In the light of
death, we are brought before ourselves and our real possibilities are revealed
so that we can choose which path to follow: that of frustration or that of
fulfillment and liberation.
The Sangha are the
eight foremost Bodhisattvas: Manjusri, Vajrapani, Avalokitesvara, Ksitigarbha,
Nivaranaviskambhin, Gaganagarbha, Maitreya, and Samantabhadra.
Standing in the boat
of the human body, You should cross the great flood of misery. Since later this boat is difficult to get, Do
not sleep now, you fool.
What is Karma? It is
motivation and motivatedness.
The essence of the
formation of an enlightened attitude is the desire for perfect enlightenment in
order to be able to work for the benefit of others.
Pleasure and pain,
simple and extreme, are experiences of mind.
Relative mind is our
day-to-day mind of perceptions, thoughts, and emotions. We could also call it our moment-to-moment
mind, because it moves and changes at such high speed -- now seeing, now
hearing, now thinking, now feeling, and so on.
Actually, it's three minds rolled into one: perceptual mind, conceptual
mind, and emotional mind. Together,
these three layers or aspects of relative mind account for all of our conscious
mental activity.
If there is a table
in front of us, by the time we notice it, what we're seeing is just our
thought, "Oh, it's a table".
We aren't seeing the actual table anymore; we're seeing the label table,
which is an abstraction. An abstraction
is both a mental construct -- an idea we form quickly based on a perception --
and a generalization that's one step removed from our direct experience. … We
continually produce one label after another, unaware of how far removed we are
from our own experience, and this is what we call conceptual mind. Our concepts then become triggers for the
third level of mind, which is emotional mind.
We react to these labels and get caught up in our habitual feelings of
like an dislike, jealousy, anger, and so on.
We end up living in a world that's made up almost entirely of concepts
and emotions.
By meditating we see
reality in its true nature and compassion for sentient beings is born.
Buddhism does not
recognize the assumption that there is something unknowable. Knowledge, though not knowledge of something,
is at the core of human nature. Only as
long as we have not penetrated to this core we speak of knower and knowable and
erroneously believe that the two will never meet.
Mind is not an
entity, at best it is a symbol pointing to something ineffable.
The activity is
working for the benefit of others without preconceived ideas.
