Nagarjuna's Mahamudra
Vision
1.
I bow down to the all-powerful
Buddha
Whose mind is free of attachment,
Who in his compassion and
wisdom
Has taught the inexpressible.
2.
In truth there is no
birth -
Then surely no cessation or liberation;
The Buddha is like
the sky
And all beings have that nature.
3.
Neither Samsara nor
Nirvana exist,
But all is a complex continuum
With an intrinsic face
of void,
The object of ultimate awareness.
4.
The nature of all
things
Appears like a reflection,
Pure and naturally
quiescent,
With a non-dual identity of suchness.
5.
The common
mind imagines a self
Where there is nothing at all,
And it
conceives of emotional states -
Happiness, suffering, and equanimity.
6.
The six states of being in Samsara,
The happiness of
heaven,
The suffering of hell,
Are all false creations, figments of
mind.
7.
Likewise the ideas of bad action causing
suffering,
Old age, disease and death,
And the idea that virtue
leads to happiness,
Are mere ideas, unreal notions.
8.
Like an
artist frightened
By the devil he paints,
The sufferer in
Samsara
Is terrified by his own imagination.
9.
Like a man
caught in quicksands
Thrashing and struggling about,
So beings
drown
In the mess of their own thoughts.
10.
Mistaking fantasy
for reality
Causes an experience of suffering;
Mind is poisoned by
interpretation
Of consciousness of form.
11.
Dissolving figment
and fantasy
With a mind of compassionate insight,
Remain in perfect
awareness
In order to help all beings.
12.
So acquiring
conventional virtue
Freed from the web of interpretive
thought,
Insurpassable understanding is gained
As Buddha, friend to
the world.
13.
Knowing the relativity of all,
The ultimate
truth is always seen;
Dismissing the idea of beginning, middle and
end
The flow is seen as Emptiness.
14.
So all samsara and
nirvana is seen as it is -
Empty and insubstantial,
Naked and
changeless,
Eternally quiescent and illumined.
15.
As the
figments of a dream
Dissolve upon waking,
So the confusion of
Samsara
Fades away in enlightenment.
16.
Idealising things of
no substance
As eternal, substantial and satisfying,
Shrouding them
in a fog of desire
The round of existence arises.
17.
The
nature of beings is unborn
Yet commonly beings are conceived to
exist;
Both beings and their ideas
Are false beliefs.
18.
It
is nothing but an artifice of mind
This birth into an illusory
becoming,
Into a world of good and evil action
With good or bad
rebirth to follow.
19.
When the wheel of mind ceases to
turn
All things come to an end.
So there is nothing inherently
substantial
And all things are utterly pure.
20.
This great
ocean of samsara,
Full of delusive thought,
Can be crossed in the
boat Universal Approach.
Who can reach the other side without it?
Colophon
The Twenty Mahayana Verses, (in Sanskrit,
Mahayanavimsaka; in Tibetan: Theg pa chen po nyi
shu pa) were
composed by the master Nagarjuna.
They were translated into Tibetan by
the Kashmiri
Pandit Ananda and the Bhikshu translator Drakjor
Sherab (Grags 'byor shes rab). They have been
translated into
English by the Anagarika
Kunzang Tenzin on the last day of the year
1973
in the hope that the karma of the year may be
mitigated.
May all beings be
happy!
Nagarjuna was one of the greatest mystics India has given birth to.
He realized his infinite being, the world dissolved.
Then followers came, and followers are always carbon copies,
bound to be unless they try to penetrate the reality themselves and do not take their Master's word on trust.
The Master's word simply inspires, provokes, helps, but it should not be taken on trust,
otherwise it will become a philosophy.
YOU have to realize it.
And when YOU realize,
only then can you say,
"Yes, the Master was true."
Osho - Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing, Chapter #3
Nagarjuna is a great philosopher, one of the greatest of the world.
Only a few people in the world, very few, have that quality of penetration that Nagarjuna has.
So, his way of talking is very philosophical, logical, absolutely logical.
Nagarjuna is one of the greatest disciples of Buddha,
and one of the most penetrating intellects ever.
Only very few people - once in a while,
a Socrates, a Shankara - can be compared with Nagarjuna.
He was very, very intelligent.
The uttermost that the intellect can do is to commit suicide;
the greatest thing, the greatest crescendo that can come to the intellect
is to go beyond itself - that's what Nagarjuna has done.
He has passed through all the realms of intellect, and beyond.
Osho - The Heart Sutra, Chapter #2
Nagarjuna was one of the great masters India has produced -
of the caliber of Buddha and Mahavir and Krishna.
And Nagarjuna was a rare genius.
Really, on the intellectual level there is no comparison in the whole world;
such a keen and penetrating intellect rarely happens.
Osho - Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1, Chapter #16