate. When Perfect Wisdom speaks the words are Compassionate. It cannot be otherwise

However, to come back to the level of day to day practice, I think there are two things we can usefully do in order to develop Wisdom and Compassion. The first thing is not to identify with our moods. Our moods are passing things and to develop Insight into the self as a process of change we need to let go of identifying with moods and not take our ups and downs too seriously – not take our centrality in the universe too seriously. In this way we can gradually develop wisdom. The second thing we can do is to practise generosity. This is the most basic spiritual practice and it is the beginnings of Compassion. We need to practise generosity in the small things in order to cultivate the mind of compassion, which is concerned with the spiritual welfare of all.

We have now come to the end of this exploration of Wisdom. We began by looking at Wrong View, Right View and Perfect Vision. Then we went on to explore different ways of attaining Insight. We looked at the stages of the Eightfold Path and the three levels of Wisdom. We took in different perspectives on Realisation, including Stream Entry, Turning about in the Deepest Seat of Consciousness, the Arising of the Bodhicitta and Real Going For Refuge. Then we widened our horizons to take in a view of the four Viparyasas or topsy-turvy views, the three marks of unenlightened existence, the three liberations and the Bodhisattvas known as the family Protectors. We explored the five wisdoms associated with the Mandala of the five Buddhas and now we have just been looking at the Perfection of Wisdom, the Heart Sutra, the four levels of Shunyata and the Bodhisattva goddess Prajnaparamita. We have covered a lot of ground and some of it very quickly indeed. I hope we have gained something from the journey, if only a desire to revisit some of the sights.

The Five Wisdoms

This is the fifth in a series of six talks on Wisdom given at the London Buddhist Centre in 2000

The Buddha can be experienced or perceived in different ways depending on our level of consciousness. The Buddha may be experienced as an historical human figure, subject to the same laws of time, space and conditionality as we are. This is when we operate mainly on the level of the senses. If we are able to enter into higher states of consciousness, states of meditative absorption, we will experience the Buddha more vividly as a spiritual being, resplendent with his Transcendental qualities. This is more like visionary experience. And, if we have a direct realisation of Reality, we become the Buddha and our experience is one of there being no distinction. This is a direct, unmediated experience of the Buddha.

The Buddha that we perceive from the lower, sense-based level of consciousness is known as the Nirmanakaya, the ‘created body’ or ‘body of transformation’. The Buddha that is perceived from the level of meditative absorption is known as the Sambhogakaya, the ‘glorious body’ or ‘body of mutual delight’. And the Buddha that is experienced directly with the eye of Transcendental Wisdom is known as the Dharmakaya, the ‘body of Truth’. This is the Trikaya or three bodies doctrine of Buddhism. In this talk we are particularly concerned with the Buddha as seen with the inner eye of meditative concentration.

A very early example of this in the Buddhist scriptures is the case of Pingiya. Pingiya was a disciple of the Buddha who was too old and infirm to go to visit the Buddha but he told the other monks that he was never apart from the Buddha. He said, “I see him with my mind as if with my eye … I pass the night revering him. Pingiya’s level of awareness was such that he didn’t need to see the Buddha in the flesh so to speak, he could see Him with his heart and mind.

And ever since the death of the Buddha, meditators down the centuries have seen the Buddha with this inner eye. They have seen the ‘glorious body’, the Sambhogakaya. And not everyone has seen exactly the same form. The devotion and temperament and visionary capacities of different meditators have meant that a proliferation of forms of the ‘glorious body’ has been experienced. These come down to us through the tradition as the great assembly of archetypal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The Mandala of the five Jinas is part of this great assembly, a very important and central part, which helps us to see the whole assembly more clearly. Each of the five Buddhas is the head of a family of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. This gives a pattern to this great proliferation of visionary forms. And this pattern is the pattern of the human psyche on its deepest level. The Mandala of the five Buddhas is a Mandala of our mind, when our mind is free from delusion. This is the great archetypal pattern and by contemplating the five Buddhas, meditating and reflecting on them, we can come to gain a deeper knowledge of ourselves and of the workings of consciousness.

Each Buddha represents or emphasises an aspect of Enlightened awareness. Each has a rich symbolism involving colour, sound, gesture, emblems and animals. Each Buddha is accompanied by a female consort, who symbolises the Wisdom or Prajna of that particular Buddha. And each has an attendant family of of Bodhisattvas. This whole Mandala is a profusion of fascinating, beautiful, rich symbolism which can draw us up to a higher level of consciousness when we engage with it. A mandala has been defined by Snellgrove as: “a circle of symbolic forms … one symbol at the centre, which represents absolute truth itself and other symbols arranged at the various points of the compass, which represent manifested aspects of this same truth". ( Buddhist Texts Through the Ages, ed. E. Conze, p. 246/248) At the centre of the Mandala of the five Jinas is Vairocana, the white Buddha and arranged around him at the points of the compass are Akshobya in the East, Ratnasambhava in the South, Amitabha in the West and Amoghasiddhi in the North. The Mandala is traditionally entered from the East, which is depicted at the bottom in a two-dimensional representation.

The first Buddha we encounter then is Akshobya, the Buddha of the Eastern quarter. The Wisdom of Akshobya is known as the Mirror-like Wisdom. A mirror reflects everything just as it is. Pleasant objects don’t stick to the mirror nor are unpleasant objects repulsed by it. A mirror is completely objective, it reflects what is there. The Enlightened mind is like this too in that it does not respond with clinging or aversion to anything. The Enlightened mind is aware of the insubstantial, impermanent nature of all things and, therefore, responds with complete equanimity and imperturbability to everything. Akshobya’s name means ‘the Imperturbable’. The Enlightened mind is objective in that it relates to what is really there without adding any ideas or concepts. We tend to have so many ideas, preconceptions, assumptions and emotional biases that we rarely relate to the objective situation. We are more likely to be relating to a creation of our own deluded minds. So this Mirror-like Wisdom of Akshobya reminds us of the importance of objectivity. We need to try to be objective about ourselves, about other people and about events. Often these days we are so affected by the norms in the world about us that we have a very one sided view of ourselves, a distorted view. For instance, many people think of themselves as a problem. I was recently reading something by the American psychotherapist and mystic, Suzanne Segal, which illustrated this from her experience. She writes, “…. the negative is usually taken to be the truth. After all, the negative is so compelling and seems so deep. The positive is regarded as superficial and temporary, but, ah, the negative! When it arises, we believe we’re really in the presence of truth.

Connecting with others in our Western therapeutic culture is often based on a sharing of problems. When someone refuses to reveal what is most difficult in their lives, they are said to be ‘withholding or ‘cut-off’ or ‘untrustworthy’. When their problems are known, however, they are thought to be revealing the truth about themselves.

This overvaluing of the negative is rampant in our culture. Just about every person who sits across from me in my office and speaks to me about their lives believes that what is negative about them is most true. They are convinced that they carry something rotten at their core, that they are bad deep down, and that they will always return to the negative, which is the real bottom line.” (Suzanne Segal,Collision With the Infinite, p. 153)

Objectivity sees things clearly, sees thoughts as thoughts, feelings as feelings and so on, without any need for interpretations, assumptions or labelling.

