Kindle Notes & Highlights
It is not in some other place that the nature of reality becomes apparent; if we could only realize the fact, it is already manifesting here and now.
liberation consists in seeing processes rather than things.
If we think of nirvāṇa as a fixed point, however subtle or sublime, to which we may attain and of which we may take possession, we are really thinking of it as a glorified ego state. Nirvāṇa is not a sort of spiritual retirement home far from the madding crowd of suffering humanity, where we can settle down to enjoy our well-earned pension. Nirvāṇa is not a destination at which we arrive: it is the life of Enlightenment. It is a way of living, a process of perfectibility to which you can see no end. Nirvāṇa is the way you live, the way you have your being, when you have gone beyond the
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Similarly, the aggregates are there, but they do not amount to or include the ego-self that we read into them.
For someone who has no real spiritual experience, whose whole life is bound up with knowledge as mediated by concepts, this is indeed a teaching of non-existence or nihilism.
In one way or another, all these spiritual traditions uphold a belief in the absolute reality of the person and the aggregates.
It seems nihilistic only if what it negates is seen as everything.
If you were to speak to the man in the street about the inherent meaninglessness of worldly life, and were to suggest to him that there could be a way of life in which there was no job, no marriage, no family, no football, he would say that this would leave him with nothing.
There is no profit in shielding ourselves from the truth of things, which is that worldly pleasures and attachments are unsure and impermanent. Nor can we duck the challenges that this truth gives us. Sooner or later we have to confront the demands of the spiritual life, which may not be at all easy.
It is about transforming your life in a way that does justice to what you are and what you wish to be.
Not that the world is ultimately unreal. What we read into the world is unreal, including the distinction between real and unreal.
He is not asserting a philosophy, not teaching a monism.
It is the paradox of the goose in the bottle. Even though you cannot get the goose out of the bottle without either breaking the bottle or injuring the goose, that is what you have to do.
You can overcome dualism only by initially adopting a dualistic standpoint. As the Tantrics were to say later on, you have to get rid of dirt with dirt. It is like the traditional Indian way of washing clothes. You take mud from the river and use it like soap, rubbing it into the clothes and then rinsing them out.
The world itself does not exist ‘momentarily’ even for a moment.
like the way a film-reel creates the illusion of continuity out of a succession of separate images or frames. It is this philosophy of momentariness (kṣaṇikavāda) that Nāgārjuna has in his sights in these verses.
Anything you decide to call a moment must consist of further moments, themselves infinitely divisible in their turn.
There is, in fact, nothing that exists momentarily at all. The world itself does not exist ‘momentarily’ even for a moment.
The Abhidharma’s analysis of the world of our experience into dharmas, conceived as the ultimate components of existence, gets the same treatment as the philosophy of momentariness.51 What Nāgārjuna has done with respect to time, he now does with regard to space.
There is nothing that cannot be subdivided into parts, so nothing you can call ‘one’ can have any inherent existence.
One cannot therefore regard the parts as real and the whole as unreal, which is what the Abhidharma does, any more than one can regard the whole as real and the parts as essentially unreal, which is more like the conventional way people see things.
The idea of a poison and its antidote is another case of interdependent duality; the antidote exists only in relation to the poison. Thus nirvāṇa, as the antidote to the sufferings of conditioned existence, exists only in relation to those sufferings, to saṃsāra.
Real freedom is where there is no prison at all, and even, we might say, where there is no freedom either: no prison and therefore no freedom from prison.
applied even at a quite ordinary level of spiritual practice. If when you meditate you are simply concerned to get away from a certain aspect of your experience, you will not get very far.
If we truly get a sense of transcendental wisdom, we are frightened by it, because it teaches that there is nothing for us to settle down in, nothing in the world that is ultimately real.
We delight in a base in the sense of feeling secure in our dependence upon impermanent ‘things’, our grasping after existence or non-existence.
In order to transcend any kind of a base, we need a positive and provisionally secure base from which to begin.
Being able to settle down in a way that is committed but at the same time provisional is very much a matter of integration.
You will not, therefore, become so settled in it that you lose sight of your higher aspirations. You enjoy the meditation group, the Buddhist movement, the centre or community, the retreat facility, the right livelihood business, only to the extent that these situations enable you to grow and develop.
The mind that is not driven by its attachments is one thing; the butterfly mind is quite another.
A person is not earth, not water, Not fire, not wind, not space, Not consciousness and not all of them; What person is there other than these?
It is not mixed with
we seem to be able to accept the evident absence of the self within the elements as a puzzle, a living contradiction, perhaps in the same way that we accept the paradoxes of modern science.
the thoroughly worked, not to say overworked, logical argument seems to have been necessary
Śāntideva,
When his arguments become too relentlessly unanswerable you begin to distrust them.
Maybe we do not need all that much logical proof of the nature of reality. The real proof of any pudding is in the eating.
We may imagine that all this is too obvious to need reflecting upon, but it is our facile dismissal of the obvious that holds reality at bay.
To be brought up sharp against the limitations of one’s ordinary consciousness is utterly frustrating, but nonetheless entirely necessary if one is to apprehend the truth of things.
In fact, there should be no conscious decision to renounce the cutting edge of reason in our search for truth.
A person is not to be identified with any one of the five aggregates or six elements, nor with a combination of all of them, nor with an existence apart from them. They are not in the self, nor is the self in them, and yet without them the self has no existence.
If we think of things as embodying a varying mixture of the elements, and say simply that what we conventionally acknowledge as ‘earth’ is always a mixture of the elements in which earth predominates, then how can we identify ‘earth’ as an individual element at all?
We are a process in which we may identify elements like ignorance, skilful or unskilful actions and so on for practical purposes, but these elements have no independent reality.
He wants to return us to what Walt Whitman calls ‘the terrible doubt of appearances’,58 or what in the Zen tradition is often referred to as the ‘Great Doubt’. He wants to shake our confidence in the reality of what we now experience as our ‘self’.
We might reflect in this way: I am not the finished article; what I am now is not fixed and final. I am still on the assembly line. I am still in transition. What I am now I shall not be tomorrow. There may be growth in some areas, deterioration in others. How real, therefore, is the self with which I identify today?
Impermanence has to be experienced in ourselves and the world around us, moment by moment.
What we see today will not be there tomorrow. How real, therefore, is the world we see today? We may imagine that all this is too obvious to need reflecting upon, but it is our facile dismissal of the obvious that holds reality at bay.
The Enlightened consciousness sees through conditioned existence. That is, it sees through the attempt by the conditioned consciousness to catch reality in the net of concepts or ‘names’, catching in that net both ideas of the self and what is not the self.
this does not mean that reality is nothing. It means that a net of concepts can in the end catch only concepts.
When you get near to the mirage, it is not that you see nothing at all, but that what you see is not the water you expected to find. Instead, you see what was really there all along.
