Being Right Here by James Low

Author:James Low
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Snow Lion

VERSE 15

– THE GROUND OF EVERYTHING –

“Free of the four limiting notions of existence, non-existence, both existence and non-existence, neither existence nor non-existence, and of all relative positions mind is emptiness, uncompounded. Free of artifice from the very beginning awareness remains unimpeded. When this is experienced youthful, fresh awareness is released from its covering pot and you see your own face, the natural mode of infinite goodness (Samantabhadra).”

This verse states that the mind is free of the four basic limiting ideas, ideas which are discussed a lot in madhyamika philosophy: of things having an existence, a non-existence, both existence and non-existence, neither existence nor non-existence. These are seen as the four defining propositions of all the possibilities of being. And the nature of the mind is stated to be free of all of these, and all definitions as being this or that.

The next line is very interesting and important. It says: “Free of artifice from the very beginning awareness remains unimpeded.” This term artifice, choma (bCos Ma), refers to anything which is constructed. We can examine it in terms of the wheel of life, on the outer circle of which are the twelve nidanas, twelve steps. The second of these steps is samskara, mental formation, the factors out of which you construct the world and your self. It is represented by a potter’s wheel, with which the potter creates diverse shapes, which appear to be separate entities, out of the same source. The first stage in the twelve steps is ignorance. Ignorance gives rise to this busy activity of mental formation, which leads to all troubles of rebirth in samsara.

Yet the text says that the mind does not engage in any busyness. Clearly busyness is going on because we are all busy and our activity seems to be quiet real. But this busyness is not a quality of the mind itself. The mind is not busy but busyness arises in an effortless way from it as a ray arises from the sun. As soon as something is constructed it seems to take on not only a shape but a location and if it has a location it is then immediately in juxtaposition or relation to other positions. It is relativised and contextualised. But because the nature of the mind is empty and is not constructed in any way, free of all artificiality, it has no location and so no limit and therefore the text says that it is unimpeded. That is to say it is present everywhere. There are no walls to it because it has no shape or form of itself that would be blocked by an other shape or form.

The nature of the mind is often described as the ground or the basis of everything as we saw earlier in the text. But we have to remember that through our language we are always restricted to these linear and two-dimensional ways of thinking about things. It is not that this nature is the ground existing below things and things rest on the ground.

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