Akshobya’s mudra or gesture is known as the bhumisparsa mudra or earth-touching gesture. This hearkens back to an incident in the symbolic account of the Buddha’s life when, on the verge of Enlightenment, he is tempted and taunted by Mara. Mara represents all the forces of the psyche that resist Reality. Mara is first of all aggressive trying to arouse fear in the Buddha. When this is unsuccessful, Mara tries to tempt the Buddha into sensual pleasure. When that fails, he tries to engender doubt in the Buddha. He says, “who are you to sit here on the Vajrasana, the throne of the Enlightened ones, what right have you to sit here?” In effect he’s saying, “who do you think you are?” The Buddha’s response is to touch the earth and call forth the Earth Goddess, Vasundhara, as a witness that he has been a Bodhisattva for lifetimes and it is, therefore, fitting that he should be there. In the more prosaic accounts of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, it simply says that he remembered all his previous lifetimes. The significance of this in terms of Akshobya is that it is another aspect of being objective. There is no boasting or false modesty, just recognition of the situation as it is.

We can learn from this and, especially where we experience doubts about the benefits of Dharma practice or lack of confidence in ourselves, we can touch the earth of our own experience and endeavour to be objective about what is actually happening and what has actually happened. We can recall how we have changed, we can reflect on our abilities and qualities and put the Mara of doubt to flight with an objective appraisal of the real state of affairs.

The emblem of Akshobya is the vajra and he is the head of the Vajra family of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The vajra is the diamond thunderbolt of a mind that is not bewildered by subjective biases and clouded by delusion. The vajra goes straight to the heart of things, straight to the objective truth, you could say. The Wisdom of Akshobya, the Mirror-like Wisdom is the objective, unbiased, imperturbable Wisdom and, as we contemplate Akshobya, we can feel the longing for this Wisdom to arise in our own hearts. And, as we practice ethics and meditation inspired by Akshobya’s symbolism, we can become clearer and more objective and begin to experience the calm of equanimity.

Moving around the Mandala in a clockwise direction we come next to Ratnasambhava, the Buddha of the South. Ratnasambhava’s Wisdom is the Wisdom of Equality or Sameness (Samatajnana). This is the Wisdom that sees the same Reality in all beings and has the same attitude to all, the same love and Compassion for all. This serves to remind us that Wisdom and Compassion are not really to be distinguished at this level. The Wisdom of Equality rains down Compassion equally on all beings, just as in the White Lotus Sutra the Dharma is seen as raining down on all equally. The Wisdom of Equality does not relate to people on the basis of any limited identity. It does not relate to people on the basis of nationality, ethnic background, skin colour, sexual preference, gender, size, shape, looks, likes or dislikes. The Wisdom of Equality relates on the basis of common humanity and even more primarily, on the basis of the common Reality of all – the common impermanence and insubstantiality and the common potential for spiritual Insight.

The Mudra or gesture of Ratnasambhava is the varada or giving mudra of the open hand. Ratnasambhava gives unstintingly because the Enlightened mind is abundant and rich, overflowing with a wealth of creativity. The emblem is a jewel, symbol of richness. Ratnasambhava symbolises the Three Jewels which are an inexhaustible treasure of spiritual riches. Ratnasambhava is associated with the human realm and with the transformation of pride into the Wisdom of Sameness. Pride or making comparisons is the big failing of the human realm and the Wisdom which sees the common Reality and common humanity of all overcomes this tendency. Also, the activity of giving replaces the tendency to make comparisons with a more genuine awareness of others and their needs.

Ratnasambhava is yellow in colour. This is a very bright, alive colour that expresses something of the exuberance and energy that is released by the Wisdom of Equality. Ratnasambhava sees the whole universe as one great dance of joy that we are invited to join. All we have to lose is our limitations, our fears and our egotistic madness. We are invited to be expansive, outgoing, giving, joyful, alive, and vibrant with no holding back.

If we come under the influence of Ratnasambhava we will be encouraged to let go of all tightness, whether mentally, emotionally, verbally or even financially and we will be urged to give and give and give.

When the Wisdom of Equality starts to have an effect on us, we are moved away from any tendency to have a poverty mentality and we begin to experience the wealth mentality, which has no fears and is able to give, without even having any sense of giving. Giving becomes so natural, so ordinary, that it is no more thought of as something special than breathing or eating. According to Vessantara, the Wisdom of Sameness “is a strong, positive identification with all life”. From this perspective, to live is to give.

Moving on around the Mandala, we come to Amitabha, the Buddha of the West. Amitabha’s Wisdom is the All-Distinguishing Wisdom. This Wisdom means that the Enlightened mind sees the uniqueness of things, sees the differences. This balances the Wisdom of Sameness. The Enlightened mind is aware of the sameness and differences of beings simultaneously. To refer again to the parable of the rain cloud from the White Lotus Sutra, the rain of the Dharma falls equally on all beings, but all grow according to their own nature. Temperament or personality changes but is unique at the same time. Even Enlightened ones retain their personality differences. A well known example in the Pali Canon is the good friends Sariputra and Maudgalyayana. You are all no doubt familiar with the story of the yaksha who hit Sariputra over the head while he was meditating. Maudgalyayana was looking on and couldn’t believe that Sariputra could just carry on meditating after such a blow. Later he asked Sariputra if he felt anything and Sariputra complained of a slight headache. He, in his turn, was astonished that Maudgalyayana could actually see a yaksha. He couldn’t even see a mud-sprite himself. So, these two Awakened ones were very different, each unique in his qualities and abilities. In the chapter two we looked at the three types of individual, the faith-follower, the dharma-follower and the Body Witness and this classification also gives us an intimation of how individuals develop according to their own unique temperament. Another example of very different Enlightened masters from the Tibetan tradition are Milarepa, who could be said to be a faith follower, and Tsong Khupa, who was more like a Dharma follower. So, this All-Distinguishing Wisdom reminds us of our uniqueness and the uniqueness of all beings.

We could say that to have a real appreciation of our uniqueness is self-metta. This is different from feeling special in an egotistic way, which is probably just an over-compensation for a sense of hollowness or inferiority. A real appreciation of our uniqueness is more objective, like the earth-touching of Akshobya. Many people feel unloved or unlovable and this can lead to a sort of insatiable craving out of desperation to find some security and satisfaction. This is the state of the beings in the realm of hungry ghosts (pretas). These are depicted in the Wheel of Life as having large bellies and small mouths so that they are never fully nourished, never satisfied. Amitabha is associated with this realm. The Compassion of Amitabha, which is conjoined with the All-Distinguishing Wisdom, loves all beings for themselves, for their uniqueness. This can serve to help them appreciate their uniqueness more and so get a sense of being lovable and loved.

