I read an interesting passage from On Buddha Essence: A Commentary on Rangjung Dorje's Treatise, where the student questions the teacher regarding the link between compassion and the five skandhas. Khenchen Thrangu remarks that far from making people uncompassionate, the idea of five aggregates can make a person realize more poignantly the suffering that others feel in their daily life, resulting from the sense of self-attachment. He remarks:
For example, if someone is asleep and dreams of a big tiger, he becomes very frightened, but there's no reason for his fear because there isn't really a tiger there. Then a clairvoyant person who can perceive the person's fear comes by and feels compassion for that person and wants to wake him up and say, 'It's all right, there's no tiger. There's no reason to be afraid'. If you're aware of what someone is experiencing in his sleep, you're not just going to sit there and do something to amuse yourself while thinking, 'He's terrified of this tiger that isn't really there.' You will wish to wake him up and to free him from that fear. In the same way, being in a state of delusion gives us a great deal of suffering and pain; so with the realization that the delusion has no real existence, one will have the compassion to free other beings from that delusion." (p.42)
I found this passage surprising in the sense that it changed my overall view of what compassion could mean. When I have thought of compassion, I have typically thought of a kind of passion that treats things as very real, but can a person still feel compassionate in the midst of impermanence? According to the passage above, a person's realization of the dreamlike nature of phenomena actually frees a person to be more loving and kind, rather than more detached. But I also think it's interesting to reflect that even emptiness can be an attachment. I think this is the second part of the line in the Heart Sutra where it reads, "emptiness is form". That is, if a person is too terrified of the dream to engage in it, they can easily end up attaching to the notion of emptiness as a 'salvation' or an escape from form. In actuality, both are integrally connected and inseparable from each other.
The drama of how one can see the balance between form and emptiness is, I feel, often played out in relationships. Seeing the movie, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2", I noticed the dynamic between the mother and daughter; how the mom is reluctant to let her daughter go away to college, but needs to reconcile her passion with her daughter's growing independence and identity. If love is attaching to forms, the mother could not part from her daughter without distancing from her own emotions. But eventually, the mother is able to take a step back from her daughter, seeing that she herself needed space to make her own decisions and live her life separately from family. This seems like a common, everyday experience, but it's an example of how the mom needs to awaken to impermanence to cultivate a deeper love and respect for her daughter. Daughters might move away, but the heart can remain, and nothing ever comes or goes from the mind.
If a person is caught up in any kind of dream and think that what they see is real and unchanging, their behavior is bound to be constrained by the appearances of the dream. Compassion is giving a person a nudge to awaken from that patterned behavior, by seeing that the dream is only part of a deeper and limitless mind, and thus awakening to latent possibilities. But I also feel that self-compassion can function in the same way. How often do people, in a state of panic over something, give into that panic and conclude ''nothing can be done"? A compassionate approach would be to keep looking ahead of the experience to see what possibilities are there for rebirth and change. It would be acknowledging the fears of a person caught up in a dream, while reminding the person that the dream is always changing all the time, so there is no need to be stuck in a certain fear for one's existence. This faith in the flow of life is so vital to a moving compassion: something I need to remind myself.
Thrangu, Khenchen (2006), On Buddha Essence: A Commentary on Rangjung Dorje's Treatise. Boston: Shambhala
No comments:
Post a Comment