Property:SanskritTranslation
From Bodhicitta
This is a property of type Text.
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Whence will come pleasure and sorrow? What is pleasure? What is thirst? If one seeks for its intrinsic reality, where will one find thirst? +
Upon close examination, what is this world of the living? Who dies in it? Who is born? Who existed before? Who has a relative? Who is a friend?<span class="smw-highlighter pagebreaks" data-type="8" data-state="inline" data-title="Page number from:" title="438" tabindex="0"><span class="smwtticon pagebreak note text-80">[p.438]</span><span class="smwttcontent"><big>[[How to Be a Bodhisattva: Introduction to the Practice of the Bodhisattva Path (The Bodhicaryāvatāra)]]</big> <br> <span class="muted">Gómez, Luis O., trans. "How to Be a Bodhisattva: Introduction to the Practice of the Bodhisattva Path (''The Bodhicaryāvatāra'')." In ''Norton Anthology of World Religions: Buddhism'', edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr., 395–441. New York: Norton, 2017.</span></span></span> +
Let those who are like myself understand that all this is like empty space. Arguments irritate us, joys excite us. +
With grief, striving, and despondency, we, cutting and poking at each other, go to great pains to consume ourselves with sin while seeking our own pleasure. +
Upon dying, we fall into the evil destinies, where we undergo long and painful torments. At times we return to good births, only to become used to brief pleasure. +
In the cycle of becoming there are many falls—yet there is in it nothing real as such. Thus there is only this mutual contradiction. There is nothing real as such. +
Still there are endless oceans of sorrow, unimaginable, terrifying. In this world a sentient being’s strength is limited, its life brief. +
Swiftly and in vain life is carried away by one’s concern with keeping in health and alive, by hunger, disease, and fatigue, by sleep, by calamities, and by fruitless association with the foolish. +
The Author Replies: If, as you claim, the illusion itself does not exist, what is apprehended by the mind?
The Objector Replies: The illusory object is a representation of the errant mind itself, although, in terms of its reality, it is different from the mind. +
Under these circumstances it is difficult to attain a discriminating mind. How is one to gain access to the practice of restraining the habit of distraction? +
Here also is Mara<span class="smw-highlighter" data-type="8" data-state="inline" data-title="Note 2" title="2" tabindex="0"><span class="smwtticon bca-note note">2</span><span class="smwttcontent">The personification of evil and desire.</span></span> engaged in bringing about our fall into evil destinies. Here confusion is invincible, for the wrong paths are many. +
Moreover, it is difficult to attain the right occasion, extremely difficult to come upon the time of a living buddha, and it is almost impossible to detain the torrent of the afflictions. Thus, alas, comes to be this endless chain of sorrow. +
Alas! Only grief is reserved for those who are carried away by this torrent of sorrow—those who fail to perceive their own painful condition, and thus fall into even more painful states. +
Like a madman who would step on burning coals after every bath to make himself warm, these beings think that they are achieving their own happiness even as they stand in the midst of sorrow. +
They behave with the concern of someone who is neverto age or die. Yet they will come to terrible calamities, beginning with death. +
Oh, when will I bring calm to those who are burnt by the fire of suffering, by offering, for the sake of their happiness, my own acts of service, raining dow n from clouds of merit? +
When will I avail myself of the language of convention in order to teach emptiness to those who still perceive a real object of clinging? And when will I be able to teach them with dedication how to gather merit without relying on an object of clinging? +
The Author Replies: If the illusion is nothing but mind, then what is perceived by what? Furthermore, the World Protector has declared that the mind does not perceive the mind. +
As a knife blade cannot cut itself, so it is with the mind. If you object that it illuminates itself, as does a light, +
[our response is that] a light-source itself is not illuminated, because it is not concealed by darkness.
[Cittamātra] Unlike clear crystal, a blue object is not dependent on anything else for its blueness. +
