A City in the Clouds

“It is like the city of the Gandharvas which the unwitting take to be a real city when in fact it is not so. The city appears as in a vision owing to their attachment to the memory of a city preserved in the mind as a seed; the city can thus be said to be both existent and non-existent. In the same way, clinging to the memory of erroneous speculations and doctrines accumulated since beginning-less time, they hold fast to such ideas as oneness and otherness, being and non-being, and their thoughts are not at all clear as to what after all is only seen of the mind. It is like a man dreaming in his sleep of a country that seems to be filled with various men, women, elephants, horses, cars, pedestrians, villages, towns, hamlets, cows, buffalos, mansions, woods, mountains, rivers and lakes, and who moves about in that city until he is awakened."

Gautama, Buddha. THE LANKAVATARA SUTRA (p. 6). Independent. Kindle Edition. 

What is this city of Gandharvas that is described in the Lankavatara Sutra? I think it must be a very strange place indeed, something like a nostalgic place or a golden age. Most people have some place in their mind where they feel innocent and can go back to it when they feel stressed. But the point is that if we are not careful, we will cling to the memory and take it as something substantial, like a city that never ends.

Non existent means the city does not really exist as something separate from our perceptions of it. Yet, we can still call something existent because it lives within our mind. We still function as though it were real, and as long as we take it as real, we will always create a separate sense of self that moves within it.

I once heard a story about a man who divorced his wife because she became jealous of his video game activity and decided to "murder" him online--meaning kill off his character in an online game. The point is that the man took his image of himself and the "world" he lived in to be so real that he couldn't separate from it. He could not even tell that the body and image he created and "inhabited" in this game was just that: a series of concocted images that become habits as they are enforced within the mind over time. Had the man realized that he was only in a dream, he could loosen up a bit and forgive his wife for "killing" him, knowing that his body and all he takes to be "him" are only figments of the imagination.

To move about in this city--is this delusion? If we know we are in a dream-like place, we can function perfectly fine in the imaginary city, to the point where we are no longer bothered by the fact that it's illusory. What we do in that dream does matter. For instance, if we resists what happens within the dream, we only reinforce the sense of duality that gets us in delusion in the first place. When we stop resisting, we see that all the walls in the dream are merely projections of mind--not even a my mind, it's just ripples and effects. 

So, it is definitely important that we behave well within this dream: follow precepts and try to improve. But at the end of the day, there is no I that is improved. We are only living the dream and enjoying the scenery floating by like a city in the clouds.