WHAT IS A BODHISATTVA?
The etymology of the word bodhi sattva comes from the Sanskrit root "bodhi" (lighting) and "sattva" (be), and is a term that refers to a being who aspires to attain Buddhahood and performs altruistic practices to achieve that goal.
According to Mahayana Buddhism, the bodhisattva does not seek only achieve their own enlightenment, but also lead others to attain Buddhahood. It is an individual who is characterized by compassionate love and emotional involvement of the reality that afflicts others.
The Vimalakirti Sutra contains a passage that illustrates this kind of empathy. A Buddhist layman outstanding qualities called Vimalakirti practitioner of the bodhisattva path gives an account of the causes of their illness as follows: "For all living beings suffering from diseases, I am also sick If all living beings are freed from the disease. , also mine will heal. Why? because the bodhisattva, for the sake of living beings, entering the realm of birth and death, and because it is in the realm of birth and death, is exposed to the disease. If living beings can get rid of the disease, the bodhisattva also will. " (Vimalakirti Sutra, trans. Burton Watson, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 65.)
Buddhist texts say that the bodhisattvas, committed to guide people to happiness, initially formulated four votes or universal oaths consisting of: 1) save countless living beings; 2) eradicate countless earthly desires; 3) master the incalculable Buddhist teachings, and 4) to achieve supreme enlightenment.
In different texts of Mahayana Buddhism an analogy between the number of Buddhas exist in a dust particle and the number of particles of dust in the universe is made. In the prayer of Samantabhadra the King of Good Aspirations reads: "In a particle there are innumerable particles with inconceivable Buddhas and heaven, where all the buddhas live in the center of the wisdom of all the bodhisattvas ...".
This phrase certainly reminiscent of the monumental work that has Mahayana Buddhism, Garland Sutra (Avatamsaka), which states:
Throughout the Dharma Realm and mastery of space, there are dust particles in all pure lands of the past, present and future, in the 10 directions. In every particle of dust are so many Buddhas as there are dust particles in all worlds. Each Buddha in place which surrounded by several oceans assemblies of bodhisattvas.
In another analogy in this sutra, which tends to the cosmic and immeasurable, it is said that the merit of enlightened beings is transmitted through many eras (kalpas) as there are dust particles in the universe. Today we would say, rather than dust particles, atoms. (The Dalai Lama has called a recent book The universe in a single atom). The idea that seeks to express apparently is the immeasurable magnitude of the buddhas and the space itself, but an analog vision of macrocosm and microcosm, which is given to understand the idea of infinity and omnipresence of Buddha is also suggested. If the universe is truly infinite, as claimed by Buddhism, a perpetual becoming, then anywhere they grow countless celestial realms, sprout worlds as ephemeral bubbles in vacuum and light everywhere new Buddhas, which are like lotuses open in ponds of millions of worlds. There is no difference between that dust floating around in a corner of the room and the glorious beings in the cosmos soar as buddhas. So, we are not only evolving, as all sentient beings, to become Buddha, we are also formed by countless buddhas dancing in our atoms, as countless angels that some Christian theologians imagined dancing on the head of a pin.
Somehow this reminds the modern idea that the universe has a holographic nature, as has been expressed by the physicist David Bohm, who in his book Wholeness and the implicate order suggests that each of the space contains so involved (not manifest ) information of the whole universe, like a hologram.
The current order (the Order Implicated) itself has been recorded in the complex movement of electromagnetic fields, in the form of light waves. The movement of light waves is present everywhere and in principle involves all the time and space of the universe in each region.
Bohm uses the idea of a hologram to articulate their concept of the whole in every part, being that each part of a holographic film the entire image is recorded and can thus also be reconstructed. This way of recording the whole in every part, the Buddha in the particle, is the great magic of the universe, the seal of the unit.
We can take --and probably desestimar-- the idea of the countless Buddhas in a dust particle as a metaphor or a form of religious worship, and obviously we can not verify that this is true in a scientific way, but perhaps not just a poetic device. Without thinking that this must be taken literally, perhaps told by the texts is a way to express within the constraints of language an essential truth, a teaching that can not communicate at all without experienced. I think the way in which Borges prepares the moment of unveiling the Aleph (the point that contains all points) in his famous story, saying that the language could not communicate what is the simultaneity of all condensed moments in a litmus sphere (a sphere like the mystics, whose center is everywhere but whose circumference nowhere). What Buddhism tells us is that Aleph exists everywhere and is all things, the point that reveals the entire universe mysteriously involved in all its majesty on a thumbnail is ubiquitous and can be found wherever we are.
The Buddhist master Thinley Norbu Rinpoche says. "The nihilists say that there are millions of atoms in a cell, and people believe it, but if they hear that there are millions of Buddhas in a particle, do not believe the problem is that people do not they believe in the intangible. " Buddhism, however, understands that the only reason why we have such exorbitant amounts of things and phenomena is because in reality they are all insubstantial, as magical apparitions in a vacuum. The idea of the innumerable and inconceivable Buddhas in a dust particle finally asks us an act of perception that goes beyond logic, a proper appreciation of the vacuum. Look inward space in any redoubt, and find infinity: suns and galaxies being created and destroyed as dust particles every moment forever.
TWITER FROM THE AUTHOR