“Whatever calamities there are, and whatever sorrows and fears come to the world, they are all the result of attachment to “self.” Why is that attachment mine?
Not having extinguished “self,” one is not able to extinguish sorrow; just as one who has not extinguished a fire is not able to extinguish the burning.
It follows that for the sake of tranquilizing my own sorrow, and for the tranquilizing of the other’s sorrow, I give myself to others and I accept others like myself.”
Bhaiṣajyaguru, formally Bhaiṣajya-guru-vaiḍūrya-prabhā-rāj, Medicine Master and King of Lapis Lazuli Light. the Buddha of healing and medicine in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Commonly referred to as the “Medicine Buddha”, he is described as a doctor who cures suffering using the medicine of his teachings.
We can’t solve the problems that plague us from within the same consciousness that created them. Such consciousness must be radically transformed by dissolving the hierarchy of separation, lest there be irrevocable disintegration into entropy.
In crisis, the need for scalable, sustainable means of dissolving the source of stagnation and loosening the ground of sedimented mindsets is especially urgent. What might an “equalizing” method devised 1300 years ago by an Indian sage offer us?
Zheng Guogu 郑国谷 - Visionary Transformation of an Insight (oil on canvas, 2012)
“The word for bodhicitta in Tibetan is sem kye. This literally means ‘the opening or blossoming of the mind.’ It is the opposite of small mind, of self-preoccupation, self-contraction, and narrowness.“
Citta-bhāvanā, literally “cultivating the mind,” is the bringing-into-being of previously unarisen, perhaps latent qualities such as compassion in the case of bodhicitta, similar to the germination process.
Temptation of Mara. Mogao Cave Mural, Dunhuang. 950.
The Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra charts the bodhisattva’s path of practice—an embodied way of life—not merely one of well-wishing from afar. Through compassion, one is moved to action, drawing near to the flames in order to extinguish them for good.
Invoking fire through simile, Śāntideva seers us with the burning reality that plagues our world, both literally and figuratively. While raging fire spreads across the planet, the heat of violence and conflict seethes and ferments in its midst. What can be done to douse the flames?
