It has been heard by me that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence. Likewise, that emptiness itself, its postulation that is, is also empty, non-immune to its own description. I have heard that “Without one, there are not many. Without many, one is not possible. Whatever arises dependently is indeterminable.” , and that “A father is not a son, a son is not a father. Neither exists except in correlation with the other. Nor are they simultaneous.” Having heard such things, my relative existence has been polished clean of the stain of deception, that miserly confusion which once convinced “me” that “my” situation was a fixed and firm encampment, something I might fantasize to alter, yet would never move beyond the realm of dreams. For empty of inherent existence, I find myself full with infinite multitudes, and the path to methodically transforming the blueprint of my thought patterns to the mandala of the Awakened One is revealed in the mirror of my empty eyes. With motivation clearly understood, to set the truth of Impermanence recognized by the ennobled to my mind’s advantage, I embark along the vastness of the path, knowing all the while it is burning its own wake.
Perhaps some passers by in this winding swirl of samsara’s oceans might find the four basic facts laid out by the Buddha to be a heavy stone rather than a buoy whilst treading water, helplessly lost at sea. Getting stuck at the first couple of stones to cross that ocean, the truth that life is suffering, and turning away in fear of facing such a fact, they might miss the bridge that is that very facts’ impermanence. And in so missing, the raft passes by, to return only after countless eons too shall pass, and such nectarian dependence may arise once more. For when we taste the flavor of impermanence, it is at first a bitter remedy. Like a durian fruit, its magic is an acquired taste, and it is wrapped in a kind of spiked disguise. But once it is milked for its ambrosial qualities, it is Impermanence indeed, also empty, that allows for any kind of path at all. Particularly the path to bliss and emptiness.
If anything were fixed, anything at all, then not a thing at all could ever not be what it is. A father could never be a son, a chicken could never be an egg, and a lost and weary wanderer could never transform into an Awakened One (a Buddha). If such were the case there would be no Buddha. Which materialists might happily accept. But there would likewise be no Elon Musk. For if Elon Musk truly existed, from his own side, inherently, then 1) he would always exist, and thus would never have arisen from a state which is not the Elon Musk we now perceive. Which of course is a simple insanity his father can certainly confirm. And 2) All who perceive him would perceive and agree upon the qualities of his identity. And I can certainly confirm that there is no such consensus, as someone who sees him more as a demon than a victorious one. It is precisely this nature of all compounded phenomena as impermanent and empty of a fixed reality that allows for both the capitalist dream and the Buddhist enlightenment. Impermanence and Emptiness are what allow a poor and destitute being like me, to both dream into and step-by-step pursue, either worldly affairs such as launching into outer space, or becoming a Buddha.
Which brings me to our topic. Please forgive the delay, the vehicle needs servicing before it can take off and fathom our goal. Which is reached only through first aspiring to set out. It is this aspiration that I would like to explore with you, with the aspiration to benefit you. Not so much in your worldly pursuits, no, likely this sojourn with motivation will not make you richer for riches sake, or more finely dressed to improve your status in society. It likely won’t stop at bringing you a flashy new girlfriend, or the short-lived thrill of seeing some several digit figure in your bank account. The benefit I hope this marinate in motivation may provide, is nourishment on your path to complete awakening. To your liberation from the first truth of your suffering, the writhing addiction to samsara’s adrenaline soaked robes. Which simultaneously is the fundamental teaching of establishing a pure motivation. Having genuinely reached such a motivation, your path will simply be a matter of time until it is ripened well. And time too, is empty and impermanent. So, basically, once you touch the heart of pure motivation, you will touch the heart of Buddha. Perhaps once we touch the heart of anything at all, we will likewise touch the heart of Buddha’s womb, for the layers around it dissolve in pure perception.
Now perhaps this is as good a moment as any to confront the possibly repelling quality of the word “pure” as it mixes with your mind. If you love the word from the onset, then no need to pay great heed to the next few lines, perhaps just bathe in their nectar as you carry on this philosophical meander. For many whose conditioned mind has been fed by modern ideas and ideals, the word purity can bring a sour taste, a kind of wrinkle of the brow, or furl of the lip as we rebel against the catholic church and our grandmothers pent up assertions. Purity in this context, in the non-material frame of buddha dharma does not mean a mere accordance with a Creator God’s laid out, and down, judgment of a harshly dualistic good-and-evil scale upon which we are assessed, once again by an external spiritual godhead who is both omniscient and omnipotent yet somehow enjoys, or at the least condones, the myriad of sentient beings’ sufferings. A direct implication of an omnipotent being is that they choose to sit idly while the beings of the infinite worlds suffer. Such a purity would not be something I would suggest taking refuge in, lest you end up in such a sad and lonely throne.
The Buddhist purity refers rather to the ideal point of view a seeker of complete liberation from suffering and its causes can adopt, which is essentially the commitment to abandon all non-virtue and engage only in virtue, with the motivation of purifying one’s mind of the illusion of defilements and thus become an Awakened One; a Buddha. Further still, this complete and perfect purity encompasses the great motivation of not stopping there, satisfied with one’s own personal freedom, but committing to continuously serving every single living being until they in turn accomplish the same perfection of their own purity, and join the team of great accomplished ones, working tirelessly to serve the liberation of all beings. This kind of purity is the quality that, within the mahayana buddhist context, allows a motivation to be a good one.
