19

The Power of the Senses

Bhaskara, another great Kashmiri master of the Vasugupta lineage, writes in his commentary on the Shiva Sutras: “The senses have the power to make this new creation emerge, as experience proves, because they are sustained by the inborn power of the consciousness. It is thus because the power of the senses comes from the absorbing force existing in the Self.” Bhaskara sees in the activity of the senses the authentic foundation of existence.

For the person who does not communicate with reality, everything is illusory. Everything takes on a static form that the ego fixes and weighs down. From this illusion, which egoistic people call reality, are born suffering, solitude, separation. All these impressions will get dumped into the unconscious, or the obscure part of innermost unconsciousness, and all these reverberations will set the stage for the never-ending cycle of the person enchained within the spheres of illusion, dependence, and unhappiness.

How to escape this cycle? By total ease and presence to reality, according to the teachings of Yogacara Buddhism, Ch’an, dzogchen, and Tantrism. Consciousness, says Asanga, is “hindered by the view of the ‘I’: from there comes its agitated and powerless tension. This can be remedied by stabilizing consciousness in the inner world, which amounts to re-establishing consciousness in consciousness itself.”³³

It is therefore solely by letting go of what Asanga calls “the mass of tension” of differentiating thought that we can attain a peaceful state of the body-mind.

In the Secret Doctrine of the Goddess Tripura, a yogini gives this teaching to the proud Astavakra, who claims that nothing in this world is unknown to him:

“As long as the movement of the intelligence toward the outside has not been suspended, there is no possible inner gaze. As long as there is no inner gaze, one does not attain this pure consciousness. This inner gaze is devoid of all tension or strain: how could it belong to an intellect strained with effort?

“This is why you must approach yourself from your own essence, abandoning any kind of tension or strain. Then, for an instant, you will rejoin your own essence and you will sustain yourself in it without thought. Then you will remember yourself, and you will understand in what sense consciousness is simultaneously both unknowable and perfectly known. Such is the truth. When you have known it, you will reach the immortal state.

“That is all I have to say to you, oh ascetic’s son! Now I salute you and am on my way. If you could not understand all this simply by listening, then King Janaka, the best of the sages, will enlighten you. Ask him unceasingly and he will remove all your doubts.”

Upon these words, while the king was paying her homage and while all the members of the assembly were bowing down, the yogini disappeared like a cloud chased by the wind.³⁴

Easefulness allows immaculate consciousness to emerge; presence in our actions allows this same consciousness to unfold spherically toward the world, to contact it deeply, and to let it come back to the source of the heart, where each perception finds freshness and tremoring vibration.

Thus, as Asanga says in one of the marvelous definitions of what a Bodhisattva is,

the unceasingly-increasing relaxation and ease of body and Heart allow him [the Bodhisattva] to obtain a fundamental base . . . his body and consciousness having become supple to the highest degree. . . . Having understood that the world is only latent tendencies and being devoid of self and the initial seeds of pain, he eliminates this view of the self which does not aim for the good of others and he takes refuge in the great view of the Self with great benefit because this view is transmitted to the equitable, impartial consciousness of self and other; all beings having been substituted for the “I,” this consciousness becomes the source of the disinterested activity of the Bodhisattva in consideration and in the interest and favor of all.³⁵

Here, we are far from the idea of the Bodhisattva who refuses to enter nirvana before all people are saved because, for the adherents of Yogacara, the opposing of samsara and nirvana is absent of presence to the world. The state of nirvana infuses all of samsara, and the absolute is found in reality, as Ma-tsu and the Ch’an masters maintain.

A Ch’an story tells of how two adepts, one of the Ch’an school, the other of a different school, meet along a river. The adept of the other school says that his master possesses extraordinary powers. Seated on one side of the river, this master can draw in the air the marks printed on a piece of paper that one of his disciples is holding on the other side of the river. “And your master, of what marvels is he capable?”

“My master is a great magician,” answers the Ch’an adept. “When he is thirsty, he drinks; when he is hungry, he eats; when he is tired, he goes to bed.”

This is the kind of elegy for simple, ordinary reality that is found all through Ch’an, Yogacara, dzogchen, and Kashmiri Shaivism.

Presence becomes more and more firmly established and leads to what the last chapter of the colossal Avatamsaka Sutra names “entrance into the kingdom of Reality.”

The sage is thus capable of acting with lightning-bolt speed, because dualistic thought no longer paralyzes him. His acts are instantaneous and carriers of light; this is what is called nonaction. The sixth consciousness is short-circuited, the unconscious is no longer buried, and the whole tremoring vibration of the senses constantly comes to celebrate that consciousness from which all movement and action emanate.