Unexpectedly you wake up in the morning before the alarm goes off. You stare at the ceiling and realize that you will one day die. So what do you do? Go back to sleep or lie awake worrying about it? Unfortunately, neither dreamland nor worry can̍t solve the problem, it goes much deeper.
That evening after work you manage to find some degree of solace by going on the Internet. You take comfort in the fact that many like you share the same problem.
Eventually your life of small, accumulated pleasures and sensual excitement begins to turn into anger and becomes more frustrating. One day you happen to be in Moe’s Bookstore and have to go to the restroom. While sitting there you read on the wall, the wave is not the water. It doesn't make any sense to you but still you can't get it out of your mind.
Much of the greater story of Buddhism has to do with overcoming the allure of an imaginal world observing it with a mind under the domination of imagination. Buddhism really consists of intuiting reality the way it really is before it becomes imagined. No imaginary construct will suffice from the simplest thought to an elaborate and vivid world of great beauty.
How does this connect with the wave is not the water? It is the same as, the ring or bracelet is not gold and the brick is not clay. On the same score, your thoughts are in no way the pure Mind or absolute spirit which Siddhartha awaken to. Still having a problem?
So what is the problem? Buddhism says it's consciousness or in Sanskrit vijñāna, literally, in two parts knowing. This is more at the division of the one (spirit) or the splitting of the one in which appearance is born which, nevertheless, remains intrinsically empty (śūnyatā).
Abiding in the world of appearance or the same, conditionality, we cannot reify any of this. It always remains empty. To do so is a fool’s errand. The intention of Buddhism is to break us of this habit. Nevertheless, Buddhism has its fools who then want to say that emptiness itself is the absolute just as Judaism and Christianity have their fools who try to imagine the divine through the flesh.
Comments