The Basic Space of Phenomena
The Precious Treasury of The Basic Space of Phenomena
Longchen Rabjam
Hardback, Padma Publishing
154pp., £18.99, April 2001, 978–1881847328
‘If someone venerates Brahman as space — well; a person wins worlds that are spacious, worlds that are wide open, unconfined, and far-flung; they obtain complete freedom of movement in every place reached by space, if they venerate Brahman as space’ (Chandogya Upanishad 7:12, c. 1800 B.C.E.)
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLAH! LOOOOLAH LOOOOOOOOLAH! WOLLAH! WOLLAH! WOLLAH! EMAHOOOOOOO! The immediate conveyor. Trip. The concatenating mechanic. A spanner for your brain still wielded by the Buddha hand in the Buddha field, reaching across centuries its rotating arm. Clunk. Recalibrate your perceptions with material beyond expression [there is no beyond]. Every word the rejoicing ineffable. Every differentiation immaculate emptiness, turning, attuning your eyeballs to a new reality.
This text, this world, is unwavering, unceasing, without beginning, without end or cessation, non-referential, uninterrupted, all pervasive, unchanging, timeless, without transition, undifferentiated, undivided, motionless, un-circumscribed, spontaneously present, entirely positive, uncompounded, immaculate, lucid, pristine, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, equal, open, spacious, even, infinite, boundless, omnipresent, uniform, manifesting, primordial, ever-present, unrestricted, unstructured, luminous, unconditioned, unconstrained, supremely blissful. Naturally occurring timeless awareness extended, as the brilliant pupils of paranoia cool and the knots of neurosis unwind. See, smell, touch, taste, feel every sense as the immediate conveyor.
Remember, momently, in this fortress of vision, phenomena are without basis, support or foundation. There is nothing in which these adjectives are enshrined or to which they adhere or as which they are substantiated and they themselves are not separate from the naturally occurring, timeless awareness which is the fullness of the empty body of the teachings, the space of Dharmakaya. Things, words, people populate, disclose, sustain and are no other than this expanse. Space and those within it are not two things; each constitutes the other entirely, their mutually vocative and co-dependent origination is nowhere constrained, nowhere bordered. This totality is instantaneous, its teaching is non-referential, undifferentiated and resplendent. Undelimited, this burgeoning text is itself rife with unerring instantiation, no other than what it signifies.
I eject my own awareness into the uncreated expanse. Abiding in this reality, which is itself the cognisor, how can one say that, though sought, this cognisor cannot be found? It is the self made ground that looms and beckons. Cognition is situated everywhere, equally. Mind and phenomena unify as atemporally manifest Buddhas in a motionless, shining world, unmoving because totalised by occupying all positions. This non-dual coalescence is an entirely positive, undivided distribution, emptiness in which nihilism appears only as negation and neurosis; swimming, unanchored, adrift; a detachment that is as unsatisfactory as its debilitating assertion of an opposing material, the very act that flings the subject into its own division. Nihilism and craving are homeless wanderers, hungry ghosts. Separation, a sad trick of the mind. The extensive, unresisting, empty ground may be entered with no anxiety and no withholdings. Relinquish any debarring sense of matter at the heart of substance and stubbornness at the heart of yourself. Posit nothing at the heart of both and space is unbounded, pure illumination, a self-sustaining pervasive radiation. Being un-departing from this vision of unmodified suchness is the action-less, supreme action of the wise. In this bliss of entirely positive enjoyment, suffering appears as islands of burning fuel, the pupils of the lost.
Should any elephants opine that non-duality is non-conceptual, evacuate them with these words, the empty matrix of space immediately presented, rolled out with spinning generosity as gargantuan mind. Longchen Rabjam is even now plugged in to the unexcelled Buddha field. He taps, even now, the infinite, non-existent body of Samantabhadra. And here it pours its vapid, starry nectar. The graffiti wall of space. The mechanic, the bus, the truck, the bike, the Rolls-Royce, the vehicle, the immediate conveyor.