Like the thundering roar of a dragon, the resonant voice of the Dharma  

awakens us from afflictive emotions and frees us from the chains of karma.

Dispelling the darkness of ignorance, the sword of wisdom cuts through all our suffering.

How would I explain this to someone else?

i.

After the alarm goes off in the morning, do you ever fall asleep again and dream that you woke up, got ready for work and even went to work? That dream seems so real, doesn’t it? In fact, when the alarm goes off again (because you snoozed it), it can be downright annoying to have to actually get out of bed and get ready ‘again’.

Samsara is much the same way. We go about our daily lives believing we’re wide awake. But really we’re in a kind of deep sleep of afflictive emotions and wrong views. I don’t mean we’re some kind of zombies sleepwalking through life. But rather that afflictive emotions and wrong views distort our experiences into an almost dreamlike state.

ii.

Our prayer begins by telling us that the voice of the Dharma is “Like the thundering roar of a dragon.” Remember that in eastern lore, Japanese dragons for instance, aren’t big scary fire-breathing monsters, but rather, “…powerful and wise guardians that shield us from universal dangers and impart their wisdom.” Keeping this in mind, why does the voice of the Dharma have to be “Like the thundering roar of a dragon”? It’s mostly because, like we’ve talked about, we are almost wholly asleep in samsara. It’s difficult to awaken us from our dreamlike experiences of samsara.

Our prayer tells us that like a roaring thundering dragon, “the resonant voice of the Dharma awakens us. . .”.  Why resonant? Because the Dharma is the truth of how things are. A part of us is always awake, always knowing the truth of things as they truly are. We call this our Buddha Nature. More accurately, our Buddha Nature isn’t a “part of us”. It’s who we truly are. How do we know that? Because our prayer tells us of the “resonant voice” of the Dharma. What is it resonating with?

iii.

Where does the sky go on a cloudy, stormy day? Does it disappear? Well, yes and no. From our perspective, the sky disappears, but we know that once all the clouds blow away, what remains is a clear blue sky. Our Buddha Nature is like that. Just because we see rain clouds, we don’t believe the clouds are part of the sky. We know that in fact, nothing has changed about the blue sky. It’s still there. It’s just covered up by what one of our other prayers calls “incidental stains”.

Why is it so important to understand that the clouds are merely laid over the blue sky? Because our Buddha Nature is much the same way. The incidental stains of afflictive emotions and wrong views merely cover our unchanging, ever-present Buddha Nature. This is why the voice of the Dharma is “resonant”. It resonates with our Buddha Nature.

What’s this talk about how the voice of the Dharma “frees us from the chains of karma?” Don’t we want good karma? Don’t we want just our bad karma to go away? Remember, we were born into samsara, a realm of struggle and desire, because our karma drew us here to be born into bodies that are subject to birth, aging, disease, and death.  Even good karma is still karma, and it still binds us to samsara. What we want is to have no karma (or as little as possible) in the end.

iv.

If you lit a taper candle in a large blindingly dark room, would there be a little light? Or would that candle light up the whole room? We know from experience that we’d have a very small circle of light in a dark room. But the very last line of our prayer introduces us to the notion of a “sword of wisdom” that dispels “the darkness of ignorance.” Samsara is a dark place, full of the darkness of ignorance and the suffering of suffering. So what exactly does this sword of wisdom do? It dispels the darkness of ignorance. Our local friendly AI tells us that ‘dispel’ means to “make a (doubt, feeling or belief) disappear.”

Wow. That’s impressive. Our prayer is telling us that the “resonant voice of the Dharma awakens” us and the sword of wisdom banishes ignorance. To go back to our earlier example, a simple taper candle would create a small circle of light in a dark room. How much brighter must be the sword of wisdom to banish ignorance altogether?

In this new light we would see that our suffering mostly comes from our reluctance to see things as they are. This again is the power of wisdom – to turn the darkness of samsara into a brilliant light so that we can disentangle ourselves from the chains of suffering that bind us.

This isn’t to say that wisdom will banish our suffering in a moment. But it does mean that we can use skillful means to uncover our own Buddha Nature a bit at a time. Each and every one of us has the capacity to awaken from the stupor of samsara, and use the wisdom of our Buddha Nature to free ourselves of the darkness of ignorance and the suffering of suffering.

What are your thoughts?