since both relative and absolute views are just the same nominal imputation. All
views are only notional-conceptual because in the natural or essential state of
reality neither the relative nor the absolute can ever exist.
In his Great Memorandum of View, the peerless pandita Je Rongzompa says,
If buddha is our essential identity,
Our attributes can be no other than buddha;
Since an attribute is a part of identity,
The attribute and the identity are both buddha.With the realization that we and buddha are inseparable, reality abides nowhere
in particular, wanting nothing. Just so, as taught in the sutras of definitive
meaning, perfect insight and meditative absorption are the path of Shakyamuni
Buddha.
In neither relative nor absolute reality is anything good or bad, and there is
nothing in either to cultivate or reject. Consider dream experience: therein we can
infer that events arise from causes and conditions, that sowing crops brings forth a
harvest, that consuming poison results in death, and that taking medicine assists
recovery. But even though such events appear in sequence, neither the death after
taking poison nor the healing after taking medicine, for example, can be said to be
connected because the taking of poison and the death and the taking of medicine
and the healing are all dream events. Each moment of perception of dream events
is equal and the same, free of any imputation of causal linkage. Since in the
waking state every event is of the same dreamlike nature, any preferential
judgment we make regarding relative or absolute reality is a function of delusion
within delusion. As Je Rongzompa said in Applying the Mahayana Method, “As
inside a dream, so outside: there is no essential distinction between a functional
and a nonfunctional illusion. All phenomena in our waking state are also without
reality and without foundation, like mirage, like dream, like reflection, like
apparition.” Although, in a dream, a pot appears to function as a water container, it
has no more functional capacity than does the reflection of a pot in a mirror. There
is no need to prove that dream appearances and their attributes are indeterminate,
or have or do not have any functional capacity. Likewise, there is no need to prove
that the appearances of relative delusion—our ordinary perceptions of inner and
outer objects—arise as the products of causes and conditions, or that they are
functional or nonfunctional: they all appear the same to both the wise man and
the fool. Appearances may be imputed as pure or defiled, but there is no need to
label them either way because, in reality, cause and effect and truth and falsehood
are mere intellectual imputation. In this way relative and absolute are the same.
Unlike Middle Way scholars, tantric yogins do not hold that in relative reality the
two truths are different while in absolute reality they are inseparable. Rather, for
the tantric yogin, the relative is absolutely pure, and the absolute is absolute
sameness—purity and sameness being identical. The unique sustaining view of
the dharmakaya as unitary awareness and emptiness sees the absolute
inseparability of the relative and the absolute. In The Wish-Fulfilling Treasury,
Longchenpa says,