|
It is said that Essence of Prajnaparamita (commonly known as the Heart Sutra) alone can really go to the very core of the Buddhist teachings on emptiness, void or Voidness and by analyzing its historical existence and by restoring its component parts to their context in the Prajnaparamita Sutras, we can gain all the necessary understanding on emptiness, void or Voidness. As Buddhist learners and practitioners, we can never ever undervalue Buddha's teachings on the nature of emptiness, the negation of the inherent existence of all things and phenomena. Leaving the religious aspects aside, this very nature, or this natural functional mode of all things, is the very backbone of our current beingness which includes our physical and mental aggregates. Moreover, it is actually based on this lack of inherent self-nature that we can put a stoppage to our grasping and can come to directly see how everything lacks an independent existence. Although things seem to appear independently, they actually come into being interdependently. We call this the wisdom of emptiness of self-nature or the wisdom of emptiness based on illusive interdependent conditions of relative phenomena. This emptiness of relative, conditioned, constructed or fabricated phenomena, can be the basis for our understanding of the lack of inherent nature of all things ; however, we should expand and go beyond this view if we truly want to fathom the Voidness or Signlessness of the state of ultimate reality in the very vivid presence!
Essence of Prajnaparamita, Thich Tue Hai, Milam Sudhana (translator), Independently published, Paperback, 195 pages, $15.00
|
|
|