Buddhas and buddhas

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

My flights home proceeded well: Stewart Airport in Newburgh, NY to Detroit International to Atlanta to El Paso.. I had a small layover in Atlanta so I was able to get something to eat. I had aisle seats all the way and am happy for this.

My in-flight book is the Diamond Sutra, translated with commentary by Red Pine. It is the best version of this most important sutra and the commentaries span the centuries. It is very accessible.

Anyway, the teachings in the Diamond Sutra are the essential teaching of the Buddha. It teaches how to live an awakened life. It teaches the paramitas. It teaches heart of wisdom resides in selflessness and non-selflessness, buddha-dharma and no buddha- dharma. This sutra tangles the mind and forces us to practice.

The Buddha teaches in this sutra that what something is, is not what it is, it is just that we call that something something. This is a very important point as it demands we see more deeply than our words and ideas permit.

From the point of view expressed in this sutra, anyone who believes they have attained the four states of attainment are deluded: even when arhants. If one claims to have attained anything at all they reveal, according to Conze quoted in Pine, “an underlying attachment to a goal and to a self that would have denied the very arhantship…attained” (p. 166). Can someone be buddha and not buddha at the very same time? It is the only way. Those who are buddhas are not buddhas and therefore are buddhas.

In such statements, the Buddha teaches a subtle message: getting rid of the “I” of life makes an “I” possible, an I that is authentic and present, and not the least concerned for self, but rather, has an eye toward the deeply interconnected universe. Pine argues: “For unless detachment is based on compassion, it may lead to nirvana, but it does not lead to buddhahood” (p.157).

To be a buddha we must live in compassion for others, knowing there are no others, just the universal one arising as other. Touching the suffering of self and others is touching this essential core reality.

Be well.