The stunning piece of art featured above is titled “Your Move” and it was made by a Tibetan Buddhist artist named Ang Tsherin Sherpa. It has some wisdom to share with us.
A perpetual symbol in Buddhism is the endless knot. It is a polyvalent image that is rich with various interpretations. There is one such interpretation that I would like to expound upon as it relates to the above image.
I think there is a juxtaposition to be made between the endless knot and the Rubik’s cube depicted.
On one level, the endless knot represents samsara. The knot represents the various intricacies and unfoldings of worldly life. While it is an interconnected web, it also cannot be untied. The knot itself is endless. There is no ultimate point, no ultimate project. The knot cannot be untied. Its tangled mass will never be sorted.
The cube held in the enlightened demon’s hands is similarly unsolvable. It is decorated with images of worldly life both good and bad: smiley faces and frowning faces, dollar signs and swastikas, Gandhi’s face and hands shaking, smoking and non-smoking signs, peace signs and thumbs up and middle fingers, red lights and green lights. It is an unsolvable puzzle made of opposites. Everything moves but without an endpoint.
Solving the puzzle, unraveling the endless knot, is not enlightenment. Enlightenment has nothing to do with outcomes and worldly manifestations but in the seeing of the way things are. Reality is Real, even now. It is not something that happens in the future.
Yet has the demon abandoned the game? Did it toss the Rubik’s cube into the junk pile? No. It is playing the game!
Don’t mistake the unsolvability of the puzzle to mean that it is worthless or meaningless.
We cannot afford to wait until circumstances align, for the puzzle to be solved, for the knot to be untied, before allowing ourselves inner peace and enlightenment. At the same time, we cannot afford to abandon the game because doing so would be to abandon compassion.
So what is left? Recognizing the game to be a fiction and recognizing our identities to be fiction. Then we participate. We participate in the fiction, as fiction.
To mistake a dream to be real would be a nightmare. To enjoy a dream through lucidity is freedom.
No matter the state of the world, it cannot stop you from realizing its ultimate unreality and the primordial reality of divine awareness that is you.
Don’t get tangled in the knot while trying to untie it. Don’t abandon the knot either.
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