Amitabha is red, which is the colour of love and compassion. His mudra is the Dhyana or meditation mudra. Meditation helps us to become more and more aware so that we can see ourselves and others more clearly, so that we can begin to grasp our uniqueness and the uniqueness of others and simultaneously see the common Reality and potential for Insight that is the common human heritage. When we come under the influence of Amitabha, our hearts open in love and compassion and we affectionately appreciate the details and subtleties of difference that are everywhere in life and especially in all the individuals we meet.

Moving on now, we come to Amoghasiddhi, the Buddha of the North. His name means “unobstructed success” and his Wisdom is the All-Performing Wisdom. This is the aspect of the Enlightened mind which acts spontaneously for the benefit of all beings. Every means are used to help beings to progress spiritually. The All-Performing Wisdom represents a fearless outpouring of Compassionate activity, whenever and wherever a need is seen. It is a total and immediate response to the present situation with all the tremendous energy at the disposal of a fully integrated and Awake mind.

Amoghasiddhi’s emblem is the double vajra representing the transcendence of all opposites, all polarities, and total psychic integration. His gesture is the Abhaya mudra, the gesture of fearlessness. The spiritual life demands courage, there are many obstacles to face and we are bound to encounter disappointment, doubt and discomfort. We can’t afford to allow ourselves to be weak and frightened. We have to develop fearlessness, the ability to take risks. One way to do this is to be honest about our weaknesses and resolve to work on them. If we only develop our strengths we will be one sided and we will be fearful about betraying our weaknesses. We cannot always see ourselves clearly, we may see our strengths as weaknesses and our weaknesses as strengths. That’s why we need other people, especially those a little more experienced on the Path, to point out to us what we should be working on. The initial step on the path of fearlessness could be to invite criticism from our good friends and resolve to work to develop our total being, we become integrated and strong. We become confident and courageous. We are then able to mobilise our energy and act for the benefit of others. We become successful at communicating the Dharma to others and because of our strength of character and fearlessness, they sit up and take notice. Amoghasiddhi is concerned with the realm of the Titans, the realm of fierce competitiveness, filled with powerful, aggressive beings. But the All-Performing Wisdom is more powerful still. It cannot be defeated and even the Titans have to take notice, however grudgingly.

When we contemplate the mysterious dark green figure of Amoghasiddhi, with his double vajra and powerful gesture of fearlessness, we can be inspired to take courage and face our fears. Fear is debilitating and a real hindrance to spiritual progress. And, as far as I know from my own experience, the only way to overcome fear is to face it. When we come out on the other side of fear we will experience a great release of energy and the joy of relief and freedom. This is what the figure of the Dakini, the naked female sky-dancer of Tantric Buddhism, represents. The energy released when we overcome fear is more energy for the practice and communication of the Dharma and it is another step on the way to the unobstructed success of the All-Performing Wisdom. The All-Performing Wisdom of Amoghasiddhi, with its emphasis on activity for the benefit of all, tells us yet again that Wisdom is Compassion, Compassion is Wisdom.

Now we come to the Centre of the Mandala and the figure of Vairocana. Vairocana’s Wisdom is called the Dhamadhatu Wisdom. It is the Wisdom of the sphere or realm of Reality. This is the ultimate Wisdom of which all others are aspects. This is the Enlightened mind in its full blaze of glory, like the sun. Vairocana means ‘illuminator’, the one who lights up or illuminates everything. In Japan, Vairocana is known as the Sun Buddha, he is the spiritual sun or illuminator of the universe. The Enlightened mind experiences the universe as fully pervaded by Reality. There is a direct experience of Reality and the cosmos being the same. The cosmos is Reality, Reality is the cosmos.

Vairocana’s mudra is the Dharmachakra pravartana mudra, the mudra of the turning of the wheel of the Dharma, or the teaching mudra. Buddhism began when the Buddha successfully communicated his experience of Enlightenment to others. This is known as the turning of the Wheel of the Dharma. The Wheel of the Dharma was set in motion and has been rolling on ever since. This mudra represents something that is central to the Dharma – it can be communicated. But more than that, it must be communicated. Inherent in the experience of Awakening is the urge to communicate the Truth to others. Compassion is the activity of the Enlightened mind. The animals associated with Vairocana are lions and these also symbolise the proclaiming of the Truth. The Buddha’s teaching is often referred to as the Singhanada, the lion’s roar.

So the Wisdom of Vairocana, the Dhamadhatu Wisdom, reminds us that everything is teaching the Dharma, Reality is all around us and within us. The sound of the Dharma is everywhere. The Truth is in everything. It also reminds us that communication or sharing is innate to the experience of Insight. From this we can gather that sharing what we have learned or understood is something we can practice from early on in our spiritual journey. In our initial enthusiasm about the Dharma we may want to tell everyone the good news whether they want to hear it or not. This is not really appropriate. But it is appropriate to share our understanding with those who genuinely are interested and point them in the direction of those with greater understanding. I say those who are genuinely interested because there are also those who are only interested in a very superficial way, who may want to undermine your idealism with cynicism. We need to be willing to share and communicate what we have learnt but, at the same time, we need to be intelligent about when, where and to whom we communicate such a precious gift. This sharing or communication is what Vairocana is inspiring us to do. As Vessantara puts it, “The gift Vairocana gives us is the responsibility of sharing what we have learnt with others. The final message of the Mandala is that no experience has been complete until it has been communicated”. (Vessantara, Meeting the Buddhas, p 126)

We have come to the end of the Mandala of the five Jinas and looked at the five Wisdoms. We have learnt that each Buddha and each wisdom has many messages for us and, in particular, we have highlighted the practices of objectivity, generosity, appreciating uniqueness, facing fear and sharing our experience.

The more objective we can be, the more we will experience equanimity, as we are not pulled this way and that by our subjective reaction. Generosity helps us to transcend self-centredness and, in particular, is an antidote to pride or the tendency to make comparisons with others. Appreciating our uniqueness and the uniqueness of others gives rise to Metta and helps to counteract any feelings of being unlovable or unloved and the neurotic cravings those feelings give rise to. Facing our fears frees up our energy so that we can act for the benefit of ourselves and others. And sharing our experience of the Dharma makes us more conscious of that experience and can be an inspiration to others.

There is much more to the Mandala of the five Buddhas than I have mentioned here, it is an inexhaustible treasure of Dharma teaching and is worth re-visiting again and again. There is one more aspect I would like to mention. Each of the five Buddhas has a female consort. This is a Buddha in female form, although when we speak of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas we musn’t take gender too literally, it is just one more skilful means used by the Enlightened Ones to try to pierce through the clouds of our ignorance. The female Buddhas are Locana, consort of Akshobya, Mamaki, consort of Ratnasambhava, Pandaravasini, consort of Amitabha, Tara, consort of Amoghasiddhi, and Akashadhateshvari, consort of Vairocana. These male and female figures are depicted in sexual union. Strangely for us perhaps this has nothing to do with sex, there is no erotic content to these images. This is sexual symbolism. In the Tantra this is profound and sacred symbolism, expressing the highest Truth. These images, known as Yab-Yum, are symbolic of the unity or oneness of Wisdom and Compassion. The female Buddha represents the Wisdom aspect and the male Buddha represents the Compassion aspect, which is the active aspect of Enlightenment. The sexual embrace symbolises the fact that there is no distinction between Wisdom and Compassion, they are just two ways of speaking about, or two ways of seeing, what is in fact a total experience. So, the final message of the five Wisdoms is that Wisdom is Compassion. We will end on that paradoxical note, which will perhaps prepare us somewhat for the great paradox of the Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom which is the subject of the next talk.

