The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones: The Practice of View, Meditation, and Action by Khyentse Rinpoche Dilgo & Patrul Rinpoche

Author:Khyentse Rinpoche, Dilgo & Patrul Rinpoche
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2012-09-04T03:00:00+00:00

SIMPLICITY

41.

By examining relative truth, establish absolute truth;

Within absolute truth, see how relative truth arises.

Where the two truths are inseparable, beyond intellect, is the state of simplicity;

In the view free of all elaboration, recite the six-syllable mantra.

In conventional, relative truth, we might accept that the phenomenal world can be broken down into indivisible particles; but the logic of the Madhyamaka shows that such particles could never have any independent or permanent existence. This being so, how can we say that material objects truly exist? Similarly, although we can try to dissect the mind into indivisible instants of consciousness, we find that these, too, must ultimately be devoid of any tangible existence.

To recognize the continuity and all-pervasiveness of this void nature, this absence of any true existence, is to recognize absolute truth. This is the natural state of mind, untouched by any obscuration, in which all phenomena are seen as the Buddhas see them, as dreams or magical illusions. Here, thoughts do not give rise to negative emotions or the accumulation of karma, favorable circumstances engender neither pride nor attachment, and adverse circumstances are quickly transformed into the path of enlightenment—for example, an encounter with someone who irritates you, instead of causing anger, helps you to generate compassion and becomes a chance to recognize the absolute truth which is inseparable from the bodhichitta. If you are unable to give up your attachment to things, it is simply because you fail to recognize their void nature. Once you have realized this void nature, you will no longer feel proud of dreamlike success or depressed by dreamlike failure.

Some people find themselves surrounded by beauty, comfort, natural abundance, and safety, whereas others may have to live in harsh, barren, impoverished, and dangerous environments. Now, this is the result neither of chance nor of some grand design. To have been born in a pleasant place is the result of generosity, helpfulness, and virtue in former lives, while adverse living conditions are the consequence of harm brought to others in previous lives by attacking them, imprisoning them, and so forth. Phenomena are not the work of a creator; they are simply what manifests as the combined result of many causes and circumstances. In the same way that, as the result of sunlight shining through rain, a rainbow appears in the sky, so also, as the result of a great number of actions in your past lives, in this life you are either happy, healthy, prosperous, and loved by all or unhappy, poor, beset by sickness, and despised. Indeed, every detail of the universe and the beings it contains is nothing more than the result of many interdependent factors momentarily coming together; this is why all phenomena are so impermanent and undergo such constant change.

So when you examine anything deeply, you always arrive at voidness, and only voidness; voidness is the ultimate nature of everything. As beginners who may be on the path of accumulation or the path of union,58 we ordinary beings have not had the actual realization of voidness.

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