Why It’s Great to Have a Practice Instructor

Dear Mike: I got the Tara DVDs and I’ll be watching them this week.

I re-read the quote you sent me about rangtong and shentong. I had to go back to Andy Karr’s book ‘Contemplating Reality’ and review the meanings, esp. Chapter 16 on shentong. I was blown away once again. The first few pages say, once again, what I have been saying all along: the teaching is that we already have buddha-nature; we can’t produce it via spiritual exercise, nor can we diminish it through our personal failures:

“After the Buddha taught the essencelessness of all phenomena in the second turning of the wheel of dharma, he taught the tathagata-garbah, or buddha-nautre in the third turning. Tathagata-garbah means that all sentient beings, from the smallest insect to the most realized human, have this wisdom nature, and have had this wisdom nature from beginningless time. Therefore, the purpose of the path is to reveal Buddhanature, not to create it. From this perspective, it does not make sense to say that buddhahood is produced by journeying along the path. If buddhahood was a product, it would be something compounded and subject to decay.”
Andy Karr, Contemplating Reality, p. 168.

You’re right that this is something one can only know through experience (meditative or some other kind of experience) because science will never be able to prove this. Science has already proven that the nature of reality is emptiness (rangtong). As I said, that’s pretty much a scientific fact. But the most profound physics will not get to the point (in my lifetime) where it will reveal the nature of reality as buddha-nature, or wisdom/compassion (shentong).

So then I ask myself, if the true nature of reality is the union of wisdom and emptiness, and if it’s quality, as DPR says, is compassion, then is it really EMPTY? Is emptiness really completely empty if it is filled with wisdom? Isn’t wisdom “something”? If wisdom is something and it’s unified with emptiness, how can emptiness be truly empty? Wouldn’t total emptiness be empty of all qualities?

I’m not sure how to answer this question, but I have some clues. We know that electrons, the most abundant and fundamental particles/waves of the universe, have no mass; they are non-material. Electrons are pure energy, without mass or matter. This is kind of hard to imagine, just like it’s hard to imagine that wisdom/emptiness has no material existence. So electrons have a quality, which is energy, but they do not have a material existence: they are empty of mass or matter. So it is possible to think that emptiness is empty of material existence (mass and matter), but it has a quality, which is wisdom.

Wisdom is awareness, intelligence, knowing about itself and everything else. That wisdom, that awareness of and ability to communicate and relate with self/other, is primordial compassion. Just as non-material electrons have the powerful quality of energy, emptiness has the powerful and all-pervasive quality of wisdom and compassion. As I said before, awareness and connection (information and feedback) is how the whole universe of material existence comes into being. Wisdom/compassion, that primordial capacity to be aware of and relate to self/other is absolutely essential if material existence is to arise out of emptiness. Without that quality or capacity, nothing would arise out of emptiness. Without wisdom-compassion, there would be no universe, no material existence.

I don’t know how I came to understand this, perhaps through meditation. It can’t be proven scientifically, nor deduced from logic. One simply has to become aware of it, just as one simply has to become aware that one has buddha-nature, that same buddha-nature which permeates all phenomena.