The relationship of self and world and of body and mind are central to Buddhism.
In this paper, I demonstrate how one thirteenth-century Tibetan thinker addresses paradoxes within these relationships. In his treatise on the inseparability of saṃsāra and nīrvāṇa, Drakpa Gyaltsen uses a diverse repertoire of techniques to guide the practitioner in realizing that all phenomena are included in the body and mind.[1] In conversation with the work of Merleau-Ponty and critical phenomenologists responding to his legacy, I illuminate the role of paradox in approaching appearances, experience, and nonduality within the ritual and philosophical perspectives of the Sakya Path and Fruit or Lamdré tradition. In the process, I interrogate what “body” and “mind” mean in this context and where and how they are situated in relationship to one another.
The commentary on The Jewel Appearance is divided into three parts.[2] In the first, Drakpa Gyaltsen explains the logic of the unfolding of the phenomenal world as a process of embodiment. In his account, failing to recognize three fundamental aspects of reality—clarity, emptiness, and union (gsal stong zung ‘jug) results in the formation of kleśa. Consequently, the coarse and subtle aspects of the body emerge accompanied by illness and demonic influences. In order to heal, the practitioner must “realize all the inner and outer interdependent connections” and “seal” or unite clarity, emptiness, and union within one another. Likewise, clarity, emptiness, and union are correlated with aspects of both the generation and completion stages of tantric sādhana practice as well as with the different bodies of buddhahood.
The second part of the text–devoted to the “three piths of practice”—employs a set of thirty-two examples to catalyze the realization that: (1) phenomena are mind, (2) mind is an illusion, (3) and the illusion is natureless, being both interdependent and inexpressible. The practitioner is encouraged to “mix” or compare the appearance of things (snang ba sres)with experiences of intoxication, distortion, and disorientation in order to see that all phenomena are the mind’s “sphere of activity” (sems kyi spyod yul). Even rebirth in the six realms in construed in terms of the “countless illusions that arise from the virtue and sin of one’s own mind.”
A circularity ensues is the description of mind as illusion. We perceive things because of our karma, but the mind relies on these appearances and generates additional karma in response to them. Through comparing various illusions, like the experience of a dream or a mirage, with the experience of phenomena in the world, the practitioner develops a deeper understanding of their experience. The final pith of practice, the realization of the mind as “natureless” clarifies how interdependent connections come to assume many forms, using familiar examples such as the seed, the reflection, and the echo. Moreover, ordinary experiences such as scratching an itch as well as extraordinary experiences such as sexual yoga with a consort both attest to the incommunicable nature of the illusion, its “freedom from expression.” Certainty emerges for the practitioner in facing the contradictory nature of appearances.
The “three continua” (rgyud gsum) of cause, path and result are the subject of the text’s third, final, and most extensive section; within it, the discussion of the path or method continuum—associated with the body—is the most exhaustive. The description of the relationship of body and mind seems paradoxical; the body is just another appearance to the mind, and yet it functions as the mind’s “support” (rten). All phenomena of saṃsāra and nīrvāṇa are included within both, and body and mind are, in actuality, “undifferentiated” (dbyer mi phyed par). Drakpa Gyaltsen illuminates the process of ripening of karmic traces into the coarse and subtle aspects of the body, extending outward to the world. Everything out there is in here, everything in here is in the mind, and that too is the result of karmic traces.
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “The thing, and the world, are given to me along with the parts of my body, not by any ‘natural geometry’, but in a living connection comparable, or rather identical, with that existing between the parts of the body and myself.”[3] In that text, he seeks to “loosen the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear” and to show the world to be “strange and paradoxical.” As Gayle Salamon has pointed out, while Merleau-Ponty challenged dualistic perceptions of the connection of self and world, he likewise faced critiques that “the world turns out to be a self.”[4]
For Drakpa Gyeltsen, the world may not be a “self,” but he shares the phenomenologist’s interest in making the familiar “strange” through an embodied contemplative process. For him, the “intentional threads” are “internal and external interdependent connections” related to karmic cause and effect, the rise of afflictive emotions, and our responses to illusive appearances. Tantric empowerment, sādhana, and the experiences resulting from these ritual practices provide varied approaches to realizing the inseparability of saṃsāra and nīrvāṇa and to “sealing the cause and the fruit.” In highlighting how Drakpa Gyaltsen uses productive tensions between the cause, path, and fruit of practice and between the body and mind of the unenlightened being and their buddhahood, I invite conversation on the liberatory potential of embodied experience within and beyond the Sakya Path and Fruit tradition.
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[1] Mkhan po a pad, editor. “Commentary on the View of the Inseparability of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa.” ’Khor ’das dbyer med kyi lta ba'i 'grel pa. In Sa skyaʼi lam ʼbras (glog klad par ma), vol. 10, Guru Lama, Sachen International, 2008, pp. 209–58.
[2] Rje btsun grags pa rgyal mtshan. “Root (text) on the Inseparability of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa.” ’Khor ’das dbyer med rtsa ba.
[3] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press, 205.
[4] Salamon, Gayle. “What’s Critical About Critical Phenomenology,” Puncta Vol.1. No.1 (2018): 1-17.
The relationship of self and world and of body and mind are central to Buddhism. In this paper, I demonstrate how one thirteenth-century Tibetan thinker addresses paradoxes within these relationships. In his treatise on the inseparability of saṃsāra and nīrvāṇa, Drakpa Gyaltsen uses a diverse repertoire of techniques to guide the practitioner in realizing that all phenomena are included in the body and mind. In conversation with the work of Merleau-Ponty and critical phenomenologists responding to his legacy, I illuminate the role of paradox in approaching appearances, experience, and nonduality within the ritual and philosophical perspectives of the Sakya Path and Fruit tradition. In the process, I interrogate what “body” and “mind” mean in this context and where and how they are situated in relationship to one another.