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Homage to Manjushri!
I bow down to
the all-powerful Buddha
Whose mind is free of attachment,
Who in his compassion and wisdom
Has taught the
inexpressible.
In truth there is no birth --
Then
surely no cessation or liberation;
The Buddha is like the
sky
And all beings have that nature.
Neither
samsara nor nirvana exist,
But all is a complex continuum
With an intrinsic face of void,
The object of ultimate
awareness.
The nature of all things
Appears like a
reflection,
Pure and naturally quiescent,
With a
non-dual identity of suchness.
The common mind imagines
a self
Where there is nothing at all,
And it conceives
of emotional states --
Happiness, suffering and
equanimity.
The six states of being in samsara,
The
happiness of heaven,
The suffering of hell,
Are all
false creations, figments of mind.
Likewise the ideas
of bad action causing suffering,
Old age, disease and
death,
And the idea that virtue leads to happiness,
Are
mere ideas, unreal notions.
Like an artist frightened
By the devil he paints,
The sufferer in samsara
Is
terrified by his own imagination.
Like a man caught in
quicksands
Thrashing and struggling about,
So beings
drown
In the mess of their own thoughts.
Mistaking
fantasy for reality
Causes an experience of
suffering;
Mind is poisoned by interpretation
Of
consciousness of form.
Dissolving figment and fantasy
With a mind of compassionate insight,
Remain in
perfect awareness
In order to help all beings.
So
acquiring conventional virtue
Freed from the web of
interpretive thought,
Insurpassable understanding is gained
As Buddha, friend to the world.
Knowing the
relativity of all,
The ultimate truth is always
seen;
Dismissing the idea of beginning, middle and
end
The flow is seen as emptiness.
So all samsara
and nirvana is seen as it is --
Empty and insubstantial,
Naked and changeless,
Eternally quiescent and
illumined.
As the figments of a dream
Dissolve upon
waking,
So the confusion of samsara
Fades away in
enlightenment.
Idealizing things of no substance
As
eternal, substantial and satisfying,
Shrouding them in a
fog of desire
The round of existence arises.
The
nature of beings is unborn
Yet commonly beings are
conceived to exist
Both beings and their ideas
Are
false beliefs.
It is nothing but an artifice of mind
This birth into an illusory becoming,
Into a world of
good and evil action
With good or bad rebirth to follow.
When the wheel of mind ceases to turn
All things
come to an end.
So there is nothing inherently substantial
And all things are utterly pure.
This great ocean
of samsara,
Full of delusive thought,
Can be crossed
in the boat Universal Approach.
Who can reach the other
side without it? |