It has also been heard by me, more often than I wish to have heard, that this is a lofty and unattainable goal. Which I can understand seeing it that way, when emptiness is not understood, and thus the task to support the enlightenment of all beings feels a little like the story of Vasalisa in the book “Women who run with wolves’, where the little girl is set the task to separate all the poppyseeds from mustard seeds of a giant heap of mixed tiny grains before the evil witch gets back. I use this metaphor as comparison precisely because it is similar in that story, where the little girl is assisted by a magical doll her mother gave her, which in that story, is a symbol of her intuition.
In the mahayana motivation the magical assistant is the correct view of emptiness, wherein we realize that both the suffering of infinite beings, and infinite beings themselves, do not actually exist. Their reality is only relative, not ultimate, and thus by purifying our own mind perfectly, we free them of their relative existence that only exists in a relationship with our impure perception. An impure perception means one stained by all the afflictions, such as anger, attachment and ignorance. The suffering we perceive in the multitude of beings only exists in direct reflection to our impure mind. To another mind, free of such impressions, all beings are already buddhas. The motivation to serve and help them all is essentially a mental posture, a shape the mind can take which magically stretches the normally self obsessed, and thus utterly contracted view, into a view that contains the happiness of all beings. The scope of that happiness becomes one’s own happiness, and the view, is the path, is the goal. At least, that is what has been heard by me. I am but a poor and destitute optimist perfuming my own mind.
This nature of the motivation as being both relatively un-exceedingly precious, and ultimately redundant, sometimes trips an ordinary being like me up. If once we attain enlightenment we see that there was never any suffering, that not a one of these infinite beings we have been trying to help was ever actually experiencing real suffering, that like us, they were all dreaming a nightmare from safe within a cloud of perfect white cream, what is the point of holding such a motivation in the first place? This is where the immaculate beauty of the mahayana mind of method really sings a holy melody. The reason for adopting this view, sincerely from the honest place where we are all likely approaching at this time, the humble place of being totally confused, attached, and averted ordinary beings, is that the process of training in such a view is the actual remedy to the primary confusion.
The essential affliction that is the root of all the plethora of afflicted mind states is ignorance to the nature of reality as empty and luminous. The practice of aspiring to help all living beings free themselves from that ignorance, massages the plasticity of one’s mind to the pattern which reveals that very state we aspire to bring other beings to. What was always there; the perfect Buddha. The nature of all phenomena as empty and blissful. By stretching our mind to fathom the enlightenment of all beings and ourselves serving such a goal, we impress upon our own minds that reality. Like all the practices and methods, we are training the mind to recognize its own nature, obscured by countless lifetimes of unskillful mind training. We are not adding something, so much as removing illusory mistaken appearances arising from the delusion of fixed and real existence.
Now we have to watch that we don’t trip again, and turn the path into a materialistic strategy. It is a strategy, don’t get me wrong, and a skillful one at that. But we have to be cautious not to skip steps in the process, thinking we get it, and then not methodically engaging the path until it naturally burns away from under us in the wake of actual sincere realizations. We don’t want to throw away the wholehearted conviction in our motivation to serve all beings until they all attain enlightenment because we think we’ve understood emptiness and thus may as well just lay back and smoke rollies. Which is not to say we couldn’t do just that, if our realization was pure, and we could sincerely hold the view without needing the support of the laid out methods. So much honesty is required in the secret places of our own minds. It’s kind of like rushing. We can’t rush the process of method burning itself away. Rather, I think it’s probably best to err on the side of caution and plod along earnestly with the vast goal of the mahayana motivation, held as relatively real.
I seem to be endeavoring to serve myself some medicine here, and from the depths of my heart may it benefit you too. I have heard that one of the most dangerous things is when a practitioner of the path, a mind trainer, thinks she’s already at level four, when she’s actually still spinning on the first step. If the medicine becomes a poison it’s hard to concoct a proper cure. What this seems to mean to me, is that we can intellectually and rationally comprehend the ultimate teaching, that the method is only relative, without genuinely knowing it as a realization. We then might think we don’t need to engage the path of practice, tricking our mind in an ineffective way that we are already there. It’s such a delicate and precise prescription to hold the ultimate view and the relative practice at once, in a harmony that allows them both their place in the throne of mind-projected gold. And this is just our dance as aspiring bodhisattvas, those beings whose minds have turned to awakening, and whose motivation is to bring all beings to enlightenment.