Wider Horizons

This is the fourth in a series of six talks on Wisdom given at the London Buddhist Centre in 2000

There is a story that the Buddha said that all ordinary people are mad. He probably didn't say it or if he did he probably didn't say it quite like that. But let's assume it's true anyway. The reason we might be considered to be mad, from an enlightened point of view, is because we behave as if changing things were permanent, as if unreal things were real, as if painful things were pleasant and as if ugly things were beautiful.

These are known as the four ‘perversities’ or the four topsy-turvy views (viparyasas). Buddhism makes a distinction, at least provisionally, between Samsara and Nirvana. Samsara is the unenlightened state, it is cyclic existence, it is the constant round of birth and death that we fall into because of our spiritual ignorance. Nirvana is the Enlightened state; it transcends the cycle of birth and death. This distinction between Samsara and Nirvana is, as I said, provisional. It is how we have to approach things because of our unawakened, dualistic perceptions.

There is, of course, only one Reality. Those who Awake to the true nature of Reality do not pass into some parallel Universe or some other dimension. The distinction is really that they are Awake and we are asleep. They can see Reality as it is, we see Reality in a topsy-turvy, perverse way. For instance, we see what is changing as permanent. This does not mean that we think nothing ever changes – that would be perverse indeed – but we behave and live our lives as if we and the transient things of the world were permanent. Perhaps we see this most clearly when we suffer a loss. If our partner or lover decides to leave us, we get upset because having believed in eternal romance, we can’t cope with the inevitable transience. If we lose our favourite pen, or our bicycle is stolen or our TV breaks down, we get upset and annoyed and rail against the injustice because we are attached to things and want them always to remain the same and remain with us. And especially perhaps when someone close to us dies, we are shocked by the unfairness of it. Why did they have to die? And perhaps they weren’t even old. Because we identify ourselves and other people with our bodies we see what is simply part of a process as something final and fatal. But we are not our bodies, other people are not their bodies and when the body ceases to function, nothing final has happened really. That body and those senses have always been in a process of change and gradual dissolution. That is the reality of physical existence. Things come into being, flourish for a while, then decay and die. If we could relate to others in a more real way, rather than becoming attached to their form and senses, we would have a totally different experience of death. But to relate to others differently we would have to relate to ourselves differently. We would have to realise that we are simply a constantly changing process, a mind/body continuum.

However, we usually behave as if we are fixed, unchanging, and substantial. We have a sense of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ that seems quite real and solid. We may even come to accept our essential impermanence but we think ‘I’ am changing. These changes are happening to ‘me’. So we cling to an ‘I’, an ‘ego’ which is ultimately unreal. This does not mean we don’t have a personality, it simply means that there is nothing ultimately real about our personality, it is change, it is process. But we are subject to the topsy-turvy view that we are a fixed self and this means that we try to take some things in to enhance this self and keep some things out to protect the self. Like a walled city, with gates to allow in what is needed and wanted and defences to attack and keep out what is not wanted, we proceed through life giving vent to craving and ill will. And, of course, this perversity lived out in the lives of individuals is also lived out collectively between nations and tribes and groups of all kinds. This can lead to such horrors as war and extermination camps and torture chambers. No wonder the Buddha might have said ordinary people are mad!

We also hold to the topsy-turvy view that satisfaction is to be gained where satisfaction cannot be gained. In the last chapter we mentioned this in terms of false refuges. For instance, many people are convinced that life would be a real bed of roses if only they had enough money. With money they could do whatever they wanted, go on holiday whenever they liked, they wouldn’t have to work and so on. But it is also well known that very wealthy people are not necessarily happy and, in fact, are frequently unhappy. Money cannot buy existential wholeness, or even love for that matter. That bed of roses still has thorns in it. Many people also think they will be really happy if only they find the right partner – Mr. Right or Ms. Right. And sometimes people will go through many relationships before it dawns on them that the perfect person of their dreams is just a dream, is just a projection of their own mind and will not be found outside them. Some people, of course, never realise this. Others realise it enough to know that their real happiness will not be found in that direction and others half realise it, so that they learn to put up with less than they want, sometimes contentedly, sometimes grumpily. Some people stake their happiness on security in old age. They decide to work hard and put by enough savings and earn a good pension so that when they retire they will be able to do all those things they enjoy; travelling and golf and gardening and going to the theatre and so on. It is a big gamble. They may not be able to do those things when they are older, due to ill health or even loss of interest. Or the whole financial and political order that savings and pensions depend upon may not be quite as stable as it seems. It is only as stable as the human beings who operate it and that is not very stable at all. This does not mean that you should not try to provide for your old age, just that that it is unwise to postpone your life. As E.M. Forster put it “ We can spend our whole life preparing to live”

We could probably multiply examples of how people expect to gain some sort of permanent satisfaction from the transient processes of life. But lets look at the fourth topsy-turvy view. This is the feeling that what is ugly is really beautiful. It is easy to misunderstand this. It is not saying that there is no beauty in the world. What it is saying is that what we normally consider to be beautiful is relatively ugly compared to the greater beauty of Nirvana. So these four viparyasas (topsy-turvies) are how the unenlightened experience the world and themselves. The Enlightened see the world of the unenlightened completely differently. To the Enlightened the world of the unenlightened is characterised by impermanence, insubstantiality and suffering. To move from the world of the unenlightened to the world of the Enlightened we need to experience Insight into the true nature of unenlightened existence. By penetrating deeply into the true nature of unenlightened existence (Samsara) we arrive at the doors of liberation and pass through it into Nirvana, the world of Awakened existence which is permanent, blissful but still insubstantial.

Gaining Insight (Vipassana) then is first of all having a direct realisation of the true nature of unenlightened existence. It is seeing or experiencing the world as we know it as being characterised by impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness. These are the 3 Lakshanas or ‘marks’ of unenlightened existence and if we penetrate deeply enough into any one of them we will see the other two.

So let us look at each one in turn. Firstly, Impermanence (Pali, annicca, Sanskrit, anitya). From the point of view of someone with Insight, someone who is Awakened or irreversibly on the path to Awakening, this whole Universe and everything in it is impermanent, transient. This is not just a point of view, this is an experience. Our own bodies are changing all the time, however imperceptibly, our minds are changing very rapidly and our emotions are in constant flux. The world of nature, from the tiniest plant or insect to the biggest mountain, is changing too. And the stars and planets are changing, indeed, some of the stars we see in the night sky are already extinct. And from the perspective of Buddhist cosmology, Universes too come into being, continue for a time and then pass away.

Science tells us that there is no such thing as matter, only various forms of energy. This should make it easier for us to see the truth of impermanence. Perhaps it does. However, what really needs to change is not our ideas about the world and ourselves but our emotional responses which drive our behaviour. This is much more difficult to accomplish but it can be accomplished as the records of the Buddhist scriptures and commentaries for over two and a half thousand years can testify.

