THE FIVE BUDDHA FAMILIES

THE FIVE BUDDHA FAMILIES

Jörg Fitz (2013)

INTRODUCTORY WORDS

...in tantric Buddhism, one usually summarizes all enlightened forms of being with the designation method and wisdom in union...by method is meant primarily compassion and various approaches suitable in different contexts to promote our development towards enlightenment...by wisdom is essentially meant a non-conceptual awareness that has dispersed our ego manifestations and all our ignorance...this inclusive and all-encompassing method-wisdom awareness we can also call significance awareness...this is also a good umbrella term for the paradigmatic meaning of all life, that is, what we all in the universe have to devote ourselves to, namely to increasingly realize an omnipresent significance awareness, which we can for now consider as our overarching evolutionary destination direction...

...if we divide this method-wisdom composed and all-encompassing significance awareness into five main branches, we can in conventional terms speak of five Buddha Families...these are with different method-wisdom variants related to five main afflictions that all unenlightened beings suffer from more or less...namely jealousy, pride, dualization, desire, and ignorance... with the help of the five Buddha Families' variants of significant method-wisdom awareness, we can be guided to be liberated from these afflictions, which cause our suffering and our ignorance...

...let us begin by briefly characterizing the green Buddha Family, the dynamically action-fulfilling Amogasiddhiattitude, with whose help we can productively use and remedy our jealousy...

...thereafter we make a corresponding characterization of the yellow Ratnasambhava Family, which provides wisdom methods to address our pride and which can cultivate us towards natural dignity and generosity, not least with the help of a jewel-like radiating equanimity awareness...

...then we characterize the central chords of the blue Akshobya Family, whose mirror-like awareness and recognizing approach help us dissolve our dualizations and make us clearer and increasingly holistically aware...the Akshobyan awareness and attitude also disperse our hateful anger caused by our lack of significant affinityrecognitions...

...thereafter we dwell for a moment on the red Amitabha Family, which with its endless light awareness and differentiating perception helps us disperse reductive thoughts and our restrictive and darkening desires as well as our numerous pursuits of unfruitful and meaningless entertainment adventures that lack enlightening creativity...

...finally, we describe something of the white Vairocana Family's reality awareness, which is purified from ignorance and with whose help we can see through the essence of illusion and among other things also see dense phenomena almost like rainbows that are created and dissolved...we can then easily see the difference between spiritual and wisdom-spiritual spheres, which is not done in god-centered religions and not even in spiritual contexts that lack Buddha enlightenment as a compass and living tuning fork...with a dharma-conscious and wisdom-spiritual journey onwards, our conditions become very different and we take refuge in more inclusive perspectives...

...once we have initially and insightfully entered the dharma path, we have three main traditions: Hinayana, Mahayana, and Tantrayana...the latter tradition- which encompasses Mahayana, which in turn encompasses Hinayana - has the most methods and a more dynamic and inclusive goal vision that encompasses all worlds and all living beings...

...once we are well into the tantric dharma path, we have to do with four main traditions: Nyingma, Kargyupa, Sakyapa, and Gelugpa... the first mentioned, which developed first – in the beginning of the 800s - has largely freer methods than the others...Kargyupa, which developed thereafter, is practically oriented, Sakyapa, which developed thereafter, is both practical and theoretical, and Gelugpa, which developed thereafter, is mostly theoretical...then, in the 1600s, an even more inclusive ecumenical direction began to develop - the so-called Rime movement - which has the different traditions as complementary method branches on the same dharma tree...when we below describe the essence of the Buddha Families, it is done mainly from a central place in the ecumenical Rime tree, which we will have in the background as a basic chord without it necessarily needing to be explicitly actualized...

AMOGASIDDHI FAMILY

...jealousy is indeed an ego-centered approach, whereby one ungenerously dislikes that others in certain respects - at least through one's own eyes - have more favorable conditions than oneself...when under the influence of jealousy, one can also seek to overcome or compete out these more favorable living conditions that others are perceived to have, or even seek to destroy them in some way. Herewith, one can for now defend oneself against and avoid developing in a significant way that would entail insights into the whole of which one is a part and in which we all are mutually interdependent...and that we could not exist without others' presence...

