just like ignoring the root and focusing on the branch, putting a jewel aside and
buying glass trinkets, refusing fine food in preference to muck, or refusing
medicine and taking poison. When we realize everything as our own
envisionment, baseless and rootless, it is like the poor finding wealth, the hungry
finding a feast, and the sick finding healing medicine. When we realize that both
happiness and sadness arise from the mind as self-envisionment, no attachment to
happiness or aversion to suffering can occur. When we understand everything as
mental illusion, both happiness and sadness are like a child’s play.
We elders regard a sand castle built by children as an imaginary castle and have
no attachment to it, while the children consider it to be real and may become quite
attached; when by chance it is destroyed, the children are saddened and cry. When
we see the children becoming upset, we console them and urge them to stop
crying, because their sand castle was imaginary; we give them proof of that in
order to relieve them of attachment to it. When the children come to understand
that the castle was a fiction, they are relieved of their sadness. Knowing that the
sand castle has no real value, we elders were neither moved to sadness by its
destruction nor moved to happiness by its beauty. What we ordinary sentient
beings consider to be real—the objects upon which our happiness and sadness
depend—are to the noble ones like the sand castles of children. They have realized
that unpredictable and unreliable happiness and suffering are without essence,
and thus avoid attachment to them.
In general, happiness and suffering arise due to attachment to objects in the
sensory fields. When we understand that objects in the sensory fields are unreal,
without substantial existence, just like the reflection of the moon in water, then
external things no longer have power to hurt the mind. In the same way, other
people’s suffering has no power to affect us deeply. We are not so affected by the
suffering of someone else’s child, whereas the suffering of our own creates deep
sorrow, although in neither case is there a direct connection with our own mind.
There is no cause for sadness in either case except when the mind generates the
illusion of a sense of self. Different feelings thus arise from the same incident.
When we understand such ideas, we can be free from both temporal suffering
in this life and ultimate suffering in the lower realms.
1.17 REASONABLE PROOF THAT BUDDHA-NATURE EXISTS IN OUR MINDSTREAM
The sutras and tantras of definitive meaning (as opposed to the scriptures of
provisional meaning) teach that the ordinary mind of all sentient beings is
buddha-potential. Direct perception verifies that buddha-nature saturates mind
just as oil suffuses the sesame seed. Experience on the path leads to the
accomplishment of the fruit of the ultimate level of buddha. Here, where buddha-
potential is revealed, knowledge, love, and power become fully mature. Sentient
beings in the three lower realms of samsara are ignorant of the natural perfection
of things and wander as the devils of hell, hungry ghosts, and animals. The same
is true for beings of the three higher realms—gods, demigods, and human beings.
Yet all possess the potential for attaining buddha right here and now.