Longchenpa’s fourth vajra point, ‘Mirage,’ teaches us to regard all phenomena as mirage-like, specifically in their non-departing nature. This subtle concept requires careful examination to ensure full understanding.
Understanding the Metaphor
A mirage appears clearly from certain positions under specific conditions, yet upon investigation, nothing tangible exists at its apparent location. While the scientific understanding of mirages might initially complicate our acceptance of this metaphor, let’s explore both perspectives.
Scientific Perspective
A mirage occurs when a layer of hot air bends light similarly to water, creating an illusion that the mind interprets as water. This layer can also reflect objects, enhancing the water-like appearance. Additionally, atmospheric layers can bend light to create apparent displacement of distant objects like buildings.
Metaphorical Understanding
For this vajra point, we adopt a simpler interpretation: a mirage represents something clearly perceived from a specific viewpoint, yet utterly absent when investigated at its apparent location. Mirages thus exemplify phenomena that appear distinct yet lack intrinsic being or actual substance.
“O Subhūti, since phenomena are primordially free from ‘departing,’ they are like mirages.”
– The Middle-Length Prajñāpāramitā
Core Concepts
Primary Concept
Phenomena, like mirages, lack actual substance despite their apparent existence. They manifest clearly yet prove non-existent under close examination.
Secondary Concept
The ‘free from departing’ aspect reveals how phenomena transcend all cognitive parameters we might use to define them. This concept often creates initial frustration as we attempt to grasp it – which precisely demonstrates the ungraspable nature of phenomena.
Part One – The Ground
Our initial task is to recognize the ground as both ‘mirage-like’ and ‘devoid of all departing.’ The nature of awareness is primordially pure; however, through a ‘subtle thought of self’ combined with awareness manifesting as six sense objects (five sensory objects plus thought objects), samsaric appearances manifest like mirages on the ‘even plain of emptiness.’
Early Awareness Development
In pre-verbal children, sense objects arise within awareness due to instinctive, karmic imprints that condition awareness to recognize patterns in sensory fields. These objects emerge without labels or categorization.
As the concept of self develops, these unlabeled experiences become increasingly categorized as distinct sensory events – things seen, heard, smelled, and so forth. What began as an unlabeled continuum of sensory experiences becomes catalogued into discrete events, which we mistakenly perceive as real despite being mere snapshots of a dynamic process.
This transition typically occurs around adolescence, where conceptual labels become more prominent than direct experience. Unknowingly, we shift from innocent appreciation of reality to become enclosed within walls of our own distorted concepts. This marks a transformation from the undefinable, blissful phenomenal experience of childhood into a habitual, self-sobering state based on illusory pursuits and fears.
Eight Ways of Regarding Ground Phenomena as Mirage-Like
1. Ungraspable Identity
Like a mirage that appears in a specific location yet vanishes upon approach, phenomena lack any graspable identity despite their apparent manifestation.
2. Beyond Dichotomies
Phenomena, like mirages, may appear from certain perspectives while being absent from others. They appear yet remain empty of actual existence, neither coming from nor going anywhere.
3. Essential Emptiness
Lacking enduring substance or intrinsic being, phenomena merely appear to arise or cease, yet contain nothing that truly does either.
4. Subsidence of Description
Adult awareness encounters phenomena with labels that generate mental proliferation and samsara. By recognizing phenomena’s inherent ungraspability, we learn to rest in awareness as labels subside.
5. Unborn Space-Like Nature
Phenomena are unborn, meaning nothing actually becomes them. While they appear due to causes and conditions, no essential substance transforms from one state to another.
6. Lack of Inherent Being
Despite our learned sense of object permanence, phenomena lack intrinsic self-nature. Recognizing this reduces our tendency toward attachment and suffering.
7. Unoriginated Nature
Being unborn, phenomena cannot originate from anywhere. Like mirages, they arise through the subtle concept of self but lack substantial existence.
8. Transcendence of Thought
Phenomena appear yet contain nothing to appear. They seem to arise yet hold nothing that arises. They appear to depart yet contain nothing that can depart.
The Appearance, Remaining, and Cessation of Phenomena
“Ignorance resembles space itself;
Phenomena have no real features.”
– The Sūtra the Irreversible Wheel
While phenomena seem to possess features, these are merely labels that fall short of true experience. Consider how challenging it is to describe a dream – even the most eloquent words fail to capture the actual experience.
Three Aspects of Phenomenal Manifestation
- Apparent Beginning
In the very moment they appear,
Things seem to have beginnings,
And yet, like mirages, they have no origin.
What appears as a beginning requires an intrinsic substance that transitions through time. Since phenomena are empty, nothing moves from moment to moment, precluding any true beginning.
- Apparent Remaining
It seems that they remain,
Yet like a mirage, they have no abiding.
Though phenomena appear to persist continuously until their dissolution, no intrinsic being moves between moments. Consider a candle flame – while it appears as a continuous entity, it’s actually a sequence of momentary light points shaped by dynamic processes of heat and fuel.
- Apparent Cessation
They also seem to cease,
And yet, like mirages, they do not cease.
The continuous flow of experience suggests phenomena arise and cease, yet being empty of actual reality, nothing truly exists to cease. Only illusory appearances seem to come and go.
Emaho! A wondrous and a marvelous thing,
A secret all the perfect buddhas know!
Without being born are all things born,
And in the moment of their birth, they are unborn!Emaho! A wondrous and a marvelous thing,
A secret all the perfect buddhas know!
Without remaining, all things yet remain,
And in the moment of remaining, they do not remain!Emaho! A wondrous and a marvelous thing,
A secret all the perfect buddhas know!