...it is not so difficult to understand that a, let's say, lion male, who is the leader of a herd, chases away another male who would want to take over the leadership role. If these lion males had the ability to reflectively listen to what Buddha Amogasiddhi had to say to them, they could develop an intelligence and living conditions that would extend far beyond what they find to be the smartest approach, namely to defeat and chase away the "enemy"...to cooperate and utilize each other's conditions and abilities and share these with each other, is not present in the mind of primitively jealous beings..."smartness" here is too short-sighted, narrow-minded, and instinctively ego-survival-defending to let in an intelligence that would be able to expand ego and herd consciousness to a level where more long-term consequences of one's jealous - and not just jealous - actions are considered...

...jealousy exists not only among animals, but also among most of us karma-unconscious humans...yes, even among demigods who dislike that there are gods who have more favorable conditions than themselves. We can organize an Olympic giant event and arrange huuuuge competitions in all sorts of things...how often does the first-place winner, for their victory, thank the second and third places and the others, without whom it would be completely impossible to stand there as a winner...no, here one should wave their winner's trophy as if one were the only important player in the arena...

...there is now much power in jealous actions, and if this energy were to be utilized in a fruitful way, one would instead of seeking to win over others and be applauded for one's speed or strength, be able to cultivate the intention to fulfill an alternative project where one would take home the unbeatable grand prize, namely to win over all of one's jealousy. Thereby, one would also be liberated from many related chords, such as being skilled, elbowing oneself forward, seeking to excel and be the best without others being enriched in any way, compulsively being virtuous, becoming schadenfreude over a shrimp sandwich sailor having problems, etc., etc...

...we are often blind to flaws at home regarding our jealous green-sickness and let it be carried by Darwinistically explaining evolutionary principles, which in turn are carried by short-term survival principles that do not include the karma principles, insight into which would indeed be the most intelligent evolutionary formula...jealous players are thus often unfortunately not even intelligent ego-trippers...there is a reason why, for example, large dinosaur animals die out before the small rats, which will probably be some of those that will survive the longest on our jealously competing earth. A jealousy-motivated being is rarely aware of the long-term karmic consequences of it´s actions...

...the emerald green radiating Buddha Amogasiddhi can be depicted sitting on a lotus on a throne supported by half-mythical Garuda birds, which can fly powerfully and quickly...one can also imagine sitting on such a Garuda bird in meditation and that with the help of such a symbolic energy configuration, one can move effectively, purposefully, and willfully, whereby one's dharma-oriented intentions are realized...the wind is thus in dharma-tantric practice the element in this so-called karma family. The activity can also be destructive when conditions that hinder the fulfillment of enlightenment's destinations are dispersed. The action is thus precise, powerful, and fulfilling...

...in his left hand, Amogasiddhi symbolically holds a so-called visvavadchra, a double-vadchra, which indicates the maintenance of the fulfillment energy... Amogasiddhi's right hand is held slightly raised in the protective gesture, which also means that he has overcome all fear that signals defense against the fulfillment of a Buddha-awakened be´ing...most Buddhas, regardless of family affiliation, are usually depicted with a green aura around the head, which just shows that they have fulfilled their development journey to full enlightenment...

...Amogasiddhi's consort is the faithful and wish-fulfilling Tara, who is mostly depicted green and called Green Tara...she can also assume other colors... She holds a branched green and multicolored flower in her left hand, and her right hand forms the giving gesture...Tara also assists dharma practitioners in maintaining the bodhisattva vows.

...let us then somewhat schematically summarize the following about the Amogasiddhi Family in the mandala of the whole: it occupies the northern position, the color is emerald green, the energy sphere is the root chakra, the aggregate is will, the element is wind, the affliction is jealousy, its animal is the Garuda, the dharma function is action-fulfillment wisdom, and Amogasiddhi's consort is the wish-fulfilling Green Tara...

RATNASAMBHAVA FAMILY

...pride is also, like envy, a self-preserving approach, whereby we - potentially unconsciously - try to cultivate ourselves into a more mature stance composed of a naturally generous and dignified being... we compensate, one might say, with expressions of pride, as long as we are not sufficiently whole-conscious beyond being identified with self-conceptions, group belonging, and tradition systems. It is like when, for example, a party politician matures into an earth-conscious statesman...

...being free of pride does not mean being freed from self-respect or respect for others. On the contrary: liberation from pride in the best sense occurs when one has experienced enough security, love, protection, generosity, and significant understanding... and thereby also have become satiated with respect and honor...

...when one is free of pride, one no longer needs to unnecessarily highlight oneself, nor feel superior at inappropriate times, or - often unprovoked - outdo others with, for example, skills and knowledge, where it is secondary whether someone is enriched by this... spending much time greasing one's sense of self and ventilatively making a recurring psychological number of it can also serve the pride-strengthening clan...