The second ‘mark’ of unenlightened existence we will look at is insubstantiality (Pali, annatta, Sanskrit, anatman). As I said earlier, we may accept, at least intellectually, that all things are transient including ourselves but we may still retain the sense that change happens to ‘me’, that ‘I’ am changing. So this Lakshana is realised by turning our concentrated awareness inwards and investigating our experience. We look at the five skandhas, the five constituents of personality and see that there is nothing fixed or permanent in any of them, there is no ‘self’ to be found in them. The five skandhas, which we will be familiar with from the ‘Heart Sutra’, are form, feeling, perception, volitions and consciousness. There is no ‘I’ which changes, there is only change, only process, only transience. And turning our attention to others we see that the same applies to them. They are also devoid of any fixed self. They too are change. Even on superficial reflection we can see how this sort of realisation would radically alter our relationship to ourself and to others. Another practice which helps to loosen our clinging to a self or ego is the Six Element practice. In this practice we systematically go through body and mind and see that all the elements are transitory and therefore not ‘me’ or ‘mine’. This practice is taken up by people about to be ordained into the Western Buddhist Order. Ordination represents a spiritual death and rebirth and, therefore, it is best to loosen the attachment to a fixed self as much as possible at that time. An interesting point about this characteristic of unenlightened existence is that it is also a characteristic of Enlightened existence. Nirvana is also insubstantial. This is because nothing can be said of Nirvana, it is ineffable. It cannot be defined in any way, whether as existent or non-existent. It cannot even be defined as Nirvana because that imposes limits on it. It suggests that it is something other than Samsara, whereas really the Enlightened state transcends all distinctions including the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana. This can remind us not to take concepts too literally and to remember that language is limited in how far it can go to express the Transcendental.

The next characteristic or ‘mark’ of unenlightened existence is that it is unsatisfactory (Pali, dukkha, Sanskrit, duhkha). Dukkha covers the entire spectrum of experience from grossest physical pain to the most subtle forms of psychological or existential unease. The Buddha usually outlines seven different kinds of unsatisfactoriness. These are birth, old age, sickness, death, contact with what one dislikes, separation from what one likes and not getting what one wants.

In addition to these the Buddhist scholar, Dr. Edward Conze, has pointed out four kinds of hidden unsatisfactoriness. Let’s just briefly go through all of these. Birth is physical suffering for the mother, emotionally stressful for the father and probably very disruptive, not to say traumatic for the baby. Old age is characterised by physical deterioration, loss of memory, dependence on others and, in some cases, senility and other unpleasant discomforts. Sickness is not pleasant. It is physically uncomfortable, at times painful and it is distressing and the cause of fear and anxiety. And apart from physical illness there are all sorts of stress and neuroses which are also a cause of suffering. Death is suffering for those who are bereaved. It is also unsatisfactory to know that all our loved ones will die and that we too will die. And the approach of death can cause great distress for those who have regrets. Contact with what one dislikes is unsatisfactory. This could be our work, it could be other people, it could simply be the weather but often we can find ourselves in situations or with people we don’t like which is stressful and upsetting. Being separated from what we do like is unsatisfactory. We’ve mentioned bereavement already. Then people are separated from friends and family by war and famine and natural disasters. This sort of thing can have a life shattering effect from which people never recover. This separation from what we like can happen on a smaller scale when something is lost or stolen. And finally, it is unsatisfactory not to get what we want. This is the pain of disappointment and frustration. You can see it very clearly in young children who stamp their feet and scream when denied what they want. And this stamping and screaming carries on into adulthood, except it is internalised and perhaps only emerges as bitterness or swearing or anger on particularly frustrating occasions. So those are the seven kinds of unsatisfactoriness mentioned by the Buddha.

As well as these fairly obvious forms of suffering, there is concealed suffering and Dr. Conze points out four aspects to this. Firstly, there are pleasant experiences which cause suffering to others. Two examples of this are the enjoyment of eating meat which causes obvious suffering to animals. This could be extended to dairy products too. The other example is being very wealthy. The reason these are cited as examples of concealed suffering is because usually in these cases we are dimly aware that our pleasure is another’s pain and this dim awareness taints the pleasure for us and gives us an uneasy conscience. We feel guilty even though we may not be quite sure why. This is a form of dukkha.

The second form of concealed suffering is when we experience something as pleasant but we are afraid of losing it. An example given here is power. Those who have power find it hard to trust anybody out of the fear of losing their power. An image from the Pali Canon for this kind of thing is that of the hawk flying off with a piece of meat in its claws and the other hawks fly after it. But they don’t peck at the meat, they peck at the hawk until it loosens its grip. The world of politics and business can be like this.

The third kind of hidden dukkha is the experience of something pleasant that binds us to something unpleasant. The example given is the body. We experience all sorts of pleasant sensations through the body but because we have a body we also experience all sorts of unpleasant sensations. We can’t have the one without the other.

The last kind of hidden unsatisfactoriness is that the deepest yearnings of the heart are never fulfilled by worldly pleasures. We are always left with a feeling of lacking something, of feeling empty even. This is because there is something in us that only responds to the spiritual, to the Transcendental even. There is something in us that yearns for Nirvana, that ultimate peace. This is what gives rise to shraddha and sets us on the spiritual path. You could say this is our Buddha nature.

So those are the three Lakshanas, the three characteristics of unenlightened existence: impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness. When Insight arises in us this is how we see unenlightened existence. And we can help to bring about Insight by penetrating deeply into one or all of these Lakshanas.

The experience of one with Insight is permanent, insubstantial and blissful. It is permanent in the sense that the Awake can never fall back into being unawake. It is insubstantial in that it is indefinable, as we’ve already said and it is blissful because there is no longer any craving or aversion. We don’t want anything and we don’t not want anything. As David Smith puts it in his Record of Awakening, “It became clearer and clearer that everything in this great, big beautiful world of trees, rivers and mountains is only a creation of mind.” Seeing that all is mind created we are no longer attached or afraid.

The three Lakshanas are gateways to liberation and when we investigate them deeply, thoroughly and effectively we emerge into the three Liberations or three Vimokshas. The three Vimokshas are the Imageless, the Unbiased and the Void.

The Imageless (animitta) is the freedom we experience when we penetrate deeply into impermanence. It means that we will no longer feel the need to label things with words or thoughts. We have transcended the level of concepts and have a direct experience of Reality of which nothing can be said or even thought.

The Unbiased (apranihita) is the liberation experienced when the lakshana of unsatisfactoriness is probed into deeply. Unbiased means there is no leaning in any direction, no tendency towards this or that. There is just complete calm and equanimity. Utter peace.

The Void (Shunyata) is the freedom attained when insubstantiality is penetrated to its depths. The Void translates Shunyata. Shunyata is the term employed by Mahayana Buddhism to counteract any tendency to dualism, such as the tendency to see Samsara and Nirvana as separate. Shunyata is the experience of realising the emptiness or voidness of the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana.

