Toward those who have not understood,
Compassion arises.Such loving-kindness arises effortlessly. Just as a mother instinctively becomes
anxious when her toddler runs in play hither and thither across a flat roof without
balustrades, so the yogin who understands that all phenomena are mental
delusion feels a patient love for people engaged in subduing enemies, caring for
kith and kin, accumulating wealth and improving reputation—in short, for all the
people who are bound in an environment of pain by the concretization of their
delusions. With this understanding, bearing in mind the delusiveness of karmic
result, we can nondelusively see karmic cause and effect working in specific cases,
and strong confidence will arise in us. This is proof of correct view, or buddha-
potential manifest. If, at the very center of mind, we lack a clear understanding of
the view free of all bias, we are then ignorant of karmic cause and effect and
without compassion for sentient beings, and we will wander like a blind man left
in the middle of a large field, not knowing where to go. Ignorant of the view and
thus bewildered, even if we walk the path of liberation and enact the conduct of
the six perfections, we will remain ordinary beings.
In the context of the sutras, no matter what effort is applied to prove through
logic and scriptural authority the reality of emptiness—the emptiness that is
profoundly liberating and free of all conceptual elaboration—we cannot go beyond
deductive hypotheses and speculative concepts. When the sutric mind investigates
phenomena and discovers nonexistence, it takes it to be nothingness; when it
discovers the absence of nonexistence, it takes that to be a constant. When it holds
both existence and nonexistence together, it cannot conceive of both existent
objects and nonexistent objects simultaneously. If the unity of existence and
nonexistence is emphasized, the sutric mind tends to conceive of black and white
threads wound together, and it can go no further. Such beginners, who understand
reality only through intellectual analysis, conceive of it as categorized, nominal,
absolute—a factor of deductive logic. But then just as a picture of the moon can
introduce us to the moon, and just as its reflection in water can orient us toward its
presence in the sky, so too we may connect to basic pure presence by applying the
logic of the four extremes. Through the view of deductive logic practiced for a long
time with correct reasoning, gradually we understand that the moon’s reflection in
water is illusion, an understanding that eliminates the extreme notion that it
exists. Second, it removes the extreme notion of its nonexistence. Third, it removes
the extreme notion of both its existence and nonexistence, and then fourth, it
removes the extreme notion of its neither existing nor not-existing. Gradually,
having removed the four extreme notions and free at last of conceptual
elaboration, we can enter into the mind of buddha. This is not the same as the
direct approach of Dzogchen.
On the sutric path, pure presence is not mentioned as existent, now, in the
minds of sentient beings, except as the seed of buddha. If pure presence is taught
as manifest here and now in the minds of sentient beings, then, due to the
inadequacies of the sutric view, the result is the accumulation of the negative
karma of wrong view. In the sutric tradition, when the bodhisattva Manjushri