Property:SanskritTranslation
From Bodhicitta
This is a property of type Text.
T
Ultimate and conventional truth—truth is thus twofold. The Ultimate does not fall within the scope of intellection. Intellection itself is called "conventional truth." +
This shows that something is either dependent on another or independent.
[Mādhyamika] When something is not blue it cannot make itself blue by itself. +
A light is said to illuminate once this action is cognized by a cognition. Intellection is said to illuminate once this is cognized by what? +
Whether the mind is luminous or not, talking about it is pointless since it is never seen by anything, like the beauty of a barren woman's daughter. +
[Cittamātra] If there is no self-perception, how is consciousness remembered?
[Mādhyamika] Memory comes from connection with another experience, as with the shrew's poison. +
[Cittamātra] It illuminates itself by seeing what is in indirect contact with the cause.
[Mādhyamika] A jar seen by applying sight-restoring lotion would still not be the lotion itself. +
We do not reject things as they are given to us by perception, tradition, or reason. But we do reject the notion that the mind’s capacity for generating imagined realities is the cause of sorrow in any substantial sense. +
If you affirm that illusion is nothing different from the mind, we say it is something totally different from the mind. If you say it is a real entity, we ask “how can it not be a separate reality?” If you say it is the same as the mind, it can have no reality as an independent entity. +
[our reply is] How could something non-existent gain causal efficiency by being based on something real? For, according to you, the mind is reduced to isolation, accompanied by things which do not exist. +
If the mind is without external objects, then everyone is a Tathāgata. That being so, what virtue is gained even if 'mind-only' is posited? +
[Cittamātra] Even if the similarity to illusion is recognized,
how does defilement cease, when lust for a woman who is
an illusion still arises in the one who created her? +
With respect to these truths the world is divided into two types of persons: yogins and common humans. The vision of yogins invalidates that of common humans. +
An Objector Interjects: In the same manner, if you take everything to be like a magical illusion, how will the afflictions ever cease, for even the wonder-worker who creates a phantom woman will feel passion for her. +
The Author Replies: In this case, the creator of the phantom has not abandoned the habitual tendency to experience things as real objects and experience afflictive states of mind; consequently, when he perceives the phantom woman, he still has not reached the point where emptiness permeates all his experiences. +
If one is infused with the concept of emptiness, the habitual belief in being disappears. Then, by cultivating the idea that neither of these two exists, in the end even the idea of emptiness is abandoned. +
When one no longer apprehends an entity that one could conceive as not existing, then all being has lost its ground. How could it appear before the mind again? +
When neither being nor no-being appears any more before the mind, then, having nowhere to go, deprived of its support, the mind is calmed. +
Just as a pillar empowered by an expert on poisons, who
then dies, will continue to neutralize venom and other
poisons even when he is long dead, +
So too the 'pillar' that is the Conqueror, empowered by
following the path to Awakening, continues to achieve all
ends even after that Bodhisattva has attained Enlightenment. +
[Hinayānist] How could worship offered to something which
has no consciousness be fruitful?
[Mādhyamika] Because it is taught that it is the same whether
he is present or has attained Enlightenment, +
