The Wisdom of Selflessness

Tonight at the Vajrayana Institute, Geshe Samten continued teaching Lama Tsong Khapa's Lam Rim Chen Mo, 'The Special Insight on the Path of Enlightenment'. This week we read about the path of training in analytical meditation, which is pursued after stability has been reached in calm abiding meditation. The intuitive hits that I got around several of my stuckness-es inspired a Chariots of Fire style knees-up run this evening (ah, here's my mojo...).

Anyway.

One key learning for me has been that dharma words have quite specific meaning in Buddhist discourse.

'Emptiness' is a good example, and was a key to most of my revelations tonight.

Geshe Samten started out advising us to debate and discuss these ideas, to interrupt and to argue, while he was teaching us the points of distinction between the commentaries on the text from the great teachers. By virtue of this discursive practice, he argued that we 'bring the memory alive', and are in a better position to analyse our own interpretation of the texts once we have listened to and understood other people's perspectives.

Chapter 7, 'Why Insight Is Needed', starts from our achievements in concentrated meditative serenity, which include non-discursiveness, clarity and the delightful and blissful physical and mental benefits of these two. While these are wonderful achievements, bodhisattvas throughout time who wish to be liberated from samsara realise that concentration itself cannot eliminate the conception of the self. Concentration does not reveal profound meaning, or wisdom.

Wisdom is the dawn of knowledge that obliterates the seeds of confusion. Wisdom is proposed to come from being 'one who listens to others', this one who will then be 'free from aging and death'.

Buddha proposed this idea, of listening to others, to refute the notion that we can develop a notion of selflessness from within ourselves.

Selflessness takes on a critical meaning here too. In my recent posts, I've been rattling on about the deconstruction of the ego, about how I never felt I had a very strong ego because I've felt as though I've been most grounded when I hold other people's needs as quite dear. My take on ego could be loosely termed as a form of 'selflessness', although not a very pious form of selflessness, at that. My reified selflessness looks like an empty cardboard cutout after tonight, where I now understand selflessness in terms of the Lam Rim text. This is an emptiness of the self, both as a person, and emptiness of a self as an experience of all phenomena. Ultimately here, there is boundless groundlessness. This can be clarified by analysing the characteristics of an object across many levels of reality:

- the reality of it's gross form - shape, colour, size;

- the reality of it's subtle impermanence - realised through inferential cognising, or logic;

- the final reality of the emptiness of the object, where no analysis can be continued beyond this point, the collapse of logic;

- and finally, seeing all these things, the dawn of knowledge of special insight into emptiness, which eliminates the seeds of ignorance.

Here's another important point: the seeds of ignorance are in the grasping. Grasping, with the mind, is the delimiter on samsara and nirvana. That self of me, who wants to know all about everyone elses needs, she's still grasping, still identified. The cycle of samsara is continued. This notion can be logically followed all the way to generosity, to great compassion and loving kindness and joyous effort, all of which are noble and worthy and fulfilling, but none of which can break the cycle of samsara, as none of them directly engage with the root of ignorance and confusion. In terms of the Lam Rim, it could only be the opposite of ignorance, the opposite of confusion, a light for these darknesses, that stancds a chance of dispelling their vile traps. Only the total opposite of a conditioned mind can eliminate ignorance.

The wisdom of selflessness eliminates the root of cyclic existence.

I like it. And I love running.