locations of such places.
Then where do our present feelings of happiness or sadness, as well as our
feelings in the dream state, come from? The answer is that those appearances
arise from karmically induced tendencies of the mind. If they are examined, they
are seen to have no substantial existence; if they remain unexplored, they seem to
be real, concrete, and true.
This story is taken from the sutra The Pile of Jewels: Once in the kingdom of
Magadha, there was a clever magician called “Bhadra,” and his fame spread far
and wide. “If I could fool the Lord Buddha with my magic, I would be the most
famous magician of this world.” Thinking this, he went to see the lord with the
intention to deceive him. Arriving in the district where the Buddha resided at that
time, Bhadra sent him and his retinue a luncheon invitation for the next day, and
the Lord Buddha accepted. The morrow arrived, and Bhadra conjured a beautiful
house decorated with flower garlands, with a throne and tables displaying many
delicious foods. The people living nearby were amazed to see such things. Bhadra
reasoned that this enterprise was a good test of the Buddha’s omniscience because,
if omniscient, the Buddha would naturally avoid coming to lunch for fear of
looking foolish and subjecting himself to ridicule. But at noon that day the lord
with his retinue of five hundred monks arrived for lunch. Bhadra ushered them in
and begged them to sit down. Then he served them his illusory food and drink,
and the Lord Buddha blessed the offerings as if they were real and began to eat.
Bhadra decided at that moment to dismantle the illusion of his magic and expose
the Buddha as a fool, but however hard he tried, he could not dissolve the illusion.
The Lord Buddha enjoyed the lunch with his retinue and, having finished the
feast, he recited a dedication prayer:
Both the giver and the recipient,
As also the gift, are unknowable;
Through the sameness of those three,
May Bhadra attain perfection.This fine dedication prayer means that the three—giver, receiver, and gift (Bhadra,
the Lord Buddha, and the lunch)—should not be reified as separate entities or
imaged as individual objects. These three are the same in being unknowable, and
by this recognition—that in deepest reality no one thing is necessarily more real
than another—the accumulation of virtue and primal awareness can be completed
for the magician Bhadra, despite the fact that his intention was deluded and the
luncheon was magically produced. In deepest reality, there is not the slightest
difference between a “magical” luncheon and a “real” one. Due to the inadequacy
of the blessing power of his mantra, Bhadra was unable to dissolve the appearance
of his magical illusion, while the superior power of the Buddha’s real blessing
gave what would otherwise be a magical illusion the same perceptual continuity
as the conventionally real. But the specifics of the magical illusion created as
“illusion” by Bhadra and made “real” by the Buddha are identical. The
appearances of the waking state do not actually differ even a whit from the
appearances of the dream state, and if we recognize dream as dream, then release