atsuro 96
| Seemingly,
the concept of Vairocana and Dharmakaya rest as the final outer shell of
this intricate system. For those of us intent on continuing and becoming
a timeless Buddha, like Vairocana, there seems nothing left to do except
to penetrate this last shell, or, put more poetically, to dance as an egg
in this egg-dance in order to contain the entire system. In the scripture
"Tip of the Thunderbolt" (Skt. Sarvatathagatatattvasamgraha, late
seventh century) we find Vairocana as the host and choreographerof all
five elemental Buddhas engaged in such a cosmic dance. The five Buddhas
and their elements are: Ratnasambhava, earth; Vairocana, water; Amitabha,
fire; Amoghasiddhi, air; and Akshobya, space. Here, Vairocana is conceived
as a black and white hole. The meditation practitioner (Skt.
Yogacarya)
internally explodes and implodes this image of Vairocana, (by extension,
the yogin himself) in a display of universal creation and dissolution.
|
atsuro 96 |
| With the timeless Vairocana
concept, the Buddhist pendulum seemed to swing back to ancient Brahmanism
and its equation of the supreme Godhead with the Self (Skt. atman).
Countervailing influences kept this from becoming a completely accurate
analogy. The purpose of all these invented Buddhas was not to say that
Atman
equals Brahman (that self=universe) but rather to help people visualise
intuitions (L.
intuitio, act of contemplating). We see this type
of practice in Nagarjuna's Madhyamika (as noted above) and in the
"cognition-only" theory (Skt. vijnapati matra) developed by the
founders of the Yogacara School, the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu (fifth
century CE.)
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