While teaching about emptiness this Summer Festival, Gen-la Dekyong was describing gross mistaken appearance, where we mistake one object for another common object, such as seeing a hose as a snake. She was encouraging us to notice our own examples by describing how she had taken a dead brown leaf blown by the wind for a little mouse scurrying across the yard. Laughing at herself, Gen-la said she was "daft" for nearly making prayers for an inanimate object!
I was thinking that I didn't have this kind of mistaken appearance very often, but then I soon found two examples: I saw a bowl with a curled-up banana skin as sliced lemons, and a small stick as a thin black slug like the one that I'd seen earlier that day.
Because we have so much faith in what we see, recognizing these mistakes helps undercut that confidence and helps lead us to understanding subtle mistaken appearance, believing that the things we normally perceive truly exist.
In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
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