Guy Newland - Spiritual Fulfillment Requires the Ability to Act Compassionately

INTRODUCTION TO EMPTINESS
As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa's
Great Treatise on the
Stages of the Path
by Guy Newland
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Dharma Quote of the Week

Complete spiritual fulfillment requires the ability to act compassionately, and that involves making practical distinctions. Therefore, Tsong-kha-pa insists upon the clarifying power of analysis that is not ultimate, analysis that operates within the constraints and boundaries of conventional fact and language so as to illuminate what does and what does not exist, what is and what is not helpful.

Not all useful analysis need immediately reduce everything to emptiness. In other words, we can learn valuable, practical things by analyzing which car is good to drive, which action is good to do, which seed is good to plant, without at each step interrogating the final ontological status of the car, action, or seed.

... A pervasive sense that things are real and solid and exist just as they appear is woven right into the fabric of the world as we experience it. While tables do exist, we have yet to see them just as they are. Our very perception of them--while a valid source of information--is at the same time contaminated with a layer of distortion. That distortion is the appearance of the table as something that is able to be there on its own power, something that exists in and of itself.

Thus when we begin to see, or even to suspect, that things lack essence and are not at all as we had supposed, we may feel terrified, as though our world is coming apart at the seams or evaporating beneath our feet. We calm those fears by again remembering that it is not that there is nothing. There is dependent arising, just as there has always been. Analysis threatens nothing but the false overlay, the distorting superimposition, which has caused us and others so much misery. (p.43)

--from Introduction to Emptiness: As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path by Guy Newland, published by Snow Lion Publications

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