Suenam wrote:
Quote
but the point of Vajrayana is to achieve selfless non-conceptualisation.
Another way to state 'selfless' is to name it as 'non self-serving'.
John Donne, the English poet and divine, may have come closer to bodhichitta when, in his Devotions, he lay in bed, dangerously ill. He heard in the distance, the 'passing bell' rung in the bell tower of some distant church where a parishioner was dying--a signal the the neighors to pause and offer prayers of assistance to the departing one.
'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. [/quote]
My idiosyncratic reading is that Donne was not speaking of suffering as we Buddhists do, the affliction that degrades and dehumanizes, but as Aeschylus did, when he said, 'Through suffering (consciously recognized and endured), we gain wisdom.'
To set the alarm clock for 5 AM and drag out of bed in the dark is part of this consciously endured hardship.
When the teachings of Buddha dharma are used to keep one's finer awareness asleep in the face of the worlds grief--thats a medical malpractice at religious level.
'Great is the matter of birth and death
Time is passing, gone, gone,
Wake up, wake up
Do not waste your life.'
(Inscribed on the wooden hammer and sounding board used to summon practitioners to the Soto Zen meditation hall)