Teaching the Aptitude for Emptiness: A Review of Bodhicharyavatara

There is no God, nothing was created by God.

"If, without a son, a man cannot be father,

Whence, indeed, will such a son arise?

There is no father in the absence of a son.

Just so, the mind and object have no true existence."

(Verse 113, Chapter 9, The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala Classics)

Reality is cause and effect. We surrender to a spirit that utilises the body to play out its own phenomenology. Does consciousness express itself if consciousness is all there is that perceives? What do we attain from the experience of such a reality, if all we do is question if what we experience is true? Nirvana is a detachment from thought through the negation of the experience of reality. To understand cause and effect is to reap what you sow. 

A mirage causes eventual disillusionment. By becoming aware of the transient nature of the formless reality of a mirage, the mind negates sensations arising out of our experience of a transient reality. A key take-away is skyo ba or skyo shes which in Tibetan means a wholesome disillusionment, a concept which thickens as the meditation on emptiness navigates through realms of desire and pleasure. 

Human beings discover laws of physics to express their experience of reality. Must not the need for expression have been desperate? 

So, what are we to do when our experience of reality is one of emptiness and non-existence? What do we do with the inevitable dread of nothingness? 

"If, you ask, "there's no validity in valid knowledge,

Is not all that it assesses false?

And therefore it becomes untenable

To meditate on voidness, ultimate reality"

(Verse 138, Chapter 10, The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala Classics)

The Way of the Bodhisattva, also known as the Bodhicharyavatara originally belongs to Shantideva. He was the son of the King of Saurashtra, a teacher and a monk in Nalanda. He can easily be found in Tibetan Buddhism and the Bodhicharyavatara has been translated from Tibetan by the Padmakara Translation Group. 

Bodhicharyavatara or The Way of the Bodhisattva is for those who contemplate the logic of human birth, growth and death, and feel existential due to duality. 

Knowledge and lack of knowledge, both, are workings of the human mind and logic is a method of enquiry into the co-existence between human consciousness and external reality. 

The book advocates for a Sangha, that believes in the absolute rejection of Ahankaar and walks a virtuous path of resistance to, abstinence from, and renunciation of Samsara, towards enlightenment for the sake of all beings, especially the downtrodden. 

In this book, towards the end, we get a brief description of the fate of all beings beside Mandakini, the river in heaven and Vaitarani, the river in hell. A professor of Mahayana, Shantideva took a threatening tone of contempt towards evil crawling under our skin. Though, the Bodhicharyavatara raises necessary questions that are still relevant today, its logic is full of fallacies and proves that Dharma is make-believe. Whilst teaching an aptitude for emptiness, in the end the Bodhicharyavatara requests for preachers and teachers to be blindly worshipped. The book proves useful in proving the uselessness of prayer. 

Though one may pray for the well being of all and for wrongs to become right, nothing will be achieved through blind obedience to the organized religion of one's birth. Its message, however, is filled with good intention. 

Bodhicharyavatara emphasizes on the need of enquiry into the sensations and feelings arising out of our experience of reality, and offers insight into how one can go about enacting Karma, while living in a society, that has its own traditions, and a nature which possesses its own physics.  

Shantideva's logic is like Wittgenstein's logic. 

"These parts themselves will break down into particles,

And particles divide according to direction.

These fragments, too, lack partless parts; they are like space.

Thus even particles have no existence."

(Verse 86, Chapter 9, The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala Classics)

In training the mind to be at ease with the feelings caused in the human body and the human spirit by the empty nature of reality, the Bodhicharyavatara sparks the imagination to picture a body-less spirit or a spirit-less body. We imagine that there is no link connecting the cause to its effect and vice versa. Then, we begin wondering whether the permanent nature of forms of external reality ever matter in trying to investigate the sensations arising within the body and the spirit due to external reality.

Then, to quit the mediation on the nature of the spirit, the body, and the nature of reality as one and united, no longer separate from one another, we experience skyo ba or skyo shes, a "wholesome disillusionment".