These three doors of liberation, the Lakshanas and Vimokshas, are also sometimes related to three Bodhisattvas, Avalokitesvara, Manjushri and Vajrapani.

Avolokitesvara is the embodiment of Compassion and those who meditate on his form and chant his mantra are developing that compassion within themselves. Compassion is the response of a truly loving heart to suffering. Compassion is not horrified by suffering nor is it sentimental about those who suffer. The suffering which Avolokitesvara is responding to is the suffering of the unenlightened, which they cause themselves through their craving, ill will and delusion. Sometimes this compassion will come as an unpleasant shock because it is a wake up call, a call to wake up from the slumber of spiritual ignorance and make the effort to see things as they really are, not as we want them to be. Those who are compassionate may not always be nice to us. The Buddha, for instance, wasn’t nice. Sometimes in the Pali Canon he is depicted as quite fierce. For instance, in the story of Saccaka (Culasaccakasutta, Majjhima Nikaya, 35), he completely humiliates Saccaka. Clearly, for someone so inflated and egotistic as Saccaka, a complete humiliation was all that was going to break through and allow his better nature a chance to come to the fore. Avolokitesvara appears in many forms. One of the most evocative is the eleven-headed, thousand-armed form. He has eleven heads so that he can see in every direction and know where his compassionate activity is needed. He has a thousand hands each holding different implements to symbolise the variety of responses needed when dealing with the suffering of the world. And each hand has an eye in the palm. This is the eye of Wisdom because Compassion is never divorced from Wisdom. At his heart he holds a jewel, the wish-fulfilling jewel, which is the jewel of full and perfect Enlightenment. Meditating on Avolokitesvara and chanting his mantra – om mani padme hum – is another way to open up the door to liberation and free ourselves from suffering.

Vajrapani is the embodiment of liberated Energy. When we enter liberation through the doorway of Insight into impermanence, tremendous energy is released. We are not limited by words, concepts, and thoughts. We are able to flow with the energy of the universe. Vajrapani is Energy. He is the energy that breaks through all obstacles. The energy that takes risks, that is not held back by fears. Those who meditate on Vajrapani and chant his mantra develop the heroic qualities of the warrior, who is fearless and undaunted by forces ranged against him. Vajrapani is often depicted in wrathful form looking very fierce, wielding a vajra and trampling under his feet figures representing greed, hatred and delusion. There is something unstoppable about Vajrapani and contemplating his form and chanting his mantra can put us in touch with that determination and courage which is needed to break through our fears and doubts.

Manjushri is the embodiment of Wisdom. His name means ‘gently auspicious’. He is also known as Manjughosa, ‘the gentle voiced one’. He is depicted as a beautiful youth, a prince, richly adorned and sitting on a blue lotus throne. With his left hand he holds a book to his heart and with his right hand he very delicately holds a large, sharp sword with flames coming off the end. The book is the ‘Perfection of Wisdom’ with its profound paradoxical teachings on Shunyata and the sword is the sword of Wisdom which cuts off all ignorance. We meditate on the figure of Manjushri and chant his mantra – om a ra pa cha na dhih – to help us to develop clarity and see through all the mental obscurations that cloud our minds. These three archetypal Bodhisattvas are known as the Family Protectors. This has nothing to do with ordinary families and home and hearth. The families referred to here are the families of the Buddhas Amitabha, Akshobhya and Vairocana. These were the original three Buddhas that formed the beginning of what later developed into the Mandala of the five Dhyana Buddhas, or the Mandala of the five Jinas. In the next talk we will look at the five Jinas and their respective Wisdoms.

Perspectives on Realisation

This is the third in a series of six talks on Wisdom given at the London Buddhist Centre in 2000

We began by looking at Right View, which is the conceptual expression of a direct apprehension of Reality. When that Right View becomes a direct realisation, it is Perfect Vision. We then looked at the Path that leads us towards a direct experience of Reality. Now we are going to look at various ways in which that experience of Reality, that direct Realisation, has been described. Like Cortez and his men in Keat’s famous poem, we have come to the mountain top and now standing, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien”, we can survey the surrounding terrain. All those who have reached that peak have had different ways of explaining what they saw; they have used different metaphors and emphasised different aspects. We are going to explore some of these different metaphors and emphases.

There are, of course, many ways of conveying spiritual Insight or Realisation and not all of them are conceptual. There are the beautiful, rich images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with their gestures, colours and emblems. We will look at some of them later in this series of talks. There was the famous occasion when the Buddha simply held up a flower and one of the monks achieved Awakening on the spot. This is sometimes said to be the beginning of the Zen tradition. There are also mantras, sound symbols, which convey the essence of Enlightenment. There is also the record that simply seeing the Buddha was enough to convey to the first five disciples that he had realised the Truth. His physical presence communicated his Realisation.

There are all these different ways in which Insight can be communicated as well as the more conceptual formulations. But even the conceptual formulations are largely poetic – metaphorical, so we must be careful not to take them too literally. We are going to look at Entering the Stream, Turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness, the arising of the Bodhicitta and Real Going For Refuge.

Firstly, Entering the Stream. The Stream is the Stream of irreversible Insight into the true nature of Reality. When one Enters the Stream then one can never fall back from the spiritual path. One has seen or experienced something on such a deep level, in such a real way, that one can never again see things in the old, unawakened way. Traditionally, it is said that someone becomes a Stream Entrant when they break through the first three of what are known as the Ten Fetters. The Ten Fetters are self-view, sceptical doubt, dependence on moral rules and rituals as ends in themselves, sense desire, ill will, craving for existence in the realm of form, craving for existence in the realm of no-form, conceit, agitation and delusion.

The first three have to be broken through in order to Enter the Stream which flows to Enlightenment. To break these fetters means to be no longer affected by them in any way. The first fetter is self-view. This means the belief that we have a fixed, unchanging self. This belief affects how we relate to others, how we view our own abilities and capacities, how we think about the future, even how we view the past. If we break through this fetter then we are no longer limited by the sense of being ‘me’, a fixed entity. We begin to have a more fluid, flexible sense of ourselves and our capacities and abilities and we also have more flowing relationships with others. We no longer fix ourselves with regard to the future. We refuse to predict how we will respond in any particular situation. How could an unfixed, changing stream of thoughts, perceptions, feelings and so on, predict its future responses. And we have a less fixed perception of our past and what actually happened. This fetter has been called the fetter of habit by Sangharakshita (The Taste of Freedom). Our normal way of being is habitual. We consist of habits, especially habitual ways of thinking, responding and perceiving. These habits are what we identify with.

For instance, we might have a habit of self-hatred and this leads us on to the habit of perceiving and construing what other people say and do as an expression of dislike for us and this leads us to a habit of responding to other people with anger and this, of course, leads them to dislike us which, of course, proves to us that nobody likes us and that we are, in fact, unlovable. So, a habit like this can be like a closed circle, perpetuating itself. This is the Wheel of Life in action and this is fixed self-view.

