Does the Buddha Exist?

Not according to the Diamond Sutra (or Vajra Cutter Sutra as it's now being named), if I'm reading it correctly. (And that's not certain by any means...)

The early lines of the sutra are taken up with the Buddha discussing with his disciple Subhuti how a bodhisattva should practise. The essence described here is non-discrimination. (But even that's not accurate.)

I'd better quote:

...those bodhisattva mahasattvas will not engage in discriminating a self and will not discriminate a sentient being, will not discriminate a living being, will not engage in discriminating a person.

Subhuti, those bodhisattva mahasattvas will not engage in discriminating phenomena nor discriminating non-phenomena; nor will they engage in discrimination or non-discrimination. Why is that? Subhuti, because if those bodhisattva mahasattvas engage in discriminating phenomena, that itself would be of them grasping a self and grasping a sentient being, grasping a living being, grasping a person. Because even if they engage in discriminating phenomena as non-existent, that would be of them grasping a self and grasping a sentient being, grasping a living being, grasping a person. (Italics added)

Whoa! Neither discrimination nor non-discrimination. Here is the difficulty of trying to use words to signify the dharmakaya, or the buddha, or phenomena, or anything at all. Better to remain silent! Even the use of the word signify is fraught with difficulty, since one of the "characteristics" of the dharmakaya is signlessness, that is, a state without characteristics.

But to get back to the existence or non of the Buddha...A few stanzas later, the Buddha compares the bodhisattvas' giving of vast gifts (completely filling this billionfold world system with the seven types of precious things...) with the merit of reciting, explaining and thoroughly teaching even four lines of the Vajra Cutter sutra. The merit produced by that would be incalculably greater.

Quoting again:

Why is that? Subhuti, because the unsurpassed perfectly completed enlightenment of the tathagata arhat perfectly completed buddhas arises from it; the buddha bhagavans also are produced from it.

I put the word arises in italics. Why? Because that's the key. The Buddha clearly indicates that buddhahood is a dependent arising. In other words, it is in the nature of emptiness or voidness. It neither exists nor does not exist. It arises from a conjunction of causes and conditions.

It is not only the Vajra Cutter that asserts this, now that I think of it. It is a basic teaching of the Mahayana that our ability to develop bodhichitta, the mind of enlightenment, the heart of great compassion, depends on other sentient beings, on the people around us. It's an odd way of phrasing it, but we can't practise in a void. We have to practise with others. We can't become Buddhas without the wing of bodhichitta, and we can't generate bodhichitta without other sentient beings. Therefore, our buddhahood is dependent. In the nature of emptiness.

So all we can say is, it neither exists nor does not exist.

At least, that's the way I see it. And in a future post, I'll contemplate whether I see anything at all.

Notes on Emptiness #11

A long quote here from Kyabje Gehlek Rinpoche in Solitary Yamantaka Teachings. This is a book which is restricted to those who have received the Yamantaka initiation, but I think it's possible to distinguish between the sections that are "secret" and those which are more general.

Teachings on emptiness are right on the borderline. There are many instances of being cautioned not to teach emptiness to those unprepared, because a premature exposure (without the proper foundation) could turn potential students away from Dharma and consign them to many more lives in samsara before they have another opportunity.

Having said that, this passage is quite clear, doesn't say anything outrageous, and is easily verifiable if you take the time to meditate or think on it. Please read it carefully:

Look at these offering materials like that: [Here Rinpoche is talking about the outer offerings made to the deities in the Yamantaka practice, which include drinking water, water for washing, incense, perfume, food, etc.] they are all created, first by the collective mental activity of a number of people on their mental level, followed by their practical interpretation, followed by their projection and perception. Combined together, those collective conditions are able to produce this. That's what's really meant by: there is no inherent existence. If there were inherent existence, you wouldn't need all those conditions; things would be there already, existing inherently.(Italics added)

