Conceptual and Non-conceptual

Wow, great quotes, guys, thank you very much. That is a really good and topical passage, Dan. I have never seen that before, which is no surprise to me.

Jeff what you quoted from the Dalai Lama is very close to what my teacher has said a few times. He put it like this, "A Buddha can manifest as a building, a plant, a river, a bridge, whatever sentient beings need." But saying I heard my teacher say this, does not have the same credibility as a quote from His Holiness, you can point to.

Anyway, I think if you pay attention, or ask the right questions, what Mipham describes is being alluded to all the time in Tibetan Buddhist teachings, but Buddhists are very skillful in the way they say things, they can work on lessor, middling and great levels simultaneously. Obviously I don't have that kind of skill, or nobody would ever get so frustrated with me around here. Maybe as I continue to refine my motivations for writing, I will improve.

The point about offerings Dan made was one I considered making as well. The truth is I was trying really hard not to say, it's all awareness, because I know that seems to contradict basic teachings, and in its un-purified state, matter has a different (polluted) appearance at the subtle levels than the clear light one can realize in it. But how many times have I said that in the last five years? It seems to me I have been writing that or alluding to that all along. Goes to show there is a big difference to what you think you are saying and people are hearing.

But according to teachings I have heard, the position of Cittamatra (Mind Only), Yogacaran and Mahdyamika (Middle Way) schools is that all reality is a projection of mind, Yogacaran emphasizes the interdependence and emptiness of outward reality, and Mahdyamika goes a step farther and asserts that even the mind that projects is interdependent and empty. These are not just saying what we experience is mind, they are saying it all is a projection of mind. In Addi Yoga, I have heard, they describe outward reality as "your displays", and relate them to various energy channels in the body. A lot of tantras and mandalas work on these principals, in my opinion, based on what little I have heard or read about them. It all only makes sense to me if one considers the pervasive nature of the primordial Buddha, and this works perfectly with the way I experience things.

Anyway, it all starts and ends with the laboratory of our own thoughts and feelings, so don't let these big metaphysical topics intimidate you. They are just describing different aspects of your own ultimate nature.

This discussion is fascinating and largely above(or below, beside, on top of, outside) my understanding. However, in this quote you seem to be saying that the world is a dream, whereas I've always read and been taught that after achieving a direct experience of emptiness, in the post-meditative stage that the world appears like an illusion or dream.

Clive.

Yes Jeff, but saying that a cat can be black does mean that every cat is black.

I need some more time to consider how to answer best to Matt, this is pretty complicated matter and certainly confuses me too regularly! It's pretty hard to pinpoint where I think Matt's conclusions are incorrect, and I suspect it is because he mixes up the different schools of thought like Cittamatra and Prasangika Madhyamika, these are two views that simply do not mix, like oil and water. That is not to say that one is inferior or so, just the perspective, the approach to the subject is different. Like in the famous example of five blind men describing what they can sense of an elephant. None of them is wrong, but one describes a tail and the other a leg etc.
Not much time at the moment...

Dear Matt & all,

Firstly sorry, because I think the confusion was at least partly on my side. Yes, according to the Yogacara school of thought of course mind is the only 'real' existing phenomenon in the universe, and in a sense it creates matter or at least the appearance of matter (but that's a different discussion again).

There are a few reasons though why I made the mistake to react the way I did, which maybe helpful to know for you Matt in your further writings.

In much of what you write, I miss whether the information and conclusions come from your own experience or the traditional sources, and if so, from which school of thought. As the article that you quoted last mentions, there are serious problems in just mixing statements and viewpoints from the different schools. Like the blind men who are discussing what an elephant is, while one touches the trunk and another touches the legs, the different traditions actually talk of different things with similar words, or with similar words refer to different things. If you mix statements from different traditions, you simply do not automatically get something that makes sense.

So when you are in a basically Prasangika Madhyamika (PM) argument, you cannot simply add conclusions from the Mind Only school (Yogacara or - more or less - Chittamatra) and expect a sensible outcome, and that is what I thought you were doing - my bad. I reacted to what I thought was in a PM context (the tradition I am most familiar with), to read the statement that mind creates everything, and unfortunately these two statements do not simply go together.

A similar thing can easily happen when people try to combine e.g. PM with the Shentong or Great Madhyamika view; these views are based on different sutras, and the conclusions of one do not fit into the other system; simply said, at some stage they contradict each other and reach different conclusions. (Of course nobody likes to use the word 'contradict' within the teachings of the Buddha, so more perhaps more 'politically correct', we tend to talk of 'different viewpoints'.)

This matter is very complex indeed; for example just before the great quote which Dan introduced, there is another paragraph, which I find very hard to understand - in particular in how I understand the Dan's quote; it reads:



Somehow I cannot grasp this at all; and I get completely lost when I then try to combine the above with Dan's quote....

Not sure if I managed to create some clarity or more confusion.

Great quote, Dan.
Ju Mipham, ......... one could go down to one`s knees and cry in gratitude that Ju Mipham understood
what Buddha (or another enlightended being) taught.
And this again is then misunderstood as `weird Guru devotion`.

Since years I ask myself the question if it is possible to kind of reconcile the, let`s call it in a simplistic way, Gelug and Nyingma approach or do we always have to go and to express ourselves along the various schools.....

Buddhism is so confusing for many because at some point they feel that there are contradictions and to understand that these are NOT contradictions requires a big effort indeed.

The message of so-called Buddhism is very simple and once one understands what Buddha wanted to say
then one wonders why one spent years and years wading through all kind of stuff......

This was to understand the one simple and most profound truth which otherwise stares into one`s face 24/7 and one does not get it.

And this is why I find Vajrayana (or as they say in a simplified and often incredibly misunderstood way `tantra`) so important, because after all these years of going through various stuff it deals with the one point and the one point only.

Should one laugh or cry about this ?
I do not know.

The only thing left to say here is:

Never fully give up to connect with the teachings and the practice.
Even after long breaks, come back and go on.
Do not give up.


Tamara

(PS: Matt, I hope I`ll come back to answer your questions at some point.
Am very busy again.)

Rudy quoted Mipham:


This quote, from a short excerpt from Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche's book, The Practice of Mahamudra, seems to parallel nicely with the Mipham quote. (The full excerpt is a quick and savory read.):

Rudy wrote:


Oftentimes, though, Yogacara is mentioned, but qualified. In other words, it's often accepted that the external reality is mind only, just not, as in Yogacara, that mind itself is inherently existent:

Hey Matt,

Lemme pull on your coattail about something here.

On Jan 31, 2014 at 10:11am, you wrote:



I think that's mostly an excellently crafted paragraph. However, regarding the highlighted portion, and though you qualify it as an opinion or a thought, (and not to mention that it could be subtly misleading) I think it's important to note that a continuum is based on the mindstream of a sentient being and that any clear light continuum is inseparable from that mindstream, neither increasing or decreasing. In other words, clarity and awareness are uncompounded and not "building." For example, when Berzin uses this word, he usually refers to something like a pure-building network, or pathway. To me, "building" sounds too constructionist, though in regard to re-training the mundane habits of body, speech and mind, I appreciate that a network of related behavioral potentials increases, or is building, instead of the tendency toward action in the habitual spectrum.

In other words, what is building is actually more like the ongoing deconstruction of habitual tendencies and obscuration.

One analogy for consciousness that might be helpful is to think of a glass of ice water*. We might say inside the glass there are two things, water and ice, but immediately we begin to see a problem with that, the ice is water in a solid form and what we call water is water in a liquid form. So course forms of consciousness can be thought of as the ice, and subtle forms as the water. The ice never stops being water, and as it melts it reveals its liquid nature. We could say that the water is the essential element in the ice, but that is not quite right either, is it? The ice just changes states, it never stops being water, so how can it be essential to itself?

So Gleug ways of describing consciousness and phenomena in general will begin with the present appearance, we have ice water**. Then they will describe the ice melting, and eventually you just have "pure" water. It is easier to understand, but not logically pure, because the ice was always water. As the ice melts it absorbs heat from the water, so this is a process we can liken to bliss, and understand that Sakya teahcers are going to say something like the ice is just bliss, they are just pointing to the process, not really admitting there is ice, but not calling it water either.

The inevitable result of ice is water, because eventually it is bound to melt. And as we apply heat, that is like penetrative insight, it is revealing its ultimate, or true nature. It is really more accurate to say we just have water, the problem is that makes for difficult explanations, because to say we have water in different states, is akin to saying ice water. Ningmapas are very reluctant to do that. Always they are attempting to describe from the view of result, we just have water.

As you know water can take a lot of different forms, or more accurately, be in a lot of different states. It can be vapor as in steam or a cloud, these are both vapor, but different conditions. Eskimos, I hear, have hundreds of words for different kinds of snow, snow with different qualities. It's all just water, though, isn't it?

But at least water is a substance, something we can point to, touch, drink and feel very familiar with. This is why ocean is such a good analogy for sentience and sentient beings, but it is just an analogy, because consciousness is not a substance, even though it can manifest as form, ultimately it is nothing definable at all, and even water (and consciousness) is empty. So phenomena, any phenomena, is best understood as an appearance, when we realize the true nature of any phenomena, we find it is in fact the ocean, and never was apart from the whole ocean at all.

But to continue the analogy, we can liken sentience to ice, sentient beings to ice cubes, and water to clear light. The most refined or purified form of sentience is clear light, but even the stains--the pollution or dirt--is just sentience in a particular state, and it never stops being ultimately pure. When we realize the ultimate nature of sentience, we find it is, and always was clear light. Just as the ice is and always was water. But that was not our experience of the ice was it? Relative reality is a valid experience, but it is not ultimately true. Delusion is like being fooled by ice, and thinking it is other than water. Enlightenment is like having the whole universe to drink, and not having to give up ice when you want it, which for Buddhas, would be when it is somehow helpful to sentient beings.

You can bathe in water, but that does not stop it being water, it does not mean you can't also drink water, or that your body is not grown with water. If every particle of your body was somehow water in a different state, then the analogy would work even better for the higher schools of Buddhist philosophy, like Yogacara and Mahadyamika. The difference between them is like where sometimes Yogacara seems to be asserting mind is inherently existing (ice) the Mahadyamika is saying no, that too is empty (just water in our analogy.)

Penetrative insight is knowing you are non dual with the ice (any appearance), and realizing it is just water, is like realizing an appearance is empty. If you then come to understand that little bit of water in the ice cube is actually the whole ocean, because it was never separate from the whole ocean, then that is akin to the Union of Wisdom and Method or as Nyingmpas might refer to it: Recognition. This way we gradually come to realize the Universe is in fact, pristine awareness, and always was just that.



* For those of you who aren't Americans, we love to put ice cubes in water, and we call the beverage ice water. Every restaurant serves it free as a first course, and Americans are famous for demanding ice water when they travel overseas, where it is usually not at all common.
**The glass is a red herring, because there is no container as such, if there is, it is just water too, maybe a glass made of ice.