Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the second line of verse 34 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

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“Offer the torma of whatever arises to the guests of immediate liberations;

Mold the clay of whatever appears into the tsa-tsa of void appearance;

Offer the prostration of nonduality to the Lord of Mind Nature.

Consummating these Dharma activities, recite the six syllable.”

 Full Disclosure:

In writing this contemplation, and working with this verse this week, I had an odd feeling of eavesdropping on my own mind, as though I’d ventured into a basement work room marked PRIVATE: DO NOT ENTER. I’m glad I ignored the sign.

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

There’s a lot of talk these days about unemployment rates and how the economy’s recovering. Honestly, who cares? Unless there’s a job that gets you out of the burning house of samsara, every job is the same job. Wanna see a politician’s perfectly coifed hair stand on end? Tell them this: At this time (Madam Prime Minister, Mr. President…whoever), there is 99.99% unemployment, worldwide. After he or she runs screaming into the night in search of their spin doctor cavalry, think about this.

We are here in samsara to do one job and one job only: recover our Buddha Nature. Everything else is just, as my Dharma friend Tashi likes to say, entertainment. Patrul Rinpoche puts it like this: “Between meditation periods, make sure that everything you do is in harmony with the Dharma….whenever you have the free time…do only what is truly meaningful.” How many of us do that? Right, about .01%, which is why the worldwide unemployment rate is 99.99%.

Now, honestly, I don’t carry Play Dough around in my purse. Everything else it seems, but not that. I don’t have time in my life to mold little clay statues (tsa-tsas) as offerings. But there’s no need for that. We all have the ultimate clay molding mega machine with us wherever we go. We could go into the bowels of the earth or way out past where the Hubble telescope can see, and we’d still have that amazing fantastic mega molding machine right there with us. And it travels light, very light.

Our experience of reality is an internal representation created by the mega molding machine of the mind. All that we see, all that we experience is the “clay of whatever appears”. Given this, we could spend our entire lifetime molding whatever arises in our lives along the elegantly shaped lines of the Dharma. How do we do this? It’s simple, really. As we go through our experience, we remind ourselves that all is impermanent, insubstantial, and completely dependent on our karmic formations.

Lest we think this is too difficult a task, let us remember that at each and every moment we are master sculptors who shape into being a delusional reality that is convincingly permanent, substantial, and independent.

Isn’t it time we employed that incredible talent for molding the clay of whatever arises to work for us instead of against us?

***

 Apply to a past situation (how would it have been different?)

Tsa-tsas are traditionally made of clay, usually mixed with the relics (ashes) of a Buddha who’s left their body. When I first heard that this past Sunday, I thought—how brilliant is that? In creating an offering, the thing we fear most—death—is actually made part of the offering itself.

I’ve thought about that all week and how, growing up Christian, offerings were made on pretty white cloths on beautifully pristine altars. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to put a dead saint’s ashes on all that pretty white cloth. Particulary since Seventh Day Adventists don’t hold with all that ‘Saint’ stuff. This goes with the Christian theme of sin being something to apologize to God for and to make every effort to scrub it away from your filthy, undeserving soul.

Imagine offering sin to the Christian God? He’d probably smite you into the middle of next week.

So this way of seeing offering was totally different to me. Looking back over my life, I think the situation that I could have molded into void appearance was the relationship with my mother. That caused me no end of heartache from about the time I was five years old until a little more than a year ago. I wanted desperately to be the perfect daughter. I wanted her to love me as I was—not the perfect daughter she wanted to make me into. I wanted to stop being the fat, stupid little girl (to use her well-turned Patois phrase: you no have no sense!) she always saw me as and treated me as.

If I look back on my life at that time, I can notice that both my mother and myself were caught up, embroiled in afflicted emotions. We were like flint rocks that struck sparks of pain and anger off each other on contact. If I could have taken a step back, breathed, done a quick mantra, I might have noticed how I had nothing to do with how my mother was. It wasn’t personal. She resented having children. Any child could have stood in my place and would have been subject to the same treatment.

Having noticed this, I could have taken yet another step back and noticed that all that was arising in my experience with the woman I called ‘mother’ was insubstantial, impermanent, and wholly dependent on my karmic formations that went back for eons.

Once I’d noticed that, I may have sensed the ancient feel of the conflict, and instead of seeing it as a battle to be won over an external entity, I might have seen my afflicted emotions as markers showing me what karmic formations I need to work with to recover my Buddha Nature.

Having realized the emptiness nature of the ‘external’ conflict, I would have been free to mold each encounter into a welcome chance to work with dissolving the underlying karmic formation that all the conflict was pointing to.