...to imaginatively conceited fantasize oneself into a condition or role that in one's own experiential world might provide extra benefits and honor is also a method of compensatorily and pride-spicing seeking to strengthen one's own conditions... one can, for example, as a spiritual leader skillfully inflate one's guiding sermons to gain many people's admiration... when it is then revealed that one's own life hardly reflects or is carried by a corresponding life that one urges others to live, one can become perplexed and confused when one's pride-colored view of oneself fades...

...then one can also, as a proud player, instead devote oneself to praising incorrectly and not particularly generalizable ways of living in an apparently rational way, to indirectly safeguard one's own shortcomings and defenses... one can, for example, come up with many arguments for shooting, let's say, wolves, instead of daring to recognize these beautiful and vulnerable animals' conditions as chords in one's own psyche... wolf hunters are simply cowards who do not even dare to meet the wolf as a loneliness-feeling soul mate and as a partial chord in their own psyche... no, instead one takes a coffee break with hunting companions and proudly informs them that one has succeeded in killing a troublesome wolf... which did not wish for anything other in life than what the hunter himself wishes: food for the day, security, and community with its relatives... they really do not wish to suddenly be shot... and moreover just so that a dulled hunter can boast about being a skilled shooter who defends himself against recognizing the significant consequences of his actions: namely, that one day he will experience similar circumstances to those the wolf he shot had to experience...

...another pride variant can consist of making an ego performance of despising oneself, in a style like this reasoning: "those bosses have it good, but it is actually we lowly servants here on the workshop floor who enable their gliding life... it is thus actually we who are the heroes and who in the background create what brings in the earnings... the bosses' proud attitude towards us is a rather cheap facade, compared with our attitude formed by dirty toil and patient acceptance of the bosses' bonus wage increases after we produced the sellable goods... it is we who sacrifice our lives and who should actually be celebrated and we who are the proud worst of the humility virtues"... that both pride attitudes feed on each other and are chords in the same social song, both camps avoid recognizing in a significant way...

...yes, there are many pride chords that keep us in grinding and limited worlds when we lack a sufficiently relevant holistic view regarding our development and living conditions... such awareness is found in Buddha Ratnasambhava. To be like such a jewel-creating being means to naturally, worthily, and pride-free dwell in jewel-like awareness whereby one with generous energy warmth in all directions naturally radiates chords that everyone needs... with Ratnasambhava's integrated wisdom awareness, one sees that we earth dwellers and other living beings consist of the same kind of fundamental components and subtle energy patterns and nature... Ratnasambhava-attuned beings with their naturally radiating energy can grant people fortunate, protective, enriching, and humanity-perfecting feelings and conditions, if receptivity exists...

...at a somewhat more inclusive level, Ratnasambhava's basic chord can be enriched to Medicine Buddha's conditions, whereby healing balancing with the help of the other Buddha families' chords constitutes the guiding tuning fork...

...pride exists not only in us humans, but also in other earth dwellers and in beings in most other existential worlds, including the spheres of the gods... it exists even among us dharma players, among both Hinayana and Mahayana followers... and among bodhisattvas up to the eighth of the ten so-called bhumis, which are bodhisattvas' developmental seasons towards Buddha enlightenment...

...when pride is active in us, we like to place ourselves in an ego-oriented position so that the sunlight is directed just at us, whereby one not infrequently also seeks to shade others and close one's eyes to the fact that the light is always equally intended for all of us... when one realizes that we mostly impoverish our existence with the numerous variants of unconscious pride expressions, the steps with which one disperses this ailment no longer need to be so complicated... when we become more and more beings who easily recognize variants of pride in our own attitude and herewith generously smilingly can pick out and dissolve these, in order to instead cultivate our radiating energywealth, a radically new civilization level could develop on our earth and elsewhere, whereby we can dwell unhindered and with increasingly significant mutual awareness in natural and generous dignity...

...let us schematically summarize the conditions of the Ratnasambhava family... it occupies the southern position in the wholeness mandala, the color is golden yellow, the energy sphere is the navel chakra ('gut feeling' area), the aggregate is feeling, the element is earth, the ailment is pride, the animal is the horse, the significant medicine is the wisdom of equanimity, the dharma function is natural generosity, Ratnasambhava's consort is Mamaki (fertilizing water) and a more inclusive near relative within the Ratnasambhava family is the Healing Buddha whose superior medicinal treatment consists of dynamic balancing...