We break habits through creativity. In other words, with awareness we can learn to respond differently. We can develop the ability to choose how to respond to any situation and then respond in a creative rather than habitual manner. In this way, we break out of the circular trap – we break the fetter of habit.

The second fetter is the fetter of sceptical doubt. This could, perhaps, also be called the fetter of rationalisation as Tejananda refers to it in his excellent book The Buddhist Path to Awakening. We rationalise in order to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want. So our rationalisations are an expression of our habitual self-view. With this fetter, the tendency is to remain vague, even deliberately vague, about what the Dharma really says. We would rather preserve our own version of reality intact, so we come up with rationalisations to show that the Dharma couldn’t possibly be saying anything different or shouldn’t be saying anything different. As Tejananda puts it in The Buddhist Path to Awakening, “we are determined to do what we want to do – and if this happens not to be in accord with the way things really are, well, so much the worse for the way things really are. In reality, of course, it is so much the worse for us.” This kind of sceptical doubt is to be distinguished from the sort of questioning that is determined to get to the truth whether it is palatable or not. The sceptical doubt of the second fetter wants to avoid the truth or by-pass it somehow. In order to combat this tendency we need to develop our faith in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Our aspiration needs to be strengthened so that what we want becomes more and more what the Three Jewels have to offer. We looked at ways of developing and strengthening shraddha in the previous chapter, when we spoke about Right Emotion. Perhaps we could just add here that contact with spiritual friends, especially those with more faith than us, can be a major help in overcoming the fetter of doubt or rationalisation. It is said that one of the seven characteristics of a Stream Entrant is that he or she is endowed with unshakeable faith in the Three Jewels. That is as you would expect, since the fetter of doubt is broken.

The third fetter is reliance on moral rules and religious observances as ends in themselves. This is sometimes referred to as ‘going through the motions’. All Buddhist practices are means to an end, not ends in themselves. If we find ourselves getting overly attached to a practice and even defensive about it, then we are probably starting to relate to it as an end in itself. This can be the case whether it is the five precepts or tantric ritual. The Dharma has one flavour, the Buddha said, the flavour of freedom. All Dharma practice conduces to freedom from greed, hatred and delusion. When we get attached to practices in an egotistic way and start to relate to them as ends rather than means, then they are no longer Dharma practices and will probably just enhance our ill will, ignorance and craving. To counteract this tendency we need to constantly try to go deeper with our practice. We need to constantly try to bring a fresh approach and fresh enthusiasm to our practice. If we are content with a superficial meditation practice or a superficial practice of ethics or a superficial relationship to Puja, we are likely to fall into ‘going through the motions’ and even a defensive attachment to our lack of initiative. Breaking the third fetter requires an effort to maintain ‘beginner’s mind’, that enthusiastic engagement which often characterises our initial meeting with the Dharma. Those are the three fetters which we need to break through in order to Enter the Stream that flows irreversibly to Enlightenment.

This stage of spiritual Insight is sometimes also referred to as the attainment of ‘Knowledge and Vision of things as they really are’ (yathabhutajnanadarshan). This is the eighth stage on the spiritual path of the 12 positive nidanas or links. The first of these nidanas is an awareness of suffering, especially an awareness that our greed and ill will causes us suffering. In dependence upon this awareness arises faith in the Ideal of Enlightenment. This faith leads us to practise ethics. In dependence upon faith, therefore, the joy of a clear conscience arises. In dependence upon the joy of a clear conscience we are able to engage in tranquillity meditation and in dependence upon that we can undertake insight meditation. This, in turn, is the condition for the arising of ‘Knowledge and Vision of things as they really are’. And this stage represents the point of no-return, the point of irreversibility, in other words, Stream Entry.

Another way of giving expression to the experience of Insight into the nature of Reality is called, “turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness” (Paravritti). The “Turning About” is a teaching of the Yogachara School of Buddhism and it is quite complex, so I’m not going to go into it in detail here. Perhaps the most important factor that this teaching is pointing to is the profundity and radical nature of the experience of Awakening. There is a complete “turning about” in the depths of our being. We are, as it were, turned upside down and inside out when we see into the true nature of Reality. This emphasises the fact that spiritual insight is not a matter of gaining knowledge or mastering obscure philosophical points but, rather, a matter of profound and far-reaching change to the heart and mind of the individual.

When the paravritti, the turning about, takes place, all distinction between subject and object disappear, all distinction between ‘I’ in here and the world outside is left behind and there is an experience of what is called One Mind (cittamatra) or Mind Only. As Sangharakshita puts it, “The experience of one mind is like a great expanse of water, absolutely pure, absolutely transparent, with nothing in it, not a speck, other than the water itself”. (Sangharakshita, Complete Works, Vol.2, p.275)

According to the Yogachara teaching, everything we say or do or think or experience leaves a trace in our mind or consciousness. This trace or impression left in our consciousness is conceived of as a seed, a seed that will eventually bear fruit. There are pure seeds and impure seeds. The impure seeds are deposited in consciousness as a result of our unskilfulness – our greed, ill will and delusion. The pure seeds are deposited in our consciousness as a result of our more skilful and spiritual thoughts, words and actions. The more we dedicate ourselves to spiritual practice and dedicate our lives to spiritual goals, the more pure seeds we deposit in what is called the ‘storehouse consciousness’ (alaya vijnana).

When the pure seeds outweigh the impure seeds, eventually the impure seeds get pushed right out of the way and this constitutes the experience of “turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness”. To put it another way, eventually our spiritual practice purifies us of all past unskilfulness and our purified consciousness can have a direct experience of Reality.

The heartening thing about this teaching is that it assures us that our practice is having an effect even though we may not be able to see the effect and it also reminds us that even the smallest of skilful thoughts or words or deeds makes a difference. Spiritual practice is cumulative and if we ‘stay with it’, it eventually brings results.

Another way of speaking about spiritual Insight is in terms of the Arising of the Will to Enlightenment (Bodhicitta utpada). The teaching of the Bodhicitta, the Will to Enlightenment, very strongly emphasises the compassionate aspect of spiritual Awakening. Anyone who embarks on the spiritual path is likely, at some point, to experience the wish to withdraw from the world, to have nothing more to do with its madness and trivia. Also, any spiritual practitioner is likely to experience a wish to involve himself or herself with the world out of compassion for the mass of suffering. These two tendencies – the tendency towards withdrawal from the world and the tendency towards compassionate involvement with the world – set up a conflict. If we withdraw completely, we may set up a tendency in our own psyche which will prove to be an obstacle to the attainment of Supreme Enlightenment, because Supreme Enlightenment is definitely compassionate. If we involve ourselves too much with the world we may lose touch with our spiritual Ideals and become swamped in the unending demands of the world.

