A Magical Mystery Tour

Rabbit horns and Gandharvic Castles in the air; the mind, will and consciousness; the five dharmas and modes of reality; long and short, is and isn’t, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob, ect—all are nothing more than a magician’s conjuring trick, designed to keep the great Ferris Wheel of Samsara turning round and round. Red Pine states, “Just as a magician fabricates forms that people imagine as being what they are not, thus does our repository consciousness produce our world of objects as well as our sensory bodies, both of which we imagine to be real, out of the seeds of habit-energy from past discriminations that we once more imagine as being what they are not.” Interesting take on how the defiled seeds of the alaya vijnana, if stirred into motion, create our apparent reality as such–thus initiating that magical mystery tour. One continuous action that dependently originates from all the accumulated habit-energy since time immemorial; as the Lanka itself expounds, “it is based on a dependent reality that the myriad projections of an imagined reality arise—the myriad projections of appearances that are the habit-energy of attachment to projections.” How does one stop all the spinning? How does one prevent the Mad-Hatter from sprouting unremitting discriminatory associations and attachments?

Enter the shadow-slayer of all discriminatory outlows: the Dharmata Buddha. “Mahamati, what the dharmata buddha does is establish and create that realm which transcends self-existent appearances of the mind and on which the personal realization of Buddha knowledge depends.” The Dharmata Buddha “does not teach, does not speak” (Red Pine), yet through detachment, as intuitively taught by this Transcendent Buddha, one enters into the tathagata family. Being free from all formal objective and subjective snares, the Dharmata Buddha initiates the Noble Power of self-realization upon those who are ready to awaken from the mad dream of samsara and who, through faith and reason in the Unborn Spirit, know that there is nothing apart from the Unborn Mind Itself.

The Lanka here also embellishes upon the notion of Nirvana. “Shravakas {those associated with Hinayana Buddhism} who are afraid of the suffering that comes from their projection of samsara seek nirvana unaware that the difference between samsara and nirvana, as well as their projection of everything else, does not exist. They conceive of nirvana as the cessation of all future sensory realms, not the transformation of repository consciousness through the personal realization of buddha knowledge.” A Lankavatarian discerns that nirvana is the Noble self-realization that there is no independent entity that needs salvation from an abstracted and defiled representation that masquerades as apparent existence; nirvana is annihilation of this false no-self representation, thus rendering it extinct. The meaning of nirvana is thus: Annihilation of the false, abstracted, no-self and giving full recollection to the undivided awareness power of the unborn mind.