How can nirvana and samsara be the same

In Buddhism, these negative states of mind that lead to suffering are called delusions. The good news is that complete liberation from the suffering of an afflictive mind nirvana is entirely possible. Explore the meaning of samsara and nirvana with Gus Cutz, and learn how to move out of a state of inevitable suffering to one of pure and irreversible peace. Find out how to develop your own determination to be completely free from suffering renunciation and its role on the spiritual path.

Get empowered with practical tools for dealing with disturbing emotions up to the point of elimination, and reflect on the possibility of nirvana——and how that differs from enlightenment. But, Buddhism overturns that. They say the teacher as a friend—the kalyanamitra —the virtuous friend, an inspiring friend. The Dalai Lama really lives that, you know. I think that—in the history of why people have resisted the radical nondualist teachings and kept insisting that emptiness is somewhere else or nirvana is some other place—the basic thing is to get out of this world because this world sucks.

Meanwhile, people should do what you say and you can do whatever you like. TS: OK, Robert. But, what I want to circle back around to is: I began by asking you what teachings or texts have meant the most to you and have changed you.

But, basically, the world of other beings. And emptiness is physical in that sense. I argue that the Buddha was a physicist—he was a scientist. But, all of this comes from my slowly deepening, rather poor, not complete understanding of nonduality in the sense that I myself have this kind of escapist psychology, where I will want to get away from difficulties.

We all do. You get all different soul theories that are like that. That is to say: someone who creates the world but He is not in the world. You know that kind of doctrine? As Shelley once said about the normal monotheistic idea about God—that God was some kind of Greek monster. Shelley and Keats used to write stuff like that, which I appreciated.

But, I think there are nice gods, myself. So then, these concepts of nirvana—like the Theravada concept of nirvana—is a dualistic Buddhist concept of nirvana.

I think it was a form of Buddhism that Buddha taught to the male chauvinist Brahmans who were the dominant ascetics and seekers of his day. They were the educated, privileged people—some of whom got tired of doing rituals in the Vedic ceremonies and wanted to actually find the nature of reality.

They were chauvinist and they were psychotic in that sense of having a separate self. They wanted to get away from the world. Those early Sankhya teachings, for example—you know, Sankhya yoga teachings—the word purusa, for the soul, is a word for the male.

And maya and prakrti —nature—is female, and she traps the soul in suffering. The idea is to get the male soul away from the female. And Theravada Buddhism [actually] appeals to them as well, but leads out of the idea of the teaching of self.

This is just my experience of not having that kind of a Self. But, to resist that temptation to get away from it all and keep investing it. And the business is the bodhisattva business of making this a better world—not just seeking my own meditative pleasure.

Tell me a little bit about how that works for you. To get down to your visceral understanding, you have to get down to the super-subtle consciousness, which is actually bliss. You have to understand it with the deeper bliss of your nature. That bliss is not just—it is sexual—sexuality is powerful because it touches that bliss.

That would be a mistake. Why do our atoms hold together in the form of molecules and DNA and the healthy cells, et cetera? Because they like each other! They fit into each other. Bliss wants to expand and connect to things. It melts into them, you could say. When you do that in a deep meditative state, with your super-subtle mind—that is to say, you realize it not just with your brain. You realize it with your whole nervous system—with your fingertips, with your fingernails, with your bones.

Every cell melts into clear light, you could call it. But, you get into that world and you feel the reverberations of it, so to speak. You see the art of it. You see the beautiful forms in it. You meet the great masters who really themselves have melted in this way, and who therefore are completely, blissfully present in an ordinary manner as well. There are no mountains and no rivers. And again, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. Then you do do it. Being ordinary as a blissful—with ordinary now seen as a total field of bliss, is what enlightenment is.

There are some people promoting that kind of idea. So, I think the real exciting thing is: bliss is actually our deeper nature. Human beings are sensitive. The reason we are sensitive is that we have chosen a life-form that is close to bliss. That means we take our own young. Some higher forms of the mammal—which I consider the female to be—opens her body for a stranger.

They have no idea who that person is. And yet, they share their body and their bloodstream and their vitamins and calcium and what-have-you with a total stranger for nine or ten months. Then they become the slave of that stranger for ten years! They get all involved in the Truth of suffering. They really are. You see the world this way.

But, you do it in the non-psychotic way. I think that they first should learn something for many years—or at least three or four years. I did not do that. I had about a year while I was a monk, and then I do a short month here and a month there. If you go back over the same thing again and again, it goes deeper and deeper. But, then we do have wonderful people like Matthieu Ricard and others who—they can take six months.

He does periodically take few-month retreats. But then, of course, he produces these huge, vast tomes. So, in a way, the mind can be your retreat when you live in the teaching. You also learn a lot by teaching someone else. You find out what you really think—or you make your thinking more deeply—when you have to explain it to somebody. I look forward to the next life. But, maybe with this whole [ inaudible ] help thing. Woodstock is sort of the East Coast Boulder, but I do miss getting out there sometimes.

TS: We all want you to come visit us. Now, Robert, you mentioned about having a profession that keeps you close to the teachings. Also, he was a teacher of [ inaudible ], who runs a lot of retreats in France.