We need to do both and allow the conflict to intensify even. The eventual resolution of this conflict is what is known as the arising of the Bodhicitta. At this point, one experiences being involved in the world and withdrawn from it at the same time. Here is how Sangharakshita describes it,

“At that point something happens. It is very difficult to describe exactly what does happen, but we can think of it provisionally as an explosion. The tension which has been generated through following simultaneously these two contradictory trends results in a breakthrough into a higher dimension of spiritual consciousness. Withdrawal and involvement are no longer two separate trends, not because they have been artificially amalgamated into one, but because the plane or level on which their duality existed, or on which it was possible for them to be two things, has been transcended. When that explosion occurs, one has the experience of being simultaneously withdrawn and involved, simultaneously out of the world and in the world.” (Sangharakshita, The Meaning of Conversion in Buddhism, p. 60/61)

So Wisdom and Compassion coalesce and there is no longer any conflict.

There are two practices which are specifically undertaken in order to bring about the Arising of the Bodhicitta. These are the Sevenfold Puja and Vasubandhu’s four factors.

The Sevenfold Puja culminates in the Transference of Merits and Self Surrender and the aim of the Puja is to engender this attitude in us. This is the attitude of not practising just for our own sake but for the sake of all sentient beings. The Sevenfold Puja can be seen not just as a ritual but also as a series of practices which we can perform all the time. Or we could see it as a series of attitudes which we need to bring to all our practice. And, chiefly, in relation to the Arising of the Bodhicitta we need to encourage the attitude and practice of dedicating all our efforts to Enlightenment for the sake of all. After every meditation, after every generous act, after every confession or forgiveness, after any skilfulness of body, speech or mind, we should transfer the merits by reciting the Transference of Merits verse or something similar, such as, “What ever merit accrues from my skilfulness, I dedicate it to Enlightenment, not just for my own benefit but for the benefit of all.” If we practise in this way, we will be engendering the spirit of the Bodhicitta right from the start of our spiritual journey and, therefore, preparing ourselves for the attainment of Supreme Enlightenment.

Vasubandhu’s four factors are a series of four practices which encourage the arising of the Bodhicitta. They are, firstly recollection of the Buddhas, secondly, reflecting on the faults of conditioned existence, thirdly, reflecting on the suffering of sentient beings and, fourthly, contemplation of the virtues of the Enlightened Ones.

Recollecting the Buddhas is a practice for developing faith and the conviction that we too can become Awakened or Enlightened. Reflecting on the faults of conditioned existence enables us to loosen our attachments and withdraw from mundane involvement. Reflecting on the sufferings of sentient beings is to give rise to compassion and help us to open our hearts. Contemplating the virtues of the Enlightened Ones enables us to develop those virtues ourselves so that eventually the heart of compassion opens in us and the Arising of the Bodhicitta is accomplished. So the Arising of the Bodhicitta emphasises the altruistic aspect of the spiritual life and reminds us that Wisdom and Compassion are not really two separate things. The Energy of the Awakened Ones pours forth spontaneously in a flow of Wise Compassion, Compassionate Wisdom, which invites the world to the feast of the Dharma where true satisfaction is to be found.

Now we come to the last of our different perspectives on the Realisation of the Truth. This is Real Going For Refuge. The Three Refuges are the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. They are refuges from suffering. Because of the Buddha’s experience of Enlightenment, because of his communication of that experience and because others down the ages have received that communication and had their own Realisation – because of all this, there is a way out of suffering, there is a refuge from suffering.

We are always taking refuge in something; we are always seeking security from the trials and tribulations of life. Our refuge may be our career, our sexual relationship, drugs, possessions and so on. This is natural enough. We don’t want to suffer. We want to be happy. The only problem with these refuges is that they don’t work, they are not dependable. From the Buddhist perspective the only dependable refuges are the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, also known as the Three Jewels because of their preciousness.

How do we Go For Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha? And it is worth noting that we do need to go for refuge, it is not something passive, it is something we do, it is an activity.

We Go For Refuge to the Buddha by being devoted to the Buddha. Going For Refuge to the Buddha is essentially an act of faith. It is a deep conviction of the possibility of Enlightenment for all, including ourselves. As we’ve mentioned already, one way to develop this faith is to reflect on the life of the Buddha and also on the lives of other great Buddhist teachers including, of course, our own teacher, Sangharakshita. We could also reflect on the effect that the Dharma has had on our lives so far and generate a sense of gratitude to the Buddha and others for making this possible.

Going For Refuge to the Dharma involves knowing the Dharma and practising it. We get to know the Dharma by studying it, discussing it and reflecting on it. We cannot really Go For Refuge to the Dharma if we don’t know what the Dharma is with some degree of clarity. The Buddha, and other Enlightened teachers since, have endeavoured to express the Truth in many ways for our benefit. We need to make the effort to actively receive this teaching and allow it to have an effect in our lives. We practise the Dharma, of course, by practising ethics, meditation, contemplation, puja and friendship. Going For Refuge to the Dharma is a constant pursuit of the Truth. The truth about ourselves and the Truth of existence. This pursuit is at times a difficult struggle but there isn’t really anything else meaningful that one can do with one’s life.

Going For Refuge to the Sangha can be understood in two main ways. Firstly, there is the Sangha of all those who have gained Enlightenment or are irreversible on the path to Enlightenment. This is the Arya Sangha. This is the Sangha which is completely dependable. And we Go For Refuge to the Sangha by accepting guidance and by becoming Awakened ourselves. Secondly, there is the Sangha of all practising Buddhists and especially those practising within the same context as us. We Go For Refuge to (or perhaps better to say ‘with’) this Sangha by being in friendly and meaningful communication. The Sangha is a network of harmonious relationships based on the common Going For Refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Arya Sangha. It is essential and immensely helpful to be in contact with like-minded people as we practise the spiritual life in the midst of a world which tries to seduce and drag us in the opposite direction.

There are four levels to Going For Refuge. There is the level of ethnic going for refuge which means that someone is born into a Buddhist culture and reveres the Three Jewels as part of their culture but doesn’t necessarily do any practice. Then there is provisional Going For Refuge. This is when someone has a strong heartfelt response to the Dharma and begins to practise but they are not yet ready or able to dedicate their life to Dharma practice. It may be that there are lingering doubts or fears, or it may be that they have some psychological difficulty such as lack of confidence in themselves or an uncontrollable temper. If they carry on practising, in time, they will be able to make a stronger commitment to the Three Jewels. That is when we arrive at the level of effective Going For Refuge. When one is effectively Going For Refuge one commits one’s life to practising the Dharma and sharing it with others. One vows to practise for the sake of all beings. Real Going For Refuge is when one’s commitment to the Three Jewels is characterised by unshakeable faith and unblemished morality. Unblemished morality means that any ethical lapses will be confessed immediately. At this level of Going For Refuge one has begun to embody the Refuges and one is now irreversibly on the Path.

So we have looked at some different ways of expressing the experience of Awakening to the true nature of Reality. We have explored briefly Stream Entry, The Turning about in the Deepest Seat of Consciousness, The Arising of the Bodhicitta and Real Going For Refuge. These perspectives on Realisation are by no means an exhaustive list but they are perhaps sufficient to show us that Buddhism is united by spiritual experience, even though there are many different ways of conveying that experience.

We have been standing on the mountain peak surveying the scene and describing some of the sights. In the next talk we will take a closer look at the experience of Awakening and open out to a more cosmic perspective.