It is helpful to look at the larger context of the Vajrayana. Vajrayana is a part of the Mahayana. The Sanskrit term Mahayana, or “Great Vehicle,” is called the Buddhist vehicle of the bodhisattva path. Yana means vehicle in the sense that it takes us to the other shore. This is a famous Buddhist metaphor for awakening from samsara, the cyclic existence of suffering, to the freedom and peace of nirvana. The Mahayana encompasses the meditations and their foundations, the philosophical teachings. Together these enable us to achieve the goal of the bodhisattva ideal and path — complete awakening to liberate ourselves and all sentient beings from suffering.
Buddhism teaches that what we usually think of as reality is in fact an illusion. It’s not that things and beings don’t exist at all — they just don’t exist the way we usually think they do. It is an illusion that we are separate beings. The Mahayana standpoint is to fully embrace the illusion with love and caring. Our suffering hurts! Other people’s suffering hurts! We deeply feel pain, joy, and the myriad of human emotions. Our path is simultaneously one of realization and love. What we do makes all the difference in the world. Each moment we are experiencing past karma and creating new karma. When we are triggered emotionally, we can stop for a moment before reacting and consciously respond to what is arising. We create our state of mind. If we rest in loving-kindness with others and ourselves, this then is the consciousness we live in.
The Two Truths
Every school of Buddhism has philosophical teachings that form the basis for the various meditations. One of the most important philosophical tenets is called the two truths, which refers to the nature of reality. These two truths are genuine truth and apparent truth, which are also translated as ultimate truth and relative truth. It is very useful on the path of awakening to discuss the two truths. I will do so from a Vajrayana perspective, the larger context of this meditation.
The Buddha taught that genuine truth is beyond the dualisms of apparent truth, beyond the polarities of nonexistence and existence, of nihilism and eternalism. This truth is what Buddha called the “middle way.” Further, the phenomena of sights, sounds, sensations, feelings, thoughts, and emotions that we constantly experience are ever-changing, insubstantial, and conceptually designated. All that appears to our senses and our mental faculty arises due to causes and conditions. Apparent truth is the truth of causality: Everything is interdependent. Appearances are not only ever-changing, but the causes and conditions that produce them are empty of true existence. They appear to exist. In actuality they don’t exist the way we think they do. But neither are they nonexistent. We live our lives in the apparent truth. The mystery of reality is beyond duality of existence and nonexistence, of subject and object, of one and many.
Realizing the nature of mind and phenomena is the crux of realization in Buddhism. The Buddha taught that the fundamental cause of our suffering is that we think we are individuals. We take the fact that we have a body, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and consciousness as evidence that we are a self, separate from all else. Everything else becomes “other,” and duality is created. Our dualistic worldview is created by this split of subject and object. As the subject, we want to acquire the objects we see as beneficial to us, and we want to get rid of that which we deem unhelpful. We are indifferent to other phenomena that we consider unimportant. As we grasp at objects that do not truly exist (they are not separate, solid, or permanent), we are frustrated and dissatisfied with the results of this process. True satisfaction and happiness come from realizing the genuine truth beyond this apparent reality.
Genuine truth is the unchanging, nondual, irreducible nature of mind and reality. It is pure, uncontrived, unimpeded awareness. All that is, all phenomena, has the same true nature and manifests inseparably as the union of form and emptiness. The two truths are inseparable. The true nature of apparent reality is genuine reality.
It is said that the Buddha realized the genuine truth of all that is, and he fully understood apparent reality and how it functions. He could see all the causes and effects playing out. He sometimes talked about what he saw and knew on the apparent level, for example, explaining to people what they had done in a past life. On the Buddhist path we train in realizing and resting in the simultaneity of genuine and apparent reality. Nevertheless, it is realization of the genuine truth that sets us free.
When we realize genuine reality, love arises as a response of our true heart to ourselves and others. In the words of the third Karmapa,* Rangjung Dorje (1284–1339 CE), in the Aspiration of Mahamudra Prayer:
While the nature of beings has always been full enlightenment,
Not realizing this, they wander in endless samsara.
For the boundless suffering of sentient beings
May overwhelming compassion be born in my being.
While such compassion is active and never ending,
In the moment of compassion, its essential nature is nakedly clear.†
This conjunction is the undeviating supreme path;
Inseparable from it, may I practice it day and night.3
This quote from one of the most beloved prayers of the Tibetans acknowledges the genuine reality that beings are awakened but do not know it. The Karmapa prays for monumental compassion to be born in himself to address the apparent truth of the suffering of beings. In the midst of vast compassion, the experience of the emptiness of self, the emptiness of the activity (compassion), and the emptiness of the one receiving the compassion, the 24/7 meditation is resting in the union of these two truths. Love meets the insubstantial, rainbow-like suffering of beings, soothing the pain. Resting uninterruptedly in the two truths is called stabilization. Generally, this is quite a process, as we get thrown out of our realization by the strength of our habitual patterns and back into duality as soon as we get triggered mentally or emotionally. Resting in true nature and meeting our experience with love purifies and liberates our karma, and it brings all our qualities into full manifestation.
What is our true nature? What is the genuine truth? These are not seen as two separate things in Buddhism. The genuine truth is that everything seems to exist but is empty of actually existing. Phenomena like trees, mountains, rivers, animals, humans, buildings, and cars appear to exist but do not. In an apparent sense they do, of course. True nature is that phenomena and emptiness are connate, inseparable. Genuine reality is referred to as appearance-emptiness, awareness-emptiness.
The vast empty nature of everything is called shunyata. It is the union of form and emptiness. In the Heart Sutra, the most famous Mahayana scripture, Chenrezig states:
Form is empty, emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, formation, and consciousness are empty.
Thus, Shariputra, all phenomena are emptiness: They have no characteristics, no birth, no cessation, no stains, no freedom from stains, no decrease, and no increase.
Thus, Shariputra, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no tactile sensation, no phenomenon; no eye-faculty potential, no mental-faculty potential, no mental-consciousness potential, and nothing in between; no ignorance nor any ending of ignorance, no aging and death nor any ending of aging and death, and nothing in between.4
Genuine reality is not simply emptiness. Awareness itself is empty, yet present. All that is, is the union of awareness and emptiness. However, we have split reality into a dualistic experience. Awareness is said to be luminous clarity.
The most profound realization in Tibetan Buddhist teachings is called “realizing the true nature of mind.” In this usage, mind means awareness or consciousness. There isn’t a reality outside of mind. Everything is inseparable from