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I will try to compress it and give quotes on things that ‘reached’ me.
* Quality and motivation is the driving force for wise action in the world.
* You need a strong and deep urge to turn your back towards samsara.
* We need to develop wisdom by concentration by meditation, discipline and
ethical behavior.
* We need mental peace through:
– insight that we need to take away the mists of the knowable world
– collecting good deeds by constructive attitude: you need willingness, tenderness and goodness to come to that
* To have real compassion you need a clear insight in the root of suffering. Helping the outer forms of suffering is symptomatic (nevertheless something we need to do).
* Insight through ’emptiness’ can be reached without buddha’s or teachers.Question from the public: how can one be happy while seeing the suffering of others?
* We need to develop and strenghten our ‘mental immunesystem’, a strong determination to help others and we need courage.
Often we will not be able to help others yet deep compassion arises and we have to go to the root of the suffering and try to bring insight in the disturbing emotions, ignorance, bring wisdom. So we can be happy despite the suffering of others.Question from the public: how can we detach from our children and loved ones?
* There is difference in attachment:
– there is possessed attachment, which is egocentric, disturbing and source of suffering
– there is wellwilling and caring ‘attachment’ where we care for the well-being of the other (that is what we should reach for)
– there is partial compassion, where we care for some, and have hate for others
(you have to work further on this one)
When there is love, compassion and the will to make somebody else happy and help release him/her from suffering it is limitless and the very basis of all well-being.About Emptiness:
* Form = Empty = Form (I believe it compresses everything very well)
* There is not absence of form, yet we reach the very nature of the form.
* In the outer world we use conventions to recognize the phenomena, and we start to believe that these are permanent, yet the phenomena are not permanent.The Dalai Lama said that the opinion that everything is empty is a spiritual nihilistic view and the same as a nihilistic materialistic view. Some Buddhist schools do have this nihilistic view. If you believe this than there is no relation between cause and result, suffering is empty, you don’t need a path to resolve the suffering, than there is no buddha, no dharma, no sangha and no enlightment, than there are no positive or negative deeds, no development.
It is not his view.
* The phenomena exist on different levels:
– our ‘reality’ is formed by our projections, concepts of the world, these are false ideas of reality, conditioned world
– the real nature of the phenomena, all intellectual approach is uselessThere is a lot of misunderstanding on emptiness:
*There is a conventional truth, where we have a superficial knowledge of the phenomena and an absolute ultimate truth that is reached by emptiness. A dialectic communication between those two ‘truths’ is needed, so we are not trapped in either of these two.
Quantumfysics related:
* Thanks to emptiness there is dynamic. If there is no emptiness everything is fixed.
* Nothing is fixed, it is convention, we call it ‘self’.
* Things are events no fixed objects
* Nothing has inherent qualities
* Matter has no fixed existance
* There is no fixed entity apart from the other phenomena – everything is related to everything.
* When there is emptiness things can appear and disappear, can change, than there is evolution.Emptiness is NOT an absence but an existance in relationship!!
Study and practice 24 hours, life is practice.
Nice day!
WendyI agree with Dalai Lama views, studied with him many times. But the “negative” approach of Buddhist terminology , which he is continually trying to fix with clarifications, is fixed better in my opinion by simply using positive terminology, i.e. yuan chi instead of emptiness. Things get much clearer, fast.
mI think that the possible reason why so much budist terminology uses negative language can be understood by Gautam Buddahs’ life experience.
He grew up as an hier to the throne of a wealthy empire. Literalley living a life a of excess abundance wherein every material desire was satisfied. He never witnessed pain, sufering, sickness etc until he was 18 (I think)
When he finally did witness a sick/suffering person, the shock of it had such a profound effect on him that he then embarked on his search for the ’cause’ of suffering.
This as we know lead to his search for enlightenment and his subsequent teaching.
I feel that this teaching had so much ‘negative’ language in it (eg emptiness) for a particular reason.
The reason is, that it was a way of balancing out his earlier life experience of excess.
Perhaps if he had used ‘positve’ language, it mave have aroused peoples desires of ‘achieving’ or aquiring something through spiritual practice. And he knew from his own experience that the expectation of aquireing, having, posessing, was ultimatelly a hinderence to knowing oneself.So by negating, ie saying what enlightenment is NOT by using words such as ’emptiness’, or ‘the end of suffering’, he avoided appealing to peoples’ subtle greed for ‘spiritual’ wealth or spiritual gain.
If he had he come from a very poor family, his teaching would have probablly taken on a totally different style, one which emphasised the ‘positive’ aspect of awakening.
I think that the Dali Lamas’ continued emphasis on negating can be derived from Buddahs’ original style of teaching.
It’s for this reason that I feel it helps to understand the cultural , geographic and historical background of a teacher so that their words may understood within a particular context.Here`s something Osho said to his students, my translation into English though, since it`s from a book by Z.M. Slavinski.
“Emptiness is emptiness in the sense that there will be nothing left of you when you become it; but Emptiness is not emptiness in the second sense, because the whole will come into you – Emptiness will be the most perfect phenomenon of fullness. What should we do then? If you say “Emptiness” the spirit immediately thinks that there is nothing; then why should we worry about anything? But if you say, that it is not emptiness, but pure perfection of Being, the spirit at once goes to an “ego trip”: how can I become the most perfect Being – that is when Ego comes to the scene. To get rid of Ega, the word “emptiness” is emphasized. But, to show the fact that Emptiness is not actually empty, it also said, that it is filled with the whole.
When you are not, the whole existance enters into you.
When the drop disappears, it becomes the ocean.”In the sane book it is said that Lama Anagarika Govinda suggested that a more appropriate term (for emptiness) would be “transparency” (or clearness), because it avoids the traps of negation which some use, like “nothing” or “nothingness”.
It seems to me that the center of this issue revolves around the fact that the ego can be either a fluid center for experience, therefore, enlightened, or it can be a resistant, tense structure identified with certain things to the point of its own demise. When one relaxes one becomes fluid, energy moves, meditation happens, and there is freedom and eventual union with the source. This does not mean there is no ego. Ego simply means “I am” in Latin. As an idividuated consciousness, you ARE something, you ARE here. You ARE. “You”-ness is a vehicle that morphs as “You” go along. When we all get to union with the Dao, group consciousness, whatever…we will still have an “I” only it will be a greater one. A “ONE” or a “one” is still a “One”. It will be a state beyond the restrictions of identification with “the Small”.
Osho is right. Emptiness is Fullness. Emptiness is Wholeness.
-A
emptiness as operating element in contemplation
a phase
not a method
but the source and closure
of all gross and subtle strands are honouredif you can’t get if from usa…
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