For example, look at this round bread. Someone must have thought about making a round bread, and whether to use wheat instead of rye, and what other material would be needed. For example, if we have milk, but we want yogurt, we need milk first to be able to make it into yogurt; but milk is not yogurt yet, and yogurt is not the same as milk. The point here is, that if you ignore the relative truth, then milk would become yogurt and yogurt would become milk. And cheese would become yogurt, and milk too, just because they're also animal products. Relative truth tells you, that although something is made from milk, under certain conditions it can become butter, and under a different set of conditions it can become buttermilk, or cheese, or cream. All of them come from the same thin, milk, but different conditions make them into separate things. You can't say that buttermilk is milk, nor can you sat that skimmed milk is cream. So, all of them are relative truth. If people begin to ignore the relative truth, they start to lose the fundamental basis of emptiness.(Italics added)

So if some people say: 'Everything is only the result of mind, in the end it is all zero, so it doesn't matter, it's all the same, it's all bullshit' -- then that's exactly what it is: it's bullshit, because milk is not buttermilk and buttermilk is not cheese. Seeing this is what is meant by seeing emptiness through existence, or in other words seeing emptiness from the existence point of view, rather than from the 'empty' level. If you try to look from the 'empty' level, then everything is the same, then it doesn't matter whether what you do makes sense or not, because in the end it's going to be zero. That is the emptiness approach from the empty point of view and that gets you on the wrong track.

Update March 25/07: I can't believe Rinpoche said "bullshit"!

Notes on Emptiness #10

Struck by the danger of thinking "All is emptiness..."
the folly of concluding "It doesn't matter..."
it matters immensely
the immensity of matter
the minuteness
matters

it's the air we work in
emptiness
the water we wade through
empty wet
the words we say
empty meaning
the actions we take
empty relations

the cause and effect
bricks empty but liable to bruise

it matters

Notes on Emptiness #9

The question to be answered is this: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The chicken cannot come first, for this would mean there was a result without a cause.

The egg cannot come first, for this would mean there was a cause without a result.

They cannot be simultaneous, for this would mean there was no connection between them. One would be unable to act as the cause for the other.

The chicken cannot appear without an egg. The egg cannot exist without the chicken. They cannot exist independently.

Answer: emptiness. Dependently arising mere appearances.

Notes on Emptiness #8

Here's one:

Descartes thinks, therefore he is.
But thought is not continuous.
It only seems so.
Thought comes.
Then it goes.
This one...Next one...
Is Descartes in between?

Notes on Emptiness #7

Interesting that I should use the analogy of projections on the screen. Geshe Kalsang, who is teaching us the Seven Points of Mind Training this weekend, used exactly the same example. This is a line of thought used in the Mind Only School. Nothing exists except as projections of our mind. He reminded us that when you go to a movie, you watch the images on the screen, you get so involved, you feel the emotions...But they are only images projected on a screen. There is actually nothing on the screen itself! After all, it's only the play of light.

The Madhyamika-Prasangika school is more subtle than this. Things do exist, in a conventional way. We agree to their existence. Was it Berkeley who kicked the stone and said, "Feels real enough to me..."? Something is there. We feel it, we hear it, we smell it, we taste it...We label it. ie. give it a name. It's just not there in the way we think it is.

In what way is it there, then? Ah, that's the 64k question. The answer lies in the extended analytical meditation you are supposed to do, always questioning your perception of phenomena. The primary phenomenon to question is your self. Your concept of "I".

A "simple" question to start with. When you think of "I", where is it, exactly?

Notes on Emptiness #6

Thinking this morning of those optical illusion drawings. Like the one that switches from a young Parisian women wearing a feathered hat to an old hag with a wart on her nose. Or the one that switches from two faces to a vase or chalice.

These are good illustrations of emptiness. What you see depends on your focus. Foreground and background are interchangeable, but reveal different pictures according to how you focus. The two aspects of the illusion are separate pictures but are also indivisible. The young woman cannot exist without the old. They are simultaneously a whole and individual parts. The parts that make up the hag are essential to the existence of the young woman and vice versa.

If I remember right, most people see the young woman first and after a time are able to see the hag. One feels a certain sense of wonder and delight when the transformation occurs. And after that, you can never look at that image without seeing both. I imagine this is the same sense of wonder one feels when a genuine realization of emptiness occurs.