***

 Apply to an (ongoing) present situation (how does it matter today?)

The biggest ongoing situation in my life right now is my missing dental bridge. This week the dentist’s office called me with the cost. I promise you, here in Texas, I could make a down payment on a really nice house for the cost to replace this bridge. In the meantime, there’s lots of discomfort, especially when I talk. There’s the risk I could accidentally rip out the little filed down stub of tooth that was anchoring the bridge. Then I’d need an implant. And that would probably cost the down payment on a McMansion—in Frisco.

As this week has progressed, I’ve really worked with this whole bridge thing, and wondered what the heck kind of tsa-tsa this would make. At one point when the little stub was really hurting, I thought—hey, if it falls out, all I need is some clay to  mold around it and I’m good to go!

In my more serious moments, I watched mind at work. Mind was playing the blame game. The truth is the dentist told me a year ago that this bridge would have to come out. I had really good dental insurance. He had a treatment plan. I didn’t go.

This year before the company I work for was sold and I got moved to this Mickey Mouse Wannabe dental insurance, Interplanetary Title, in an uncharacteristic moment of candor, warned that we should get any procedures that we needed done before we moved to the new insurance. I didn’t go to the dentist.

After all that, mind has the unmitigated gall to blame my pain and discomfort on my manager (who won’t give me time off) and Salem (who’s the reason I can’t have time off until Sept. 4). This has been an amazing opportunity to watch my mind at work. Because it hurts to talk, I spend ninety percent of my time at work in silence. And in this silence I am able to observe mind hard at work molding and assigning blame. But never to me; no, never that.

Using this stanza, this line in particular, when those thought of assigning blame arise, I repeatedly ask myself: Is this substantial? Is this permanent? Is this independent? Is this the right view? What am I missing in this picture? (Thank you to Tashi for these questions)

At first mind was stubbornly silent. Then, grudgingly, like a sulky child, I’d get answers: no, no, no, no, and “missing lots”. After repeatedly asking the same questions for days, I’m not really sure what happened. I didn’t have a feeling of molding anything, but there’s far more distance between me and those thoughts of blame now than there was last week. When the thoughts of blame arise now, I don’t get caught up in them. I don’t buy into them. They are exactly like clouds passing in a vast sky.

I’m not sure, but I think the questions allowed me to recognize the “void appearance” of those emotionally charged thoughts. Once that happened, I was able to see through them, past them, and back to the causes of suffering that I put in place for myself.

As I write this, I realize that when we acknowledge illusion as our parents, and realize we are a child of illusion, the experience of our perceptions becomes very much like soft clay. We can’t mold a masterpiece out of our lives, not here in samsara. But we are after all master sculptors with eons of experience and skill. We can certainly mold whatever arises into a shape that acknowledges and bows to the emptiness nature of all experience. In this way, we begin to free ourselves of our delusions.

***

 Apply to a potential situation (bringing it home to play)

It’s twenty days until I go to the dentist. Twenty days of sore gums. Twenty days of living in fear that I’ll break off that little stub of a tooth. Twenty days of eating foods I don’t like but am forced to eat because they’re soft.

Of course, it’s also twenty days to work with mind, but more importantly, to watch mind at work. I have pinking shears. They’re a special kind of scissors with curved teeth instead of straight blades. No matter what kind of paper you cut, you get pretty sculpted edges.

In these twenty days, it’s my intent to use this line as pinking shears for the mind. In just the last four days, I’ve made tremendous headway in working with blame, aggression, resentment, and frustration just by asking myself a few simple questions.

Even more unbelievably, instead of dreading going to the dentist I’m counting the days until I can lie back in that chair, under that super-bright light, and have a very nice man insert an overabundance of needles, drills and all manner of sharp metal objects into my mouth. If that isn’t molding my experience, I don’t know what is.

As I go through these twenty days, it’s my intent to notice how incredibly malleable our experience really is. If anyone had ever told me that I would one day look forward to a dentist’s appointment, I’d honestly have thought them quite mad. But going through this experience, I see how all that arises in our lives is like clay that can be molded, is in fact molded at every moment, with every heartbeat, with every breath.

As I wait out these twenty days, it feels that I’ve discovered some wonderful new talent that I never knew I had. I will move through these twenty days with keen attention to what arises and view my experience with a sculptor’s eye, an eye that sees past the illusions of substantial, permanent, independent existence. With that sharp finely tuned view, I will move through these days with the intent to sculpt whatever arises into an offering to my parents, an acknowledgement that I am a child of illusion.

I will labor as hard as any artist ever has to call forth the essence of the Buddha I truly am, the Buddha we all truly are.