15 April 2011

It's Not Supposed to Be Like Anything

There comes a point in the Diamond Sutra when, having hammered home the emptiness of everything including emptiness itself, the discussion with Subhūti turns to just how pants-shitting scary the realization of emptiness can be for one who is still attached to dharmas, attainment, etc.

Fearless bodhisattvas aren't thrown off by it.  Buddhas, of course, aren't either.  But the rest of us…?  Me…?

I do this all the time: "If I drop my idea about x, what will I be?" I feel-think to myself on a sliding scale from fret to despair.  I'm getting a little better at dropping, but I'm getting even better at seeing just how much I'm not yet dropping.  No fearless bodhisattva here.

I used to get a chuckle out of something my grandmother from Grand Rapids said after visiting the castle-ridden part of the Rhine valley in Germany: "It looks like Michigan!"

Isn't that the problem?  I can be staring right at the Dharmakāya in all of its wondrous emptiness and see nothing at all but the petty projections of my own ego.  But let go of them?  No way!  And so the wheel turns.

No comments:

Post a Comment