We spend our whole lives looking at the foreground, never even realizing there is a background. If once we can shift our perspective enough to see the background, to bring it up front, our view of the world must change forever.

Now, take one step farther back and see yourself as the observer of the image. Another step in the exploration of emptiness. Because, really, the picture is meaningless without an observer. And the observer does not exist without something to observe. Thus, the two are separate but indivisible. Individual but united. Both one and not one. Interdependent. Empty.

Here, the observer (me) is the foreground. The picture is the background. All the activity is going on in me, the foreground, and being projected onto the background. Like looking out the window of my eyes and seeing the world pass by like a film on a screen. What if the screen suddenly comes to the fore? How different things would look!

Notes on Emptiness #5

Self is glue that keeps our parts together...
also flypaper in which we get stuck...

Notes on Emptiness #4

obscure birdcalls from the big pine next door
disappear when you search for them
like trying to thread the needle of emptiness

Notes on Emptiness #3

Ah, the optimist and the pessimist...
Is the glass half full?
Is the glass half empty?
Forsooth!* The glass is utterly empty,
Even of itself.

* The unaccustomed use of such an archaic term is a direct consequence of having been captured in recent days by Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, such that I can no longer experience discursive thought except in terms of chivalry and king's ransoms.

Notes on Emptiness #2

Penny takes issue with the first paragraph of Cook that I quoted. She says the trouble with words is sometimes people use too many of them to say simply, "They (words) don't cut it...." In other words, Cook uses too many words to explain that words do not signify any truly existent phenomenon....

You see the dilemma. We only have words and concepts to explain what is beyond words and concepts. In Zen terms, we have the finger pointing at the moon, when what we want is the moon. The prudent response is perhaps a Zen silence. But silence is then anything but "empty". Rather, it is pregnant with questions.

Notes on Emptiness #1

Forgive me for this long quotation, but at the moment it seems to me the clearest explanation of the Buddhist concept of emptiness that I've encountered. It's from a book called Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra by Francis H. Cook published way back in 1977. It was lent to me by my good friend Lynn. This is my second reading of it, and I'd like to copy the whole thing, which I may yet do!

From p.40-41: Cook has just finished explaining how emptiness itself must be recognized as empty.

The problem with words and concepts is that instead of understanding that they have a purely provisional status and a purely utilitarian value, human beings tend to believe that there is a really existing entity to which the word or concept corresponds. It is the fundamental teaching of Buddhism that there is only incessant change, or flux, and that there is no thing which undergoes the change.

There is a very great difference between this view and that which is commonly held; the former rests on the naive assumption that there is really an object (or complex of objects) which undergoes successive states -- ie. birth, subsistence and cessation -- but which itself is a real entity serving as the locus for the change, while the second view rests on the assumption that there is nothing but change, with no real, permanent locus for the change. The intricate fabric of being is thus not really being at all but a ceaseless becoming, pure flux. The change itself at any point comes about as a result of other events which act as the environment of the one point and condition it, causing it to assume a new, different, momentary form.

These conditioning events themselves have no more permanence and stability than the one point mentioned above, because they in turn are being conditioned by other events. The web of interconditionality is thus nearly infinite in scope. For this reason, there is no point anywhere which is exempt from this process of change, and nothing anywhere which lasts in one form for two moments in a row.

In the maze of interconditionality, to speak of real objects is a highly artificial process which is indebted to abstraction, and, according to adherents of the doctrine of emptiness, it is a futile process completely divorced from reality.

A key phrase here is the "assumption that there is really an object...which undergoes successive states...but which itself is a real entity serving as the locus for the change..." Cook calls this assuption naive. Damn, I don't like to be called naive. I think of impermanence -- change -- and that's exactly what I think of. My body, this body, yeah I know it changes from moment to moment. When I really pay attention to it I can sense the molecules gurgling away. But somehow I still think of it as the same body. My body. It's a body which is more or less rapidly decaying. But Cook says no. Emptiness says no. There is no body. There is nothing more than a vortex of change.