Fri, 09 Jul 2010
Nothing to Attain
Lama Phurbu Tashi asked me to do a little more copy editing and Amber asked me to update Lama Gursam's schedule, so I've been too busy to post. But now I have some free time. so here's the last post in the current series.
In mahamudra it's said that there's nothing to attain. There's several ways to explain this. First, expectations of success in practice can be an obstacle. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche tells the story of a teacher who told his student that if he practice mahamudra in retreat, he would be successful. But because he had the expectation of success, he didn't achieve anything. His teacher saw this and told him that his retreat was only a preliminary, after the retreat he should go meditate by the Ganges River and he would achieve realization there. After hearing, this he practiced mahmudra in a more relaxed way and soon had success in his practice.
The second way to explain "nothing to attain" is that ideas of success and failure are very much tied up with our ambition and egotism. To be successful in practice is to lose any idea of success. It is to give up the idea of becoming a special person and instead to be satisfied with our ordinariness. We work so hard to satisfy our anbition. And our ideas of success are nothing but illusions. When we see that and are able to drop them, it's like putting down a heavy burden.
The most profound way of understanding "nothing to attain" is to see that there is no difference between samsara and nirvana. Both are illusory. In my favorite quote frim the Perfection of Wisdom, Buddha is asked "Is even nirvana like a dream and an illusion?" He replies, "Not only nirvana, if there were anything greater than nirvana, it woud also be like a dream and an illusion." From the experiential side, with success in mahamudra come the experiences of bliss, clarity, and non-thougt. There's a sense of the one is experiencing an indescribable something, just as the mystics have always reported. But that sense of something is only a resut of clinging to the idea of a subjective perceiver. The duality of perceiver and perceived rests upon the mis-perception of a self, which can be extremely subtle, but is always there as long as there is the sense of something perceived. With genuine enlightenment, which is beyond the usual experience of realization, all the special experiences and attainments that accompanied realization disappear. They were never anything but illusions to begin with, co-dependent on the illusion of a perceiving subject. An example of this can be seen in Phagmodruppa's encounter with Gampopa, where Gampopa tells him that his realization is worth nothing more than a ball of dough. Phagmodrup, chastened by this dropped his cling to attainments and soon after gained a genuine understanding of emptiness.
