One does not escape the wheel of Samsara by going out of it; but by going into it: into the still center forever untouched by the extreme positions of the peripheries.
Conversation
where is samsara?
1
Around and inside Nirvana
1
where is nirvana?
1
Around and inside Samsara
1
so you have no answer
3
1
* Mulamadhyamakakarikah, 19 - 20: eweb.furman.edu/~ateipen/Relig
Heart Sutra: webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/heartsu
1
hahaha, ok so samsara and nirvana are the same thing?
1
They are polar opposites, in the same way that left and right are polar opposites—but it does not make sense to talk about left without right. Thus, though explicitly antithetically different, they are implicitly inseparable.
1
Your left hand is not your right hand, but they are parts of the same body, and in that sense they are one. Without the body uniting them, neirher could exist. In this sense nirvana is samsara.
Understanding this requires you to detect the hidden unity between all polar opposites. Lao-tzu expresses this in the second verse of Tao Te Ching, in the principle of "mutual arising":
wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu0
1
You can only know nirvana as nirvana, because there is samsara; you can only know samsara as samsara because there is nirvana.
This is a fundamental fact of reality applicable to everything, but it is something we are conditioned to ignore by using only a focalized mode of
1
Show replies