Sunday, January 03, 2010

Lankavatara Sutra Chapter 2, Section XXXI

Disclaimer: Please understand I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter. Nobody gave me any secret decoder ring, and if they did, what of it? But no, they did not.


As usual, I'm working with this translation.

This bit deals more with causality, and dependent origination, and the denseness and seemingly contradictory nature of our existence...

Nothing whatever is born or ceases to exist by reason of causation; when causation is discriminated there is birth and cessation.

(85) 141. It is not to keep off the idea of birth and disappearance which takes place in causation; it is to keep off the wrong imagination as to causation, which is cherished by the ignorant.

142. The being and non-being of things subject to causation has no reality; the triple world owes its existence to the Mind put into confusion by reason of habit-energy.

143. Not ever being in existence, what things are there that are born? [but] in causation nothing is lost; when effect-producing objects (saṁskrita) are regarded as like unto a barren woman's child or a flower in the sky, one perceives that grasping (subject) and grasped (object) are an error and desists [from committing the same error].

144. There is nothing that is to be born, nor is there anything that has been born; even causation is not; it is because of wordly usage that things are talked of as existing.

"Reality" here I would take to mean "intrinsic essence," and the "nothing that is to be born" talked about in the last verse here means independent origination. Subject and object are conventions we talk about.

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