[From a public talk entitled Loving Kindness and Compassion given by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche in Battle Creek, Michigan on September 21, 2012. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso. Transcribed and edited by Matt Willis. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint without permission.]
When you want to achieve something but there is no basis for its achievement, it is a pointless hope. But if you want to achieve something and you know that the basis, the ground, or the potential for its achievement is already there, then it becomes a realistic hope, a realistic vision. When we aspire to achieving a state of awakening – what the Buddha did – we are not aspiring to something that we cannot achieve, because each and every one of us possesses that same fundamental nature. And if we can recognize that nature, see ourselves as we really are, then we will be fully capable of transcending this fiction we have been telling ourselves throughout beginningless time that imprisons us.
The problem is that we have never seen our true nature, what in the Buddhist tradition is called sugatagarbha or buddha nature. We have never seen ourselves as we are. It is because we do not see our own nature that we come up with this fictitious idea of “I” or “me.” And the concept “I,” and all the concepts that go along with it, are what we come up with because we’re not seeing what’s really there. But we feel we have to account for experience and so we try and conceptualize it.
To give an analogy, it’s a little bit like the sun and the clouds. The sun is always in the sky, and it’s always more or less of the same brightness. But on a cloudy day, you do not see the orb of the sun, and the light that the sun emits appears to be reduced. It’s as though the sun has been dimmed. But in fact the sun has not been dimmed. It is purely from the perspective of us as viewers of the sun that it looks that way. So just as clouds conceal the sun, but do not affect it, do not weaken it, or get rid of it, our beginningless ignorance of our own nature has definitely restricted our access to it, but it has not polluted that nature itself. We are what we always have been, but we don’t see it.
When you look at the sky on a cloudy day, you don’t see the sun. You see clouds, and the most light you see is the dim light that comes through the clouds. But the sun is still there. In the same way our nature is merely concealed or covered. Unfortunately, we identify with the clouds and not with the sun. We think that’s all the light there is. And so we come up with this idea: “this is me; I am this; this is all I am.”
The way to reverse this, the way to clear away the clouds in our minds, is by cultivating love and compassion. Because the fiction under which we live is of our own separate, solid existence, and since that fiction is protected by the selfishness that we come up with, by attacking our own selfishness we also attack the delusion that led to it.