What if perfection didn’t require any reference or comparison at all?
We tend to think of good things as being positive, of positive things being good. When things are perfect, for example, that’s something positive, right? Everything is just how you want it; everything is just so. But what if perfection didn’t require anything to be posited, to have a position, to be something positive as opposed to negative? What if perfection didn’t require any reference or comparison at all? What if perfection could be just what it is right now, not needing anything else; lacking nothing?
… she reflected on the idea of perfection as an ongoing process, one that never reaches completion, and by the very nature of this never ending journey, is in some way already complete.
A few weeks ago in Audrey’s post, The Presence of Perfection, she reflected on the idea of perfection as an ongoing process, one that never reaches completion, and by the very nature of this never-ending journey, is in some way already complete. This particular meme is pervasive in traditional Buddhist culture and literature, as is the metaphor of the perfection of emptiness; the perfection that lacks everything and thereby lacks nothing.
I’ve been spending some time working on translations lately, and I keep running across the word bǎo (寶) often translated as “gem.” Just like in English, and also in Sanskrit (ratna), it implies something precious and rare—for example, “That dharmas blog sure is a gem.” In Buddhism the gem is used as a metaphor to illustrate the perfection that arises through the removal of impurities. In ancient India, and also today, gems are categorized in terms of value based on their lack of impurities. A perfect diamond then, is defined by what it lacks. What does it lack? In keeping with the metaphor, one could say it lacks everything that isn’t a diamond. It simply is exactly what it is. It is perfectly clear, its facets reflecting everything around it as a perfect mirror-image. At the same time its clarity brings forth all the colors of the rainbow, that shine outward to produce every shape and form around it. This is a result of the gem being exactly what it is.
… what makes these gems precious is not what they have, but what they lack.
The metaphor becomes more concrete through the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, also called Buddhism’s three gems (Chinese: sānbǎo 三寶, Sanskrit: triratna). What might seem peculiar to us is that what makes these gems precious is not what they have, but what they lack. What they lack is anything added to their basic suchness. They lack delusion: unrealistic ideas about what things should be; they lack desires: the thirst for something new and different; and they lack aversion: the compulsion to escape from what is here now. What they have already is the basic goodness that all things have, that sublime and ineffable essence that can never be named.
The perfect purity of a gem pervades everything. Its basic substance is the substance of all things: everything that is outside of our concepts and narratives, our identities and critiques. This is the void—emptiness: the only thing that is real. What this perfection lacks is only what was never really there—our false ideas and preferences about what things might be. It lacks nothing in the sense that what it lacks is false; but its substance is also nothing, in the sense that this substance is beyond concepts and words. In the modern world we might call this “presence”: the presence available to things as they are, with nothing added, and nothing lacking.
At one of Stephen Tainer’s lectures at the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, a student asked, “What is false thinking?” The answer given was that if it changes, it is false. If it never changes, then it’s true. My next thought of course was, “What is there that never changes?” I’ve spent a lot of time mulling over this question. In hindsight I think the time spent asking was itself even more fruitful than the answer. What is it that doesn’t come to be, and then to pass? What else is there, outside of this ever-present, perfect moment?