Gate, Gate.....

[Guest guest]

"So proclaim the Prajnaparamita mantra, proclaim the mantra which says:

"Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha."

Gate, gate means gone, gone; paragate means gone over; parasamgate

means gone beyond (the other shore of suffering or the bondage of

samsara); bodhi means the Awakened Mind; svaha is the Sanskrit word

for homage or proclaimation. So, the mantra means "Homage to the

Awakened Mind which has crossed over to the other shore, freed from

suffering.

The Heart Sutra uses the methodology of negation as a way of pointing

to emptiness, or the lack of any inherent meaning, permanence or

reason in the phenomenal mind, including the world of the mind. It

takes each of its existents, holds it up under an unflinching gaze

and declares it to have no sustaining self nature. This is the wisdom

teaching of the Mahayana tradition. But, at the same time, compassion

is the other equally important teaching of Mahayana. How do we bridge

the gap between sunyata as ultimate reality and the conventionality of

the human condition? In Mahayana, compassion, which is a natural

unforced by-product of meditation, supports the wisdom of emptiness,

yet allows the individual to have empathy with the conventional

appearance of the world without getting lost in it. It may be that

compassion works best as a post-enlightenment existential crisis, but

nonetheless, without compassion as a guiding paradigm, the unrelenting

precision of sunyata can make life unbearable."

>From a Commentary on the heart Sutra by Mu Soeng Sunim.

Namaste,

Joyce