Bodhicharayavatara

When something and its nonexistence
Both are absent from before the mind,
No other option does the latter have:
It comes to perfect rest, from concepts free.

- pronounced by Shantideva as he and Manjushri rise into the air, according to legend, in the recitation of the chapter on Prajna, Wisdom, in the text 'The Way of the Bodhisattva'.

As I'm winding my way back to broaden my understanding of and experience with practices for conscious dying,  I've been called back to recitation of the Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom, or the Heart Sutra, and then, (again), the Madhyamaka text, the Bodhicharayavatara, or the Way of the Bodhisattva.

They seem very much to set up a rhythm, these two texts, where they call to each other - I can do naught but follow the practice path, set.

I've been stunned as I encounter the words, this time around, to find the polemic through which the text is written - casting off the Hindu Samkhya & Nyaya-Vaisheshika and Buddhist Vaibhashika and Sautantrika schools of indivisibility of matter and 'real' instants of consciousness, hammering apart definitive (nitartha) and expedient (neyartha) expression of primordial truth into paramartha (ultimate) and samvriti (relative) truths, the Tathagata is free from all theories.

I first read this text some time back, and, like The Tibetan Book Of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, first encountered at age 18, I simply took both texts as instructive, as informative of the mind-I-should-have (that is, of course, no-mind).

The Buddha, in this text rejects all views. Maybe inspired by Bonnitta Roy's explication of the Dzogchen view, I'm met here in a suprarational place, this text, calls my heart out and over, into prajna, immediate, intuitive insight into suchness. Wisdom of emptiness beyond subject and object, free, untrammeled, simply aware, without seed of refutation. 

Without irony, systematically deconstructing a system through gentle dialectical aletheia, opening to, revealing, unconcealing, inner coherence. Mental stillness, emptiness is achieved when discursive mind is gradually and subtly slowed in recursive action, when her own polarity is mitigated by reversal of subject and object such that one renders the other, in polarity, mute. Slowing to stillness, gently, in time.

There's a call to revisit ontological essentialism, at some point I heed this.

Apologies to those with eyes sensitive to my butchering of Sanskrit, here, I'm in the unfortunate position of touch-screen typing, and will revisit to clear up my ASCII transgressions.

Love through emptiness,

who knew.

Ref:
Padmakara Translation Group (2006). The Way of the Bodhisattva. Boston: Shambala.