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What Is A Bodhisattva?

Emptiness As The Radical Ground Of Compassion

“Emptiness engenders compassion.”

Milarepa (1040–1123)

The World of the Spiritual Hero

Heroes.

In war, there are heroes.

Those who sacrifice their lives to save the lives of others.

In sports, there are heroes.

Those who stand out for their incredible accomplishments in athletic achievement — running, swimming, throwing, and sporting games of all kinds.

There are great intellectual heroes who achieve dazzling heights in science, mathematics, philosophy, technology, and engineering — to name just a few.

We have heroes in the arts; artistic heroes in painting, sculpture, film, dance, and theatre.

All these arenas of endeavour produce heroes of great achievement and attainment.

But what about the spiritual arena?

Is there any such a thing as a spiritual hero?

A spiritual hero would be one who attains a unique depth of spiritual understanding and realisation.

What would such a spiritual hero look like?

And, where would we find them?

The Catholic Church has had a long history of recognising spiritual heroes, or, as they call them, saints.

But the Catholic Church is not the only religion that has its spiritual heroes.

They have been many religions that recognise spiritual heroes.

However, it is Tibetan Buddhism that is unique in the quantity and quality of its spiritual heroes.

Spiritual heroes which they call Bodhisattvas.

To understand this Buddhist spiritual hero, we must begin to understand the nature of their heroic attainment.

The Radical Insight Into the Nature of Self and of Reality

The Bodhisattva, or Buddhist spiritual hero, is recognised by the depth to which they have cultivated and trained their minds.

The true Bodhisattva has cultivated their minds to such a degree that they have realised the nature of reality.

But the Bodhisattva’s heroic attainment does not finish there.

Their achievement of a profound understanding of the nature of reality merely lays the ground for what is the most heroic and most important of the Bodhisattva’s accomplishments …

That is the awakening of a deep, enduring, and profoundly encompassing compassion.

Now to truly begin to understand the heroic attainment of the Bodhisattva we need to explore exactly what it is they have accomplished.

There are an enormous number of schools and teachings in Tibetan Buddhism.

Thus, there are many, many different opinions and teachings on how to best cultivate the mind to achieve the ultimate goal of Tibetan Buddhism.

However, of the goal itself, there is no argument.

The goal of cultivating the mind in Tibetan Buddhism is:

The radical insight into the nature of self and reality.

And, to achieve this radical insight into the nature of self and reality is to see clearly the emptiness, or the utter non-existence, of one’s self and of the world.

Thus, all the practices, the cultivation of the mind, of thoughts, in Tibetan Buddhism, in all of its incredibly diverse approaches, aims to achieve, ultimately, just one thing:

To see that discreet things and objects are unreal and that their seeming substantiveness, solidness, is completely and utterly illusory.

Thus, the radical insight into the nature of reality is that there is no “you” and there is no “world.”

There is only No-Thing-Ness … Nothingness.

Vast, endless, boundless nothingness.

Different Cultural Understandings of Emptiness

Now, in some cultures, particularly Western cultures, this sounds terrifying and not something that you would like to realise at all!

That is because, in Western cultures, this inherent emptiness or nothingness is conceived as lack.

Academics, such as Professor David Loy, have suggested that because virtually all people, at least intuitively, recognise the emptiness of self, the nothingness at the core of our being, and because Western cultures conceive of this emptiness as lack, this fuels an extreme consumerism in an exaggerated attempt to fill that hole, that apparent lack.

In Eastern cultures, however, emptiness or nothingness tends not to be conceived as lack, but rather as pure potentiality.

For example, in the emptiness that is silence, the potential for any sound to arise is infinite. Any sound can arise in that silence; anything from the sound of a car crash to a Mozart opera.

Tibetan Buddhists see emptiness or nothingness not only as pure potentiality but as the very ground upon which every object arises out of and falls back into.

Whether those objects are subtle (such as thoughts, feelings, etc) or gross (objects in the world).

The Tibetan Buddhist spiritual hero, or Bodhisattva, is one who has realised this emptiness of self and world.

But that is only half the story.

Emptiness & Compassion

This realisation deepens into an all-encompassing and profoundly felt compassion for all beings, human and nonhuman.

The Bodhisattva having realised the Self to be empty and spacious does not stop there but rather now subsequently becomes filled with the Other.

In other words, the Self that was once felt as being a “me” is now realised to be an infinitely allowing & infinitely open space.

A space that is now effortlessly filled with the Other which in turn allows a natural and deeply felt empathy to arise.

Christ’s words suddenly become clear: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” because in some sense the Bodhisattva has become the Other.

The very meaning of the word, compassion, also becomes clear: “Com” — means “with” AND “passion” — means “to suffer.”

Compassion: “to suffer with.”

Thus, the Bodhisattva’s insight into the nature of reality allows for a profound depth of compassion, or “suffering with.”

However, the spiritual hero, that is the Bodhisattva, does not merely suffer with Others but also blesses all Others.

The clearest example of this is the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual practice of Tonglen.

In the meditation practice of Tonglen, on the inhale of breath, one takes in the suffering of others, and on the exhale, one in return gives openness & spaciousness; in other words, one blesses all with spacious, boundless and vast emptiness.

The Bodhisattva is this Tonglen practice incarnated in living, breathing, human form.

We could say that suffering in essence is the seeming forgetting of our inherent ground of spaciousness or emptiness.

The Bodhisattva’s compassion is demonstrated by, often tacitly, redirecting our attention away from our suffering and to its always-already formless and empty ground.

The Bodhisattva’s Full Expression of Enlightenment

It is the genius of the Bodhisattva to be able to live the suffering of Others and not deny or reject it, while at the same time directing Others to re-cognising suffering ultimately as No-Thing-Ness, as Nothing.

The Boddhisattva is an alchemist of suffering, resolving it, through his or her living example and realisation, into the empty ground from which it arises.

The great Hindu sage & spiritual master, Nisargadatta Maharaj, was quoted as saying:

“As wisdom, I know I am Nothing; As love, I know I am Everything. Between the two my life flows.”

In Zen Buddhism, to realise only “one side of the coin,” is to realise only that self and world are empty or Nothing.

This is, according to Zen Buddhism, to be “half-baked” in one’s realisation.

To be completely “baked” one must also realise the “other side of the coin,” that is that emptiness is also fullness.

In Western philosophy, a similar argument has been made:

Martin Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, or the self, as being the “clearing for being” was roundly critiqued by Jewish-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as being “unethical” as it did not allow for the irreducibility of the Other.

Levinas believed that it was the irreducible presence of the Other and our daily negotiation with them that was the basis for all ethics and that Heidegger’s reducing of all selves to a “clearing” (or Nothingness) was to reduce all Others to nothing and thus occlude any possibility to act ethically.

The Bodhisattva is sometimes characterised as one who has rejected enlightenment so as to remain on the Earthly plane to save and help others.

This is a misunderstanding of the unfolding and depth of Bodhisattva’s realisation.

Once the profound emptiness of self and world is seen, it cannot be “rejected” or unseen.

Rather, it is this radical insight into the Nothingness that is the ground of Reality, that deepens into the all-encompassing compassion that the Bodhisattva is known for.

Thus, the Bodhisattva’s apparent capacity to “suffer with’’ is not a rejection of enlightenment but a deepening of it!

It is this “fully-baked” realisation of boundless emptiness and effortless compassion that is the profound attainment of the spiritual hero known as the Bodhisattva.

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