AKSHOBYA FAMILY

...let us here seek to immerse ourselves in this mirror-like awareness and contemplatively dwell in this sphere for a while with dharma-oriented reflections, to thereby significantly aware facilitate our understanding of our deeply ingrained dualization tendencies...

...with a tantric attitude, initiation-like, we can also seek to get ahead of events and as best we can immerse ourselves in how it might be to perceive and relate to phenomena and living beings, if we as bodhisattvas - at least in principle - had integrated a decent portion of Buddha Akshobya's atmosphere and mirror-like awareness...

...ah, from which position shall we formulate our reflections?...and which target group should we mainly have in mind?...hmm?...always eager questions that we do not so often make explicit...conditions everywhere are changing all the time and perspectives are to say the least numerous...that something would be this or that no longer exists in current awareness...and among other things 'objective' and 'subjective' as independent conditions have played out their role here...we have to realize that we can choose to consider most things as reflections of different conditions with a certain attitude...we can call it holodynamic reflections, that is, different wholes, for example people, who experience and relate to the wholes based on how the changeable conditions of all involved wholes are constantly formed and shaped...there is not much to hold onto or grasp here...one has to learn to recognize different dynamic patterns and seasons at different levels and how these are formed and changed thanks to several interacting wholes and parts...yes, now perhaps one becomes aware that...oh!...is there nothing stable and unchanging at all?...well...yes, of course, such things exist more or less...we are now - in reading and reflecting moment - not so much in the conventional world's constructed patterns and principles...which are more schematic and system-driven...

...with the help of a simplified analogy, we can clarify an aspect of our theme...let us reflectively immerse ourselves in being a mirror's reflection...anything can be received in this and reflected...the reflection is not disturbed by being called an idiot or being flattered and called a hero or something like that...the mirror reflects disgust and appreciation with the same basic spirit and corresponding content...it is not biased and has no defense functions...and is not disturbed by, for example, jealousy, pride, or desire...the reflection can, however, be more or less clear, bright, and pure...qualities that emerge in an increasingly better light, the more ego-oriented restrictive, darkening, and elusive defenses are dispersed and the fewer conceptual operations there are in the reflection...

...let us meditate ourselves into the following context...we find ourselves on a quiet and clear full moon night, sitting on a cliff, gazing out over and into a lustrous water where the moon and stars are reflected...if we now delve into the reflection in the water, we will soon be able to experience the mirrored world in the reflecting water in the same way we experience the moon and stars in space...and vice versa!...and vice versa again!...where did the two worlds go?...what reflects what?...in the still and crystal-clear water world, we can experience the same thing as in the space world...space contains everything...the water reflection contains everything...reflections can contain everything...

...what enables the reflection?...there must be some form of echoing, back-and-forth reflection, something that causes vibrations, light waves, energy pattern movements and formations to bounce back...thus there is a kind of twin-like co-dance...a holodynamically mirroring dual co-dance...when one side changes it´s tone, a similar change occurs on the other side that echoes this back in some variant, which in turn can echo back a similar configuration...the more conscious the "two sides" become of this process, the more they can participate in the events and influence them in different ways...one can, for example, deliberately caricature a reflection and playfully color it with exactly those chords that need to be made more visible...or calibrate the reflection by essentializing and simplifying chords that might be unnecessarily complex and messy in certain contexts, or design the reflection the other way around and instead enrich impoverished expressions, etc...

...a characteristic feature of reflection consciousness is that it contains a chameleon-like function...if a cheerful tone is gestured that is received by the reflection consciousness, it will naturally also become a corresponding cheerful tone in this consciousness...it is colored by its surroundings...this function can be likened to what happens when a blue droplet of color falls into a bowl of pure water, so everything in the bowl becomes blue...the water has no inherent color...when experiencing ABC chords through reflection, the experiential content naturally becomes ABC-like, which affects the surroundings...

...then the consciously reflecting reflection can also contain more or less paradigmatic elements, meaning actively participating in reflecting back in different ways, depending on what is significant in the context and what main direction is tuned by the paradigmatic attitude...one can, for example, through energy intensification simultaneously with both sharply impenetrable and semi-transparent stabilizing reflection, clarify, make clear and transform haphazard light waves into more unambiguous laser waves...or conversely: transform rigidly uniform waves into more dancing and creative light waves...the Akshobyan paradigm is composed of significant tuning relative to our dualizing attitudes, so that these are transformed into increasingly Buddha-enlightened, deeply heartfelt and reflection-like clarity consciousness...

