Nagarjuna's Mahamudra Vision

Homage to Manjusrikumarabhuta!

1. I bow down to the all-powerful Buddha

Whose mind is free of attachment,

Who in his compassion and wisdom

Has taught the inexpressible.

2. In truth there is no birth -

Then surely no cessation or liberation;

The Buddha is like the sky

And all beings have that nature.

3. Neither Samsara nor Nirvana exist,

But all is a complex continuum

With an intrinsic face of void,

The object of ultimate awareness.

4. The nature of all things

Appears like a reflection,

Pure and naturally quiescent,

With a non-dual identity of suchness.

5. The common mind imagines a self

Where there is nothing at all,

And it conceives of emotional states -

Happiness, suffering, and equanimity.

6. The six states of being in Samsara,

The happiness of heaven,

The suffering of hell,

Are all false creations, figments of mind.

7. Likewise the ideas of bad action causing suffering,

Old age, disease and death,

And the idea that virtue leads to happiness,

Are mere ideas, unreal notions.

8. Like an artist frightened

By the devil he paints,

The sufferer in Samsara

Is terrified by his own imagination.

9. Like a man caught in quicksands

Thrashing and struggling about,

So beings drown

In the mess of their own thoughts.

10. Mistaking fantasy for reality

Causes an experience of suffering;

Mind is poisoned by interpretation

Of consciousness of form.

11. Dissolving figment and fantasy

With a mind of compassionate insight,

Remain in perfect awareness

In order to help all beings.

12. So acquiring conventional virtue

Freed from the web of interpretive thought,

Insurpassable understanding is gained

As Buddha, friend to the world.

13. Knowing the relativity of all,

The ultimate truth is always seen;

Dismissing the idea of beginning, middle and end

The flow is seen as Emptiness.

14. So all samsara and nirvana is seen as it is -

Empty and insubstantial,

Naked and changeless,

Eternally quiescent and illumined.

15. As the figments of a dream

Dissolve upon waking,

So the confusion of Samsara

Fades away in enlightenment.

16. Idealising things of no substance

As eternal, substantial and satisfying,

Shrouding them in a fog of desire

The round of existence arises.

17. The nature of beings is unborn

Yet commonly beings are conceived to exist;

Both beings and their ideas

Are false beliefs.

18. It is nothing but an artifice of mind

This birth into an illusory becoming,

Into a world of good and evil action

With good or bad rebirth to follow.

19. When the wheel of mind ceases to turn

All things come to an end.

So there is nothing inherently substantial

And all things are utterly pure.

20. This great ocean of samsara,

Full of delusive thought,

Can be crossed in the boat Universal Approach.

Who can reach the other side without it?