Not Solidly Separate

“Nirvāṇa is an extinguishment of desire, hatred, and ignorance that is often likened to the dying of a flame. Since ignorance is the fuel or source of both desire and hatred, the primary task in achieving nirvāṇa is to remove ignorance. Nirvāṇa was translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan as “passed beyond sorrow” (mya ngan las ’das pa), and sorrow is identified as the afflictive emotions of desire, hatred, and ignorance, as well as the sufferings produced by them. In that the chief of these is ignorance, the essential meaning of nirvāṇa is “passed beyond ignorance.”

Ignorance is a consciousness that conceives inherent or pointable concrete existence in persons and other things. It is not a mere lack of knowledge about reality but an erroneous conception about the way phenomena exist. A lack of knowledge would be, for instance, a governor’s not knowing how many people live in his or her state; an erroneous conception would be the conviction that the state contains three hundred and fifty thousand people when it actually contains two million. The latter is quite different from a simple lack of knowledge.

The ignorance that is the root of suffering is a conception discordant with reality, held with enormous conviction. We are convinced that persons and other phenomena exist as solid, concrete, or self-propelled units because that is how they appear to us. Yet this appearance is thoroughly deceptive, for people and things do not exist this way at all. Nonetheless, through our own ignorance we assent to their false appearance and base most of our lives on this misconception. In order to attain nirvāṇa, we must first understand how things actually exist and then become accustomed to that understanding so that neither the manifest nor dormant forms of ignorance remain or can reoccur. The mind must be transformed, and transformation of such a magnitude requires great effort and meditation.

According to the Mind-Only School (sems tsam pa, cittamātra), one aspect of the false appearance of things is the appearance of subject and object such that the subject seems to be utterly cut off from the object. In a sense, looking at another person or object is like looking across a chasm. The subject “I” seems to be distant and cut off from the object “you” or “it,” as if the two were irrevocably separate and independent entities. It is correct to say that subject and object are different, but incorrect to conceive of them as different entities, or, as is said in the Middle Way Consequence School (dbu ma thal ’gyur pa, prāsaṇgikamā-dhyamika), to conceive of them as inherently established. Of course, we do not actually say, “I am a different entity from you,” or “I am a different entity from that desk,” but such words are certainly descriptive of our experience. By bringing about a slight change in our thought it is possible to begin experiencing subject and object as not solidly separate entities.”

~ Jeffrey Hopkins, The Tantric Distinction: A Buddhist's Reflections on Compassion and Emptiness

“Based on my own experience, I have learned that from the infection of an attitude of “me against the world”—when the bottom line is SELF, SELF, SELF-either despair or merciless competitiveness erupts, undermining one’s own happiness as well as that of everyone around us, rending asunder the fabric of society, the very basis of a happy life.

Without compassion, biting criticism of others is unchecked, eventually attacking in its own autonomous and random way even one’s friends, one’s family, one’s own body, and oneself. Without compassion, politics becomes a matter of mere power blocks, counterproductively pushing other blocks around to the point where all interests are eventually thwarted.

A compassionless perspective leads to the mania of thinking that mere economic success, while admittedly important, is the be-all and end-all of human existence; it gives rise to amoral and even immoral pursuit of money, in which one does not recognize the difference between adequate external facilities and true internal satisfaction.”

~ Jeffrey Hopkins, A Truthful Heart: Buddhist Practices For Connecting With Others