Many years ago I was living in a caravan in Montana with three lesbians, two lizards and a one-eyed husky. Diane was being dumped by Mary who had taken up with Linda the Country and Western singer. I wrote a song for Linda to present Mary’s feelings to Diane. The words to the chorus are in the box.
The song came to mind recently while I was flirting with the Lankavatara Sutra. It suggests that ‘existence is forever becoming’.
Most people suffer because they use their conventional minds to try and halt the roundabout and hold it forever in one place. The good news is that by taking thought you can change your mind. You can learn to think unconventionally and put an end to suffering by getting an insight into the interpenetrating flux.
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Nothing last forever baby, nothing ever will That’s a little bit of medicine, and it’s a bitter pill The time has come for parting, there’s lots of new worlds waiting And I loved you well enough to know that you’ll make out all right |
"Ignorance and consequently the state of always being in bondage is due to discrimination wrongfully made concerning the self-nature of existence. That is to say, because we are so addicted to the categories of being and non-being, birth and disappearance, creation and destruction etc, which are the products of discrimination, we cannot look into the truth and reality of things;
we must disentangle ourselves from this bondage of the so-called logical necessity of opposites and return to the primary experience … and see and interpret things from the knowledge revealed therein and thereby.
By this primary experience … existence is taken in its truthful signification, all the intellectual scaffoldings and constructions are thus done away with, and what is known as non-discriminative knowledge … shines out … as a result we see that all things are unborn, uncreated, and never pass away, and that all appearances are like magically-created figures, or like a dream, like shadows reflected on a screen of eternal solitude and tranquillity
The Mahayanist eye is always gazing at the screen itself, but it will be conscious of the screen as long as it is discriminated from the shadows which in turn are themselves discriminations. This is not yet perfect attainment … the Lankavatara wants to go on further declaring that the screen of eternity too must be abolished, for it is only thus that ignorance is forever dispelled leaving us perfectly free and unhampered in all our seeings and doings."
(Suzuki) p295-296
Horns on a Hare
In order to speak we need words which refer to discrete ‘things’. But we ourselves create the things. We discriminate. We draw lines and set borders, we create categories and associate feelings with them. By comparison all things shine. We discriminate and compare because of how our brains are put together and also as a result of cultural conditioning.
From this perspective the horns on a hare are as real/ unreal as the horns on a cow.
"… when the hare alone is considered in its absolute aspect, with no reference to anything outside, we cannot make any statement whether affirmative or negative as to its horns … Not only the absence of horns on the hare is a relative assertion, but the idea itself is a result of discrimination.
When the hare alone all by itself with no reference to anything is set before us, what argument, what inference, what relationship, and what discourse can we advance on it?" (Suzuki) p302"
"When this idea of no-birth or birthlessness is expressed in a more positive form it is eternity unthinkable.
The truth being above the category of causation and not subject to birth and disappearance, it has no other way to be described but as eternity, and as this eternity is an absolute one and not contrasted to impermanence or transiency, it may most fittingly be qualified as unthinkable". (Suzuki) p302
Eternity unthinkable
While in the garden ‘I’ have sometimes intuited the numinous. Self awareness was absent at the time. There was an appreciation of the vastness of space and time and of how everything merges into everything else.
There was a ‘knowing’ of this interpenetrating flux of Oneness but there is no way in which words could be found to adequately express it.
