Thu, 13 Nov 2008
Relativity
The attitude that there's no difference between friend and enemy only can come from an understanding of emptiness. So here's a short explanation. One analogy often used for emptiness is a rainbow. A rainbow is only seen under certain specific circumstances. The light of the sun must be refracted through raindrops and a person must be standing in the right position to see the rfracted light. There is no rainbow apart from this combination of sun, rain, and person. Searching for the end of the rainbow, as if the rainbow had some existence apart from these circumstances, is a traditional example of a fool's quest. What we don't see is that all phenomena arise in dependence and have no independent existence. They are all like rainbows, but foolishly we act as if they have an independence that they don't.
No person is an enemy in and of themselves. The person who is an enemy to you is a friend to someone else. Enmity is a relation between two people, just as a rainbow only exists as a relation between sun, rain, and observer. To treat a relation as if it were an inherent property of one of the terms of the relation is as deluded as taking a rainbow as real. There are no friends and enemies. It's how we choose to act to others, and they to us, that creates a sense of friendship or enmity. And actions are gone as soon as they are performed. They are like tracing a line with a stick through water.
Everything that arises in dependence on other factors has no inherent existence. Emptiness is just another name for this absence of inherent existence. So emptiness is synonymous with dependence on causes and conditions. And since everything arises from causes and conditions, everything is empty. What arises from cuases is relative truth. The emptiness of these phenomena is ultimate truth. And since the two are a unity, the two truths are also a unity. Emptinese does not contradict how things appear in the world, it is only the antidote for our mistaken understanding of how they exist.
So there is no independently existing friend or enemy and no independent good or bad circumstances. Appreciating this we can release our clinging and revulsion towards them and adopt the attitude I wrote about yesterday.