The first few weeks of my traditional buddhist textual studies class we looked deeply into this notion of pure motivation, and every time we start a class, our Khenpo reminds us to set our motivation so that we may “listen to the sublime dharma”. This pure motivation is summed up in two words; renunciation and bodhicitta. Bodhicitta is the term used to encompass the vast goal of the bodhisattva to serve all infinite beings until they all attain enlightenment. Renunciation is essentially a deep and utterly convinced weariness of samsara, the cycling of birth-death-rebirth of insatiable thirsts, and from this weariness a profound resolve to refrain from engaging in samsara’s causes, which are the host of non-virtuous actions. This two-fold motivation takes the action of listening to dharma teachings from a mundane realm of just sitting on a cushion and letting our ears register the soundwaves for a limited benefit such as our own comprehension or intellectualization, to an extraordinary realm where our action benefits countless beings. The action might appear to be similar, but the posture of the mind, and thus the karmic effect it will be the result of, is totally different. According to this view, holding a pure motivation can turn any action into the path of practice, of purifying the negativities stored in the subconscious storehouse, and accumulating virtuous impressions within that same reservoir.
This is why we are continuously reminded not to let our motivation become stained by any of the eight worldly concerns. Gain, loss, status, disgrace, censure, praise, pleasure, & pain are seen as spinning the world of samsara into being, feeding its oceans like mountain streams. Ordinary mundane motivation is almost always related to one of these eight concerns. Even a motivation which might seem at first to be quite good, like wishing for a loved one’s health to improve, or for a friend to get their dream job, are by mahayana standards still impure. Which is not to say they aren’t all good and fine, only that they lack the full potential of the broader motivation. It speaks to the immaculate clarity and purity of the mahayana, because most would be quite satisfied with simply wishing for the result of happiness, forgetting to aim to generate its causes. To wish for the source of our loved one’s problems to cease is seen as a more effective prayer. The thing is, everything results from causes and conditions. So the best way to ensure that your loved one’s health is always perfect, and your friends will live their dreams, is to train in generating the causes which create those results and becoming a spring of happiness not just for a few whom your conditioned mind has preferenced, but for limitless beings impartially. This is what it means to purify the mind.
And so by this diamond standard, a motivation which is anything less than for the enlightenment of all beings, the sublime bodhicitta, is impure. It is stained by the ignorance of thinking that happiness comes from objects, and not from the mind. Which is so clearly disproven by the scene in the film ‘Matilda’ wherein the little fat boy who has been stealing the evil principal’s chocolate cake, mistaking it for the cause of his happiness, is told to eat an entire cake the size of his tubby torso. If the chocolate cake was actually the cause of his happiness, he would be able to keep eating it continuously and it would continuously make him happy. But that is not the case whatsoever, and for those of you who have witnessed this scene, or experienced for yourself the feeling after eating an entire tub of icecream or smashing a whole bag of chips, you know well that it actually becomes a kind of sick torture.
Similarly we can see evidence that happiness does not come from the object when we mistake our boyfriend for the cause of our happiness, and not as a result of our previous kindness flourishing under the conditions of our boyfriend appearing. If our boyfriend were actually the cause of our happiness, we could lie on top of them forever without ceasing, and our happiness would stream forth in a continuous uninterrupted flow of ‘Yes!’. But we know this isn’t true. I have had the fortunate karma to have had many exquisite boyfriends, and there always comes a time when I simply need some space to myself. Sometimes even, they become kind of repelling or repulsive. Not because they have actually changed, but because the posture of my mind, the karmic impressions that are expressing in the moment have changed.
Ordinary beings chase the positive expressions, and avoid the negative ones, unaware of the causes for either. Life is a kind of random bouquet of nice and not-nice experiences or is perhaps glorified as a magical display of unpredictability, an enchanting mystery of untamable chaos. Which is all fine if you like rocking along the churning ocean of pain and pleasure in a popcorn style video dream. The Buddha simply taught a method for stilling the water enough for the mud to settle and the nature of perfect clarity to reveal itself, the very nature of samsara as nirvana. And I rather like it. The vastness of this motivation moves me to tears of joy, and I wanted to share it with you, in case it might likewise bring a sparkle to your eyes on this long and heart-wrenching circumambulation of the truth.
When we move our motivation beyond worldly concerns and our private personal agendas we stretch ourselves to fathom the infinite. This fathoming alone is a kind of medicine for the contracted loci of awareness that trips over its own shoelaces and ties itself up into bondage whilst crying for help. What better way to start than by aspiration. Actually, every single action starts with an aspiration, and it is aspiration that allows it to become. There is not a single action that doesn’t first start with the aspiration to do it, though often the aspiration is unconscious, which is a whole other subject called mindfulness training. So even if you hear this lengthy praise of the vast bodhicitta motivation and think it is far too much for your mind to deal with, you can always aspire to adopt it. Or even aspire to aspire. Or aspire to aspire to aspire. You get the point right? Everything starts with a wish. In the words of Lama Yeshe “Everything exists on the tip of a wish”. So may that wish be the wish for complete awakening for all living beings!
Thus may it be heard by us, a dedication of the merit of listening to this clumsy interpretation of the sublime dharma, to Bodhicitta. Oh Sublime and precious Bodhicitta, may you arise where you have not yet arisen, and where you have arisen, may you never wane, but increase further and further! May we aspire to hold such high aspiration perfectly and reveal the nature of our minds both inner and outer. The ground sprinkled with perfume and spread with flowers, may you free your mind! The rest will follow.
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