Without their coming or their going, all things come and go,
And in the moment that they come and go, they’re free of coming and of going!– The Scripture of Summarized Wisdom
Part Two – The Path
When phenomena are understood as mirage-like, this understanding should manifest in one’s personal conduct. All friends and enemies should be recognized as cognitive labels arising with phenomena, all mirage-like and lacking intrinsic reality. From the outset, understand these phenomena as simply the manifestation of awareness’s radiance.
“To apprehend duality where there is no duality
Is like looking at a mirage.
Do not let yourself be caught by clinging,
By taking or rejecting what has no reality.
Watch your mind,
Itself not different from a mirage.
This is the wisdom of the Conquerors
Past, present, and to come.”
– Finding Rest in Illusion, Longchenpa
The Role of Prayer
Prayer serves a specific function in realizing these points, making sense even without invoking external beings. It represents a positive mental intention about something beyond conceptualization. From the perspective of conceptual reality, transcendence appears external or divine. Through prayer, one asks for answers to questions beyond ordinary knowing.
Therefore, practitioners are encouraged to pray for the realization that phenomena are mirage-like.
“As for the main practice, tell yourself
That all things are like mirages.
And then stay free from hopes and fears,
From all engagement with the thoughts
Occurring in your mind.
At night, approach your dreams as previously described,
And they will all arise as mirages.”
– Finding Rest in Illusion, Longchenpa
Practice Guidelines
Daytime Practice
Maintain awareness that neither draws inward into introspection nor becomes disturbed by external phenomena. Recognize phenomena as empty and mirage-like, without arising, beginning, remaining, or ceasing. This prevents clinging while maintaining recognition of phenomena as awareness’s radiance.
Night Practice
The evening practice is straightforward:
- Assume the sleeping lion position (lying on the right side)
- Visualize the main inner channel as a thread of white light
- Fall asleep while regarding this visualization as mirage-like
Through this practice, one learns to recognize dreams as mirage-like and perform transformations as guided by previous points. This training helps distinguish between graspable but illusory conceptual labels and the utterly ungraspable phenomena of the fundamental ground.
Part Three – The Result
A Fresh Pair of Eyes
Just as we might seek a “fresh pair of eyes” when struggling with a problem – valuing an uncontaminated perspective that might see solutions our involvement blinds us to – similarly, practicing to see phenomena as mirage-like offers this fresh perspective.
The Evolution of Awareness
Pre-verbal children experience direct appreciation of awareness’s radiance, which isn’t yet objectified and therefore creates no self-perspective. This awareness remains blissful and unconscious.
Through habitual cognition of this radiance, perceptual labels arise, creating objective and subjective awareness that manifests as consciousness. Adult awareness thus becomes predominantly conscious, always involving the creation of a subject.
While pre-verbal children still carry innate afflictions and cognitive obscurations from karmic conditioning, this practice aims to cut all cognitive activity at its root, ceasing these obscuring layers. When awareness can separate from and disregard cognitive labels, the radiance of awareness becomes recognizable – the subtle, all-pervasive knowing becomes perceivable by awareness itself.
Results of Practice
- Sudden sharpening of focus and mental concentration
- Ability to perceive and disregard cognitive labels that arise with phenomena
- Reduction in disruptive mental proliferation
Dhāraṇī – The Power of Concentration
As one masters the disregard of cognitive labels, several developments occur:
- Focus becomes undistracted
- Perfect recall of seen or heard information
- One-pointed state of awareness
- Non-wavering attention to objects
Advanced Manifestations
Powers of clairvoyance may develop, including perception of hidden objects and otherworldly realms. While difficult to comprehend, these become plausible when we remember awareness can recognize phenomena from multiple perspectives. Typically, our awareness remains distracted by thoughts and feelings arising from sense organs identified as “me.”
Uncontrolled habits create a near-continuous stream of objects, generating the illusion of subjectivity during both waking and dream experiences. Awareness rarely experiences its most naked state – omniscience – which is as subtle as it is profound.
Ultimate Achievement
Only when the mind learns to disregard the near-continuous arising of cognitive labels can it settle enough to become aware of this subtle omniscience. While temporarily impossible for most, training to regard phenomena as empty through realizing their ungraspability allows awareness to focus entirely on this subtle, undefinable point of calmness.
The combination of:
- One-pointed, unwavering awareness
- Personal mental tranquility
Enables:
- Liberation from attachment to current physical form
- Awareness of other sensory and mental systems
- Sensation of traveling to Buddha lands
- Re-experience of memories from prior lives
With a tranquil and empty mind, one can effortlessly look back and re-experience the memories and sensory experiences of all prior lives.
Further Reading and Research
- “Finding Rest in Illusion by Longchenpa”: Detailed teaching on appearance-emptiness and meditation instructions
- “Longchenpa – The Pinnacle Teaching for Meditation – Dzogchen”: Advanced teaching from the Finding Rest trilogy
- “Longchenpa ~ Timeless Freedom”: Commentary on the Precious Treasury of Basic Space of Phenomena
- “Buddhist Teachings on Reality as Illusion and Dream” by Charlotte Rotterdam
- Madhyamaka: Would complement understanding of emptiness concepts
- Kulayarāja Tantra: Explores advanced Dzogchen concepts and Longchenpa’s interpretations of existence and consciousness
- Dzogchen: Would be relevant given Longchenpa’s extensive writings on this tradition
- Mind Teachings of Tibet (sems khrid): Covers sacred instructions on mind nature and meditation, including Longchenpa’s Seven Treasuries
Understanding Mirage: Longchenpa’s Fourth Vajra Point – A Buddhist Analysis of Phenomenal Reality
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