...a holodynamically chameleon-like reflection consciousness is also extensively developed in certain aspects among some animals...the paradigmatic attitude here, of course, relates to survival and is adapted to specific conditions...elephantscan communicate with each other using deep infrasound (0-20 Hz) over a distance of ten kilometers... bats use their own high-frequency ultrasonic calls (over 20,000 Hz) in the darkness so that when these hit objects or animals, these sounds echo back and the bats interpret the environmental conditions based on the reflected sound waves' strength, frequency, direction, and patterning...when ultrasonic waves hit a night moth, for example, the waves echo back with a certain character that the bat can recognize, and it becomes reflexively completely focused on its prey...

...with more reflection consciousness in our being, we become increasingly significant and holodynamically whole-aware...when this becomes more and more united with love and compassion, and recognition of more and more beings as co-chords that compose our collective wholeness, like chords in our own psyche and energy system, this naturally leads to a way of living where we gradually dismantle unconscious identifications, dualizations, hatred, fixations on conceptual constructions, and similar things...we become naturally more heartfelt and more recognition-embracing...and more aware of the whole, so that we no longer need to be unnecessarily immature and consider, for instance, upward movements as "more fun" than the "boring" downward movements - or vice versa - and instead can see most things as naturally changeable seasons or waves and that all polarizations are two aspects of the same wholeness, such as inner-outer...dawn-dusk...becoming-ceasing...darkness-light, etc...there is not a single compound phenomenon that is this or that...nothing has independent, inherent, autonomous existence...there are no exceptions...this also applies to the socalled emptiness or ultimate reality...unconsciously naming these conditions in an objectifying substantive way already indicates that one has not quite understood the point of the Dharma's fundamental Madhyamika philosophy...there is no reflection in itself either...all events and beings are manifested thanks to many conditions, mutual interdependence dynamics, and the nature of the involved consciousness...we need to become more and more aware of this and have to gradually dissolve our compressions, condensations, fixations, reductions, and such things...even black holes are dynamic seasonal aspects of cosmic dimensions' breathing that also encompasses big bang counterparts...there are many big bangs and many black holes, and they depend on each other as an exhalation depends on an inhalation...such events will take place as long as we do not collectively and significance-consciously and paradigmatically cultivate balancing whole-awareness until everything becomes clear, pure, and endlessly illuminated and balance-perfected consciousness, so that nothing remains to be added or subtracted...

...to facilitate the integration of increasingly reflection-like consciousness on our path, a crystalline clear stability needs to become more and more accessible in our psyche...we need, in a certain dimension, like a reflection, to also be fairly unshakable and consciously non-acting restrained, even if Snow White's witch wants to kill us when she cannot recognize the mirror image of herself in an embracing and significant way, because she is too enviously identified with a single chord in the wholeness and therefore cannot recognize that the witch and Snow White are two mutually dependent chords in the same song...yes, Snow White as a young maiden cannot, of course, recognize the witch as a potential shadow side in her psyche...it is not yet time...

...such Snow White and witch dualizations occur everywhere on our earth...one dualizes between heaven and hell, the god-believing and the heathens, the right-believing and wrong-believing, enemy and clan-belonging, whereby one identifies with one side and seasons it with pride chords and schizoid-like keeps the other side at a distance, without viewing the two groupings from a side of more inclusive awareness...

...fears hinder us from seeing behind the scenes and opening ourselves to a more intelligent, wise, and fruitful approach... yes, in many places we seek to solve the problem of fears by merely calming them with dulling means... one avoids opening the closet door, behind which strange and fear-inducing sounds can be heard, which would need to be released and, with heartfelt understanding, freed from confinement...

...our dualizations are profound... they significantly mirror in certain respects our developmental level, in which we here on earth are still occupied with mostly short-term survival principles, without placing these in a broader and preferably more consequence-aware and enlightened context with Akshobya-tuned wisdom chords that have integrated the previously mentioned Amogasiddhi and Ratnasambhava chords...

