by Om Swami
o namo bhagavatyai ārya prajā pāramitāyai!
Om Salutation to the blessed and noble one.10 (who has reached the other shore of the most excellent transcendental wisdom.)
‘Arya’ means noble and the sutra begins by offering salutations to the noble one. Offering respects to your elders and masters is the fundamental tenet of all eastern traditions. Hrdaya is ‘heart’ and sutra is a thread that ties everything together, just like string in a necklace of pearls. Prajna Paramita are the most important words. Paramita11 is transcendental: beyond the grasp of the senses, human intelligence or consciousness. Its literary meaning is perfection. Prajna means intuitive understanding. And this is what you really have to understand about meditation: there is nothing to understand. It is not knowledge you acquire.
As children, from the time we can comprehend, we are taught certain concepts: this is God; that is a temple; bow down here; this is moral; that is immoral; this is good; that is bad, etc. Based on these seeds of conditioning, we make all our decisions in life and our conditioning influences whether we like or dislike certain people, countries, societies, religions or sects.
But that knowledge is incomplete; it is given to you by others. Prajna is a word frequently used in the Vedas as well as in Buddha’s discourses. It is intuitive understanding, not knowledge. You know how sometimes, when a husband comes home late and he lies to his wife? She knows he is lying; she just knows. She doesn’t have that knowledge – she has that intuitive understanding.
Throughout the years that I practised astrology, I saw thousands of horoscopes and received as many queries from people. There comes a time, after a lot of practice, when you just open a horoscope and instantly know all that you need to without studying the various charts. Just one glance is enough. That sahajajnana (natural wisdom) comes with quality practice over a prolonged period because with practice, what ancient masters called vipashya – which means insight – begins to dawn. And insight always leads to intuitive understanding.
This is the focal point of Zen: a stage (or a state) where we no longer acquire wisdom or knowledge from books or methods. We get straight to the source – our own super consciousness that is flowing, a sense of being that is in harmony with everything around us in our daily lives. Deep insight arises naturally for such a practitioner.
Note that key words like intuition, instinct, intelligence, insight all begin with ‘in’. They all fountain forth from the deepest recess of our consciousness.
Om namo Bhagwate. Aryayee prajna paramita: I bow down, I offer my salutations to the noble one, Aryayee, who always lived in transcendental wisdom and who imparted this wisdom.
ārya-avalokiteśvaro bodhisattvo gambhīrā prajā pāramitā caryā caramā ovyavalokayati sma: panca-skandhās tā ś ca svābhava śūnyān paśyati sma.
The Noble Avalokateshwara Bodhisattva while practising the deep practice of prajna paramita look upon the five skandas (the five aggregates that give the sense of our being. These are form, sensation, perception, memory, consciousness) and saw them to be devoid of any self – existence.12
Buddha is called Aryavalokitesvaro in this sutra and it’s a beautiful term meaning ‘the one who has risen above and is looking down at everything from far above’. When you are inside your home, it looks very spacious; you can move around. When you step outside and see it from a distance, it’s a different view. The further away you go or the higher you soar, the smaller it looks. Then you realize that this piece of property you struggled for, that you thought was so huge, is nowhere nearly as big in the overall scheme of things.
The aerial view is enlightenment, the goal of meditation. It is what all prayers are about: to rise above ourselves. Buddha, with his disciplined practice, mindfulness and compassion, rose above the general pettiness of life and concluded that all forms, sensations and thoughts are empty.
Pashyatii means he saw. He saw that panchaskandha, the five aggregates, of form (rūpa), sensation (vedanā), perception (sajā), mental formations (saskāra) and consciousness (vijāna) are empty.
‘Your thoughts, your feelings, your consciousness, O Shariputra, have no basis,’ Buddha said. Everything we experience – its inherent nature is emptiness. And emptiness must not be confused with nihilism or non-existence.
Thoughts, feelings and consciousness exist in our minds and experiences but they are transient and, in the end, they don’t have any meaning at all. When we receive good news, we feel elated and on top of the world and on hearing some bad news we feel dejected within a matter of seconds. From where does a thought originate, where is it travelling and where does it go? If you examine deeply, you’ll discover that it is truly empty and has no substance.
If we are going to take our thoughts and emotions seriously, as if they are real, as if the blabbering mind makes any sense of it, it is then natural that we’ll experience more pain and suffering. On the contrary, when you are mindful and remind yourself that just because your mind is talking doesn’t mean you have to listen to it; just because you are feeling low doesn’t mean life is actually bad. It helps you to quickly transcend the restive tendencies of the mind.
You realize, ‘I am just flowing, this life is taking me wherever it wants to take me. I don’t have to take everything so seriously.’
A young boy went to his mother and said, ‘Mummy, I am sick and tired of always having to ask you, “Can I go out, can I go out?” When will I be old enough to go out without seeking your permission?’
‘Son,’ she replied in-a-matter-of-fact-tone, ‘even your father isn’t old enough to go out without my permission.’
We could never get wise enough to understand our mind completely. It’s as vast and empty as space, there’s only so much we can control. It’s lot simpler to flow in a state of harmony – something we can do by being virtuous and mindful. The mind will not stop rambling till our last breath. Consider a person who is eighty-five years old, a child who is ten and someone who is forty. They have similar challenges. They all, at times, feel left out, sad or angry and frustrated. But above all, they feel empty.
The more you fill your life with pleasures, the emptier you feel. We feel that way because the essence of everything is emptiness. We are inflating balloons of different sizes, launching them into the air. But they are going to deflate no matter how much we inflate them. We are constantly looking to other people to make our decisions, to fill our emptiness.
I don’t know if you have heard this story13 before but I believe it’s true. There was a famous monastery in small village and the abbot of it was considered an enlightened master; nothing was beyond his reach. He was a Boddhichitta, one with Buddha consciousness. At least, all his disciples saw him in that light. They believed he could read the future as clearly as you can read a book.
Winter was fast approaching and the monks asked him, ‘Master, what do you say the winter’s going to be like?’
‘Cold, I reckon. Better stock plenty of wood.’
The monks began collecting wood as instructed, but the master thought there was no harm in double-checking. So, he made an anonymous call to the weather man for a forecast. It was a small community and everyone knew each other. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to find out that the source of his psychic skills was a phone call to the local weather station.
The master posed the question as soon as someone answered the phone.
‘Sir, it’s going to be a cold winter,’a voice answered.
He thanked the weather man and gathered his disciples.
‘Boys,’ he declared, ‘gird up your loins and chop more wood, because I’ll tell you what, it’s going to be a very cold winter.’
The monks went right back into the forest to source more wood. A week later, the master called the weather station again to know if there had been any change in the forecast.
‘Oh yes, sir, it’s going to be a harsh, freezing winter,’ he was informed.
He put the phone down and immediately called his disciples. ‘Come o
n, my able monks,’ he said.‘All the gruel you’ve been drinking and the rice and sake … now is the time to show your strength. Get more wood. This will be one hell of a winter.’
The disciples, with complete faith in their master, went on a chopping spree and stocked wood day and night.
The weather, however, remained pleasant while the monks continued to cut giant piles of wood. After a couple of weeks, the master began to have some doubts. Perhaps the forecast had changed – maybe the winter was not going to be quite that cold after all.
He called the weather man again and disguising his voice said, ‘I’m a farmer and I’ve been hearing that it’s going to be an icy cold winter. Is that true?’
‘Sir, it’s going to be so cold that people could freeze on the streets. One of the coldest winters ever!’
‘I don’t get it,’ the master argued.‘Every week your forecast gets worse. How can you be so sure?’
‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘I don’t deny that our systems can get it wrong sometimes. But we have an accomplished master whose forecast can’t go wrong. The monks are piling wood like crazy. The abbot has been constantly asking his disciples to stock more wood!’
This is how we lead our lives when we don’t trust ourselves and simply follow what the world is doing like dumb driven cattle, as H.W. Longfellow put it14. We think that if the other person is doing something, we have to as well. I have to grow up, educate myself a particular way and get a job. I have to make money – otherwise, I am not successful. I have to be a certain way, or I won’t get married. I have to produce a couple of kids, and then I have to go through the challenges of life. Have to, have to, have to. All these ‘have to’s: I have to pray; I have to go to a temple; I have to behave in a particular manner. This person’s car is bigger than mine. He looks very happy, because his Facebook pictures show that and so on.
We are constantly seeing what other people are doing and somehow comparing that to our own accomplishments. Measuring our own happiness based on what others have is a terrible way to size yourself up. It is a pointless thing to do. It is far more meaningful to compare yourself to your past. If you are doing better than before, you are progressing. You could be perfectly happy with a beautiful little apartment until somebody shares pictures of theirnew home with you on Facebook, or they visit and say, ‘I just bought this new home, and I’ve got a huge garden.’ Suddenly, you think, why couldn’t I have that? Your joy instantly evaporates. The strange thing is that your visitor is probably looking at pictures of bigger homes on some real estate website. It’s a vicious chain.
Buddha said, just remember that it’s all empty. Don’t believe your thoughts to be real – you know how we can have such an overactive imagination. We will start imagining one thing and then be immediately carried away by it. At that moment, we need to be mindful; we can attain that mindfulness by practising Zazen or meditation or wall gazing. The whole idea is to be mindful of our thoughts, feelings and actions. Because when everything is going smoothly, you don’t need a support system: spiritual, mental or intellectual. It’s when the going gets tough, the tough get going. That’s when you need to draw on that inner strength.
You would always draw that strength from whatever it is that you are focusing on. It’s a simple law of nature. If your centre of awareness is a positive thing, you are drawing your inspiration, attention and energy from a positive source, bringing positivity into your life. I think that’s why people go to gurus and saints – they are looking at somebody positive, smiling, and that gives them energy too. If you are going to meditate and your centre of awareness is a negative person, thought or emotion, it would only worsen your own feelings of negativity.
You cannot come out of a negative emotion simply by wanting to come out of it. Shift your centre of awareness.
Imagine you go for a blood test. The nurse jabs your arm with a needle and it hurts. Your centre of awareness is now at that tiny point where the needle pierced you. Your entire focus is now there. Let’s say a minute later, you stub your toe while walking out of the clinic and now your toe is throbbing with pain. You will forget about that blood test and the pain in your arm from the needle. Why? Because your centre of awareness has shifted. But even when your toe is hurting, if you draw your attention back to that needle and where it dug into your arm, you will feel its pain again. That is what the centre of awareness does.
In Zen or in meditation, the idea is that you get to choose where you have your centre of awareness. If you can choose it, there will be very few problems in life then. Of course, there will be some pain, but with less suffering. Pain will still to be there: painful people, challenges and circumstances – they won’t go away, but you won’t suffer on account of such things. That comes when the boat of our consciousness is tossed around by the ruthless waves of discursive thoughts, when the tides of emotions take us on an inconvenient ride of highs and lows. Mindfulness helps you check the weather (by calling the weather station … not the abbot) before you venture into the ocean.
Nothing Matters. Eventually.
The Raging Storm
Prajna Paramita Sutra – II
Buddha continues his discourse and says to Shariputra:
Iha śāriputra: rūpa śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpa; rūpān na p thak śūnyatā śunyatāyā na p thag rūpa; yad rūpa sā śūnyatā; ya śūnyatā tad rūpa. Evam eva vedanā sa jñā sa skāra vijñāna.
O Shariputra, bodily form is emptiness; emptiness is bodily form. Apart from bodily form there is no emptiness; apart from emptiness there is no bodily form. That which is emptiness is bodily form; that which is bodily form is emptiness. Like wise feeling, perception, mental images and consciousness are devoid of substance.15
All the forms that feel real are only so for a period of time. Ultimately, it’s all empty. Imagine this: a six-foot-tall person who is well-built is cremated upon his death, and turns into a handful of ash. If forms were permanent and not empty, perhaps fire wouldn’t have transmuted a corpse turning it into dust. This signifies emptiness. All that seems to exist – where has it gone? This constant evolution and transformation in the grand play of our vast universe is an expression of impermanence.
The sutra says that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. They are not different from each other. If I subject a small tissue of my body, let’s say tissue bit of the skin, to greater magnification, there will come a point when I’ll only see space. I won’t see any physical. And Buddha says, ‘Yad rupam sa sunyata ya sunyata tad rupam’ (That which is emptiness is bodily form; that which is bodily form is emptiness.)
They are identical and the same holds true for your thoughts, consciousness, tendencies and all the knowledge and wisdom you possess. It’s empty. All our fights, our grudges, even our emotions have no meaning in the end, they are empty. Today you feel immense love for somebody. Suppose you find out that he or she is cheating on you, you will come to hate that person. Where did that love go? Something that felt as real as the Himalayas, disappeared like a lone cloud on a sunny day. It is all transient, temporary, impermanent. And because it’s impermanent, it’s rarely worth brooding over.
At times, a thought flashes through my mind: some of the greatest people in the world are just as dead as are some of the worst people. How does it matter then whether people remember you as a saint or a sinner? It’s all just air going in through our mouths, then coming out again. Empty words; empty feelings. Sunya, a Sanskrit word that also means round, zero or nothing is from what wehave all emerged. Even the uniting of an egg and a sperm first turns into a sunya, a circle, too.
All planets are sunya. Even when you look at the Earth or an ocean from a distance, you see this curvature, this roundness. Even in the case of the Supreme Energy, the Puranas have called her Baindhavavasini, she lives in sunya, in a dot. Vedic philosophy of India’s classical age was so advanced that Aryabhata, the mathematician, discovered the concept of a sunya, zero – a sunya that when placed after any number will multiply it by a factor of te
n. Similarly, a mindfulness or realization of sunya expands our consciousness multi fold.
Without such mindfulness, we are repeatedly bothered and nudged by the same negative emotions. The cyclical nature of our thoughts and feelings is like riding an ever-moving Ferris wheel, each emotion being a different basket we sit in every time we ride, which is pretty much all the time.
A distressed patient once went to a doctor and showed him his ears, which were both badly singed.
‘Oh dear!’ The doctor said.‘What happened to you?’
Almost too embarrassed to speak, the patient replied, ‘I was ironing my clothes. The phone rang and I accidentally put the iron to my ear.’
‘That’s terrible. But what about the other ear?’
‘The scoundrel called back.’
Our four or five key emotions repeatedly call us, throughout our lives – from when we are born screaming and crying to when we are shouting and crying again, but this time out of jealousy, guilt, envy, hurt egos, hatred and pride. They will keep calling us and we will keep answering while getting burnt, only if we are not mindful.
Just remember that this is a mindless call from a thoughtless emotion. You don’t have to answer or be mindful to not put the iron to your ears. If you don’t pick up, whatever or whoever is calling will eventually hang up. And if you are truly mindful, you’ll have a voicemail: a place where messages can be set aside. If you are mindful, you will say, ‘There is a place for them. Let them go there. I will access them later.’
This comes with self-dialogue – when you can tell your mind, ‘Right now, I have to do what I am doing. I will listen to you later.’
When I used to run a software company, I was constantly dealing with different needs and stress in five different time zones. My BlackBerry was always buzzing. I had certain principles, though. I would put it on silent or turn off my phone before I went to bed so to sleep undisturbed. I would never take my laptop into my bedroom.