I was saying to [ inaudible ]—I was saying that it had to do with some friends of mine who had taken two-year retreats and who were really not that happy afterwards. A lot of people who have taken two-year retreats have done well. He had a few lapses, perhaps. There were a few things.

But nothing too noisy. Nothing really horrible, like some of the gurus. Good sense of humor. So, anyway, I was worried about him. If you join me, we could probably raise the money to give them some scholarships and have them go to Naropa for two years or three years—or to CIIS in California.

Or, maybe we could get some conventional college to take them in a graduate school if they have a BA. Then they do the coursework—two, three years of it—learn the languages, learn the history and the context, and then they come for the three-year retreat already knowing that stuff, and it really becomes fieldwork from the American point of view.

They do a three year-retreat, and then after the three-year retreat they either write a PhD thesis and become a professor or academic teacher, or they get a psych degree at Naropa or something—or CIIS, or someplace like that—and then they can have a career.

Then they do a deep meditation. Then they become lamas and then they can teach in any monastery. Can you do my taxes? Whereas if they were a professor or an instructor of some kind, or a healer, then people would approach them that way. Then their enlightenment would emerge to be really of great benefit. His base relationship with people is as a therapist.

So, it secures against the danger of somebody depending on having a lot of disciples and having them work for that person—abuse of power, abuse of money. All this stuff that has been happening wildly—and actually happened in Asia. It happened in Asia.

It happened in Tibet! There were disreputable teachers who used their status, definitely, in the history. No question. So, that came out of that context.

I said that I thought that would be good. Of course, nobody ever did that formally, but I think some people informally have done that. She has an MA in environmental science from Stanford already and is going to be able to package herself—at the end of the retreat—in some good way.

Whatever she learns in the retreat about her mind and her psyche and her good personality and her mood control—and whatever—will help her in whatever her profession will be. Euro-American society is relatively backward compared to ancient India—not to colonialized India, of course.

But, they were more generous. They would support a lot of mendicants and people on retreats and monasteries, et cetera. They got into de-militarizing, pretty much, and they lived the dharma more in their culture. So there, you can serve as a lama. You can serve as a guru. You can serve as a mahasiddha —although a lot of the mahasiddhas were weavers, tailors. One of them was a wrestler. One of them was a king. One was a minister. There were some monks who were mahasiddhas, but the great adepts of India—they were not all high people being worshipped by other people.

They also maintained some relationships in society. It was not published. Actually, everybody loved the lectures and I loved giving them. I enjoyed it. I love the California audience, too. There are Buddhist doctors—Tibetan ones—running around. Ayurvedic people are half-Buddhist, because Hinduism is half Buddhism.

Acupuncture people—they sort of come out of Buddhist [and] Taoist culture and context. On the other hand, of course gradually—because we do have religious pluralism, formally speaking, in America—there will be religious Buddhist organizations that will be there and be more recognized.

There are four or five million—there are more Buddhists than Episcopalians, I understand. Now, the High Episcopalians have a lesser number than the Buddhists. In Thai Buddhism, the traditional teaching is that realizing nirvana is not emphasized at all.

The teaching was almost neglected until Ajahn Buddhadasa brought it to the fore and proclaimed it to the Thai public. Which caused tremendous pressure on him from the Sangha establishment.

The monks in the forest tradition in the Northeast also received criticisms from the establishment because they were seen to wander around in search of Liberation instead of staying in monasteries and perform their traditional rituals and ceremonies. Nowadays the situation has changed somewhat due to the popularity of Ajahn Buddhadasa and the monks of the Northeast forest tradition like Ajahn Mun, Ajahn Chah, Luang Ta Bua and others.

But still the attitude prevails among the typical Thai Buddhism and I believe other Theravadins. The above serves to show how deeply ingrained the idea of nirvana and samsara being totally separate is.

He also said that in the Mahayana things are different. Nirvana and samsara are not separate; they are one and the same. There is no dualism there. Nagarjuna talks about this point when he discusses the Buddha, or the Tathagata in his terminology.

Discussing whether there is any difference between there beling a living and breathing Buddha and a Buddha who has gone to Parinirvana that is, no longer living and breathing in bodily form , Nagarjuna argues that there is in fact no difference. There seems to be a difference only to those who are attached to the bodily form of the Buddha, such as his height, his complexion, his look, etc.

This is a very easy point to understand, but somehow many peole have missed it completely. The properties that matter are those that make Siddhartha Gautama an Awakened One, not merely a good looking Nepali prince.

But if they are to be universal, they have to transcend particular time and space. Hence, there is no difference between a living and breathing Buddha and a Buddha who has entered Parinirvana because both share these universal properties.

Then Nagarjuna goes on saying that if that is so, then there is no difference whatsoever between samsara and nirvana. The living and breathing Buddha lives in samsara, and the Buddha who has entered Parinirvana lives in nirvana.

Since they both share all universal properties in such a way that there is no such property that one has and the other does not, then the two are exactly one and the same. So samsara and nirvana are the same. Things are thus and so and will continue to be so.

However, when we apprehend those things, we usually do so out of ignorance or avidya. That is, we conceptualize them and capture them as if they were to have real and substantial properties. The most serious conceptualization and capturing is that of the individual ego.