...let us schematically summarize the Akshobya Buddha Family's ingredients... the ailment here fundamentally concerns dualization... an excellent remedy for such an ailment is the Akshobya-like mirror-like consciousness and approach, with whose help we can heartily recognize everything and everyone in a significant way as chords in our collective shared vessel... the direction in the mandala is often east, but the Akshobya family's mirroring chords can also occupy the central sphere, which can essentially contain all directions and other chords... the energy sphere is the heart chakra... the archetypical color is blue... the male color tone in the gemological union is denser and darker than the female... the element is water... the aggregate is thinking... the symbol is vajra... the animal is the elephant... the symbolic gestures are the wisdom-cultivating meditation gesture with the left hand and the method-cultivating earth-touching gesture with the right, which represent the processing approaches towards dualization-defending and narrowing identification tendencies and manifestations that seek to prevent the realization of enlightenment... the so-called maras...

AMITABHA FAMILY

...in the previous section, we dwelled on the ailment of dualization and how one can relate more or less fruitfully to this form of differentiation... yes, if we do not identify with one side, but instead let both sides be united through mirror-like awareness, we can thereby achieve much clarifying healing... we now have to do with similar conditions in the Amitabha family... however, in certain respects, we shift up a gear... instead of differentiating dualistically, we now do it even more... yes, gladly much more... yes, even more... when we are under the influence of desire, we increasingly long for ourselves more experiences, ever more wine-tasting experiences, new nuances, multi-spectral adventures, etc... there is no end to it... and this endless approach can either result in us dwelling in endless light that can no longer be differentiated and nuanced, or it can result in desire's darkening and never-ending frustrations, whereby we thirstily wander further and chase temporary oases of various kinds...

...if our desirable needs are, let's say, Mediterranean-human, we will probably only be hit short-term by a fairly common hangover... but, if we generalize the perspective in the long term, we will probably also end up in a crisis...

...satisfaction of desire without a meaningful vision will fill us more or less in compensatory aspects, whereby not so significant developmental branches are included... we might, for example, gain weight, the wine collection in the basement becomes larger, vacation trips become more numerous, the clothing wardrobe becomes fuller, hair color and hairstyle can change increasingly often, etc., etc... there is no end to the samsaric more-and-more desire... especially when one is not satiated with basic human needs... if someone has had fundamental human needs met - let's say at the start of life, whereby we became satiated with, for example, fetal harmony, pleasant nursing, maternal love, care, security, and patient understanding - then we can instead find it natural to curiously investigate more in the cosmos beyond security and illuminatingly discover ever more nuances and dimensions... herewith, other motives easily actualize in us beyond desire... curiosity, insight-seeking discovery joy, playful exploration of the unenlightened areas of the universe and similar motives can instead, with fresh appetite, present themselves and vision us forward in life...

...if we are a member of the Amitabha family with the ability to remedy desire ailments, we rarely content ourselves with making distinctions, as the Akshobya members are mostly occupied with... no, here we like to make tristinctions or quatrostinctions, etc.... we like to differentiate everything so that coarse experiences gradually disperse and are replaced with more nuanced and multi-spectral finely tuned perceptions... hereby, more and more light spreads in and out of our worlds... we can, for example, liken it to sunray-like projections distinctively wedging in here and there and warmingly illuminating and making phenomena nuancedly clearer...

...as an Amitabha-red person, we gladly make a quint-stinction with many sub-branches and thereby see, for example, how Amogasiddhi greenings are more extroverted than Ratnasambhava yellows, which in turn are more extroverted than Akshobya blues, which are about as much extroverted as introverted and which are less introverted than Amitabha reds, which in turn are less introverted than Vairocana whites, which, among other things in their divine being conditions, have about 30 subtlety levels... not to mention all other samsaric worlds and all traditions and various branches of these and all different bodhisattva levels within sutra and tantra-Mahayana and all Buddha levels and all nirvana variants and all myriads of worlds and countless ages and all constant changes and dynamic combinations of these changeable perspectives... wow, how wonderful!... what abundance!... and all different dynamic patternings and all different light waves and all different subtlety levels of different dimensions and all different mixtures of them... oh, isn't it marvelous!... there are endlessly many spheres and conditions that can be illuminated and distinguished... yes, there is even a consciousness that is completely filled with endless light that no longer has any differentiable light waves... endless light consciousness without beginning and without end, without darkening shadows and without constraining formations... the enlightening and distinguishing perception has essentially been perfected to the point where nothing more remains to be enlighteningly distinguished... not even subtle light waves... now nirvanically-samsarically, the endless light consciousness collaborates with spontaneous light emanations to promote our multiversal evolution...

...yes, we like to perceive... to see, hear, smell, taste, touch... the experiences thereby become more nuanced than when we are will-focused, emotion-expressing, or thought-reflecting... we also like to peacockspring... and before we are sufficiently dharma-aware, we gladly let others applaud us and experience us as the most beautiful and colorful beings... we gladly reside in the sunset warmth in the west... and why not sitting or dancing on lotus flower crowns while creatively dedicating ourselves to singing, poetry, painting, playing the flute, or yodeling... we like to live... live more, more... we generally dislike having it boringly long and trudging forward slowly and snail-like...

...yes, we want to live long, so we therefore cultivate drinking nectar and taking herbal medicines that contribute to a long life and good health... we also find it meaningful to meditate... Buddha Amitabha's gesture is the meditation gesture, and he can hold a lotus flower crown or a bowl of nectar in his hands...

...we also like theater in its widest sense and we like images, ornaments, dramatizations, meditative embodiments, and projective creations, mostly however in the perceiving inner world... we like transformations: to transmute one thing into another... we like the fire's heat, intensity, and speed... oh, why not yoddle like an ecstatic peacock dakini surrounded by fire flames and passionately drinking nectar-like blood...

...we like the energy in the throat... from desirously drinking life's fluids to pleasantly and poetically singing dharma mantras... we Amitabha cultivators like to increasingly illuminate everything... disperse darkness, shadow sides, condensations, and reductive tendencies... yes, as said, we essentially like to enlighteningly differentiate more until all being is consciously united with endless light...

...we do not primarily analyze apart darkening condensations, as Akshobya practitioners might engage in, but instead we perceptually differentiate everything, so that life becomes more easily danceable... an Akshobya-tuned practitioner would probably sometimes experience us as frivolous... but this can be viewed from the perspective of considering us with a tendency to be crystallically ground and immovable... when we have become more bodhisattva-like, we of course instead see more the valuable interaction possibilities between clear and sharp immovability and blooming creativity... flower crowns and stamens enrich each other... an exceptionally dharma-creative and fruitful attitude would be to have integrated chords in our consciousness that we can liken to brilliant-cut jewels of various kinds in union with blooming, fragrant, and multi-colored daisies...

...let us then summarize the dharma lotus family's ingredients... the ailment is desire or attachment, and the medicine against this consists of transformatively differentiating this motivational attitude into increasingly illuminated energy until Buddha Amitabha's endless light consciousness has been green-aurically perfected and easily accessible... the direction in the mandala is west... the energy sphere is the throat chakra... the archetypal color is ruby red... the male aspect can have more white-nectarous elements and the female more blood-red... the element is fire... the aggregate is perception... the symbol is the lotus... the animal is the peacock... the symbolic position is the meditation gesture... and the main bodhisattva here is Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of love and compassion, who holds a white mother-of-pearl jewel between his palms, which are in a respect mudra in front of the heart...

VAIROCHANA FAMILY

...initially, we visited and examined ourselves with the Amoghasiddhi family's envy-processing attitude and sought to tune ourselves to fulfill the realization of Buddha-awakened being... and then the Ratnasambhava family's pride-dispersing development towards natural dignity, whereby one can perceive all beings' essential nature... and thereafter analytically examined the Akshobya family's dispersion of our ingrained dualizing tendencies using mirror-like reflections and awareness... then we resided in the Amitabha family's distinguishing and illuminating spheres and glimpsed our possibilities of transforming our desires into endless light consciousness... and now we shall become acquainted with the white Vairochana family's conditions... we will do this somewhat more extensively than when we made corresponding characterizations in the aforementioned families, as the nature of this consciousness can enable and facilitate understanding of the other wisdom aspects...

...as a Vairocana member, we are essentially occupied with gradually dispersing everyone's fundamental ailment of ignorance... this journey leads us ever deeper into the conditions of existence... what actually constitutes 'reality' and what constitutes 'illusion'?...

...when one processes and disperses our ignorance through various meditative methods, the approaches can be different, depending on one's conditions and which of the different dharma paths we have chosen... the more ignorance involved in our being and experiencing and the less conscious we are of this fundamental ailment, the denser and more clouded all perceived phenomena and beings appear... the less ignorance, the clearer, purer, more naked, and more transparent everything gradually becomes... if we simply symbolically embody ignorance as a heavy and muddy pig, we could symbolically formulate an ignorance-freed consciousness as a well-ground transparent and clear diamond at the center of a dharma wheel resting on a lotus flower with rainbow characteristics...

...a more gradual approach to dispelling ignorance can begin with a meditation method called samatha, whereby we gradually transform our mental attitude and energy system through concentration development to increasingly effortlessly rest in and focally perceive subtle mandalas... for example, with a transparent Buddha form in the center... and in this specific context, it can be suitable to have the white Buddha Vairocana holding his hands in the dharma teaching gesturein front of the heart... on this dharma-oriented samatha meditation path, we can among other things come to know about 25 divine levels... first 6 increasingly subtle desire levels, then about 19 increasingly subtle form-and-color worlds, where the subtlest - the so-called Akanishta sphere - is at the level where the central representatives of the 5 Buddha families we are discussing manifest themselves in a form... one usually also distinguishes between Akanishta and Mahakanishta... in the first-mentioned divine world, there is subtle divine consciousness that does not contain dharma consciousness, while in Mahakanishta are manifested so-called Sambhoga forms of Buddha consciousness...

...hereafter, we can - if we briefly describe it schematically and step by step - with the help of so-called vipassyanameditation sail further and become acquainted with increasingly subtle form-and-color-liberated beings... these so-called formless divine levels (Arupa-dhatu) can be experienced in four main steps: first one can reside in endless space, thereafter in endless consciousness, thereafter in endless nothing at all and finally in endless neither one nor the other... this last-mentioned level can be seen as the subtlest variant of samsaric being, which is a being that is neither eternalistic nor nihilistic... this is not a question of the clearest Buddha consciousness level, but the subtlest non-wisdom-toned spiritual level...

...if we meditatively penetrate these formless divine existence levels with dharma and wisdom-oriented reality consciousness, we will discover that these worlds are by no means liberated from subtler ignorant attachments, mist formations, and cognitive reductions... here exist vague scents, sounds, nuances... formless being is thus not the same as reality's essential nature... in the formless divine beings, time and space exist... true reality does not have this...

...in our further journey with Vairocana guidance, it can also involve becoming acquainted with the two Hinayana paths, namely the Arhats' orientation towards renunciation seeking to achieve a static nirvana state and the Pratyekabuddha's attitude of realizing clear emptiness consciousness as their destination... in the Arhat's nirvana, latent attachments to samsaric existence remain, and in the Pratyekabuddha's wisdom consciousness, a fully awakened Buddha's integrated love-empathetic method qualities are not encompassed...

...if we are dharma practitioners on the tantric bodhisattva path and seek to become acquainted with Buddha Vairocana's wisdom consciousness, we essentially enter the world of ignorance in our psyche and seek to increasingly clarify this our fundamental ailment... we examine, reflect, analyze, clarify, polish, distinguish, see through, disperse conceptual clouds, liberate ourselves from attachments to increasingly subtle pleasure experiences and various divine states, etc., etc.... we increasingly gain insight into what the question of so-called reality and illusion is about...

...with increasingly integrated Vairocana consciousness, we will gradually become clear about the difference between the conditions in relative worlds and in non-relative being beyond time and space... we will increasingly become aware that the content of our experiences is not solely composed of the samsaric world's transient conditions...

...the more clarity-aware we become about the composite world's impermanence, the more we will release our attachments and fixating thought patterns, which like to help form the changeable world to become more predictable and security-supporting... yes, even within research we often seek repeatable conditions that should provide us knowledge we can hold onto... when we generalize the knowledge we gain through this, we often forget that these conditions are generally experimentally constructed and that the natural conditions in our entirety also change... yes, they change partly just because we make them conscious...

...this uncertainty we have known within quantum physics for about 80 years, but we still disregard this principle in most contexts because we simply lack such wisdom consciousness with whose help we could relate more appropriately, responsibly, and friendly to the uncertainty of changeability... through this, we could more consciously see the relative world in a more significant way...

...the academic world's research naturally gives us valuable knowledge about the relative and primarily technical world here on our earth... but its methods still cooperate too little with wisdom awareness... for wisdom to develop within us, we must give up our attachments to, among other things, conceptual thinking, grasping, and our unconscious dualization, which among other things leads us in our extroverted cultures to emphasize objectivity as something more important than subjectivity, without holistically seeing that these aspects relate to each other like outer and inner or right and left or front and back...

...if we now aim to clarifyingly deepen and expand our meditative development further, we can seek to open ourselves more to perceiving how our cognitions limit and hinder our development when we have come a bit along the way... they become like cloudy patterns, which conceal the revelation of the clear and space-like awareness... we thus have here to become acquainted with increasingly concept-free awