“Nagarjuna… offers his own ideas as to how actions lead to effects in a contingent world. Once an act is committed, he argues, it assumes a creative life of its own.
“Imagine a magician,” he suggests,
“Who creates a creature
who creates other creatures.
Acts I perform are creatures
who create others. “
Once the fateful decision has been made, the words have left our lips or the body’s deed is done, the act is released into the flow of life. It’s reverberative effects will, to some degree, reconfigure both ourselves and the world in which we encounter the next moral dilemma. The acts we commit now thus form the conditions under which future choices will have to be made.”.
—Stephen Batchelor on Nagarjuna; from ‘Verses from the Center’
“Buddhas and sentient beings do not differ at all. If you can rid yourselves of conceptual thought, you will have accomplished [the same enlightenment].
The realization of the One Mind may come after a shorter or a longer period. There are those who, upon hearing this teaching, rid themselves of conceptual thought in a flash. Others do this after following [many stages of practice].
Whether by a longer or shorter way the result is the same, it is a state of being.“
— The Haung Po Chu’an Hsiu Fa Yao; 9th Century, China
Translation: This mind, through endless Kalpas without beginning, has never varied. It has never lived or died, appeared or disappeared, increased or decreased. It’s not pure or impure, good or evil, past or future. It’s not true or false. It’s not male or female. It doesn’t appear as a monk or a layman, an elder or novice, a sage or a fool, a Buddha or a mortal. It strives for no realization and suffers no karma. It has no strength or form. It’s like space. You can’t possess it and you can’t lose it. It’s movements can’t be blocked by mountains, rivers, or rock walls. It’s unstoppable powers penetrate the Mountain of Five Skandhas and cross the River of Samsara. No karma can restrain this real body. But this mind is subtle and hard to see. It’s not the same as the sensual mind. Everyone wants to see this mind, and those who move their hands and feet by its light are as many as the grains of sand along the Ganges, but when you ask them, they can’t explain it.
We know of ‘other Realms’ as certainly existing when we look with empathy and imagination at beings that function with very different sensory organs, bodies, and brains. By imagining such creatures experience, such as the experience of an ant as it walks over the ground, we begin to validate their radically different existing reality.
In order to truly grasp such a unique realm of existence we need to use a bit of imagination in considering the relatively abstract picture that an ants sensory abilities form when they are compiled into a take on its surroundings. So in the example of the ant we can even attempt to consider the incredibly abstract sense of pheromone mapping and smell. We can imagine in general a sort of bubble of perception/ awareness created by the range of its sense capabilities.
We should shift our view away from the assumption that Reality is independently existing as a factual state of material; which is then perceived in bits and pieces by creatures to varying degrees of accuracy. This view implies that humans are close to correct, and insects, for example, are nearly completely wrong. In fact, our perception of the total physical state of the universe is just as limited as an insect’s is and it is this limitation which allows for our experience of self.
For example, in order for me to take a walk down the street, my eyesight and my hearing must be limited to a range so that as I walk, new portions of space are brought into my range and I then have the experience of movement through the environment. If my perception was not limited I would be seeing and feeling those streets and scenes already and would be unable to bring them from out of view-->into view. If my perception of reality was not limited it would not be possible for an event to happen to me because all the parameters of the event would already be within my perception so that it would not be described as ‘happening to me’ but moreso as just known to be existing. In this way it’s precisely our limited range of sensory perception, the very incomplete and incorrect nature of our perception of the physical state of the universe, that allows for our self to exist as an entity and an independent item.
We continue to posit our Human view as the nearest to objectively correct, and as improving through science and discovery, while seeing the chicken as having a hopelessly incorrect perception. It is thru this implicit belief of their incorrect reality that animals have lost their rights and that their ability to experience being wronged, enslaved, and other obvious causes of suffering, has been denied or called into question. While it certainly may be that an objective state of the material world exists, in being completely removed from the characteristics of a subject’s reality, it takes a form that is so abstracted as to be hopelessly estranged from anything we could “know” or achieve knowledge of through scientific advancement. It is a state that is by definition, opposite to subjectivity, so no subject can know it, no witness can view it. And as explained above in examples of walking from one point to another, or experiencing the happening of an event, even in the limitless perception of reality in one’s own subjective form, the individuality of that observer breaks down through the lack of boundaries. Therefor the correct or accurate perception of reality by a subjective being is not possible. Rather, the experience of a subjective being is true through its self-validation as that beings factual reality. The human is not more correct than the bird about the facts of the world, but they have different facts, both of which are true. The nature of subjective Reality as necessarily incomplete dictates that all experiences of Reality, while different and even conflicting, are equally correct and valid.
What remains are various realms of existence of radically different substance and form. The realm of the butterfly, the realm of the bird, the realm of the man, the realm of the whale, the realm of, perhaps, creatures in the universe much larger or different than we know. They all exist with an equal claim to truth, accuracy, and validity. As all of them are self-validating through the truth of the experienced; the being who’s particular experience of reality must be a fact unto itself.
This author’s published work, in the form of minimalist prose and poetry pieces, is available at:
