In a recent class on the passage “. . . illuminated the five aggregates, saw that they are all empty. . .” from Expounding the Absolute Truth from the Heart Sutra, we engaged in considerable discussion of what we had learned from this passage and the Buddha Master’s discourse on it. Selected comments from the participants are listed below so that you can get a feel for this discussion and the impact the teaching had on all of us.
“I think temptation, strong temptation, is to think of super normal powers to be somehow real. That you can develop them, that you can have them, you can use them and so forth, and I think it is really important to understand that they are simply a manifestation of the same thing that manifests everything else. So they are not special, they are not different even, they are just–you know, come from an understanding of what is real. It is a manifestation of understanding. It is sort of unfortunate that we call them powers, and it is unfortunate that we call them supernormal, because they are not really powers and they are not really supernormal. They are normal when you understand reality.
“In the Mahamudra there is another way of thinking about this mirage, which I find very, very helpful and that is we are dreaming right now and we will wake up. We will wake up through death and, you know, dreaming, night time dreaming or dreaming in an unconscious or whatever–the actual dreaming that we do in this life is another kind of mirage to me, or at least it helps me understand that idea of mirage. I am always really amazed that how my dreams can be very, very detailed and complicated and all kinds of things going on and I wake up and it all vanishes. It all just completely disappears so that as in the metaphor in the Mahamudra of Liberation, we will wake up from this dream, we will wake up from this mirage. We will see this mirage for what it is when we die and kind of what we are trying to do now is see it before we die.”
“True emptiness is marvelous existence. You know, I have heard that so many times, and now I am just having a new understanding of it. It’s great! That’s good. Thanks!”
“I realized that all these things “exist.” We see and experience these things for one purpose–it is to let go of attachments and realize impermanence on such a subtle level. We see all these things and they all help teach us those principals.”
“Sometimes I get lost in the illusory and think that oh because it is illusory it doesn’t exist and I just really want to ditto what she just said–that it’s really good to hear that, that it does exist–we do experience it, but it is illusory and then if that’s relative to all the aggregates, that things are happening around us as conditional dharmas every day of our lives, it exists, but when we realize it is illusory, the attachments fade, so its easy to say, but I love hearing what the Buddha Master breaks down just so beautifully.
“This is really helpful for myself to understand what is attachment.”
“This particular section has been the most enlightening for me. When I was on my retreat, it just changed everything for me. I feel like we have been given the key to unlock what real wisdom and good fortune is through realizing these–what marvelous existence is.”
“Amen, amen, amen.”
“It’s funny because I remembered that there was a description of illuminate that really made it clear, but I couldn’t remember what exactly “clear” was, but when you read it today, it really does make it clear because I have always struggled with this idea of “illuminate the five aggregates” and, you know, this image that I now have really clearly, the five aggregates are like seeing an image in a mirror–you can’t do anything with that image except to reach back into your self. That’s the only way you can grasp that image in a mirror and so illuminating the five aggregates. I remembered that it was somehow complicated and that somehow there was an action in illuminate–that you did something and now I am remembering this and thus appreciating that idea that the way that I grasp the five aggregates is to reach backward into myself and that is the only way I can actually deal with the five aggregates in the mirror.”
“The thing that I have never really thought about before, or never put it together like I did today and how brilliant it is, the way the Buddha Master used the Ten Illusory Things, to explain the nature of all reality. I just want to read them again, just so we can remember what they are because each one gives a little different way of doing it. The first was Illusions, whatever they are, like the David Copperfield stuff. The Mirages which are phenomena that happens in nature, but are also useful. Dreams, that is a different way of looking at it. Shadows and Reflections, like the mirror that was just mentioned. Mirage Cities, another thing that happens in nature. Echos, a nature thing, like the Moon Reflected in Water, Floating Bubbles, and now [next week] we are going to still do the last two–Sky Flowers and the Fire Wheel, other ways at looking at the same thing, but ways of using these exotic–or some of them are exotic–to show us the nature of all things. I just think this is absolutely amazing.”
CLICK for link to Dogen’s “The Mountains & Waters Discourse (Sansui Kyo)”
CLICK for link to article that contains some of the Q &A from the discourse and a video of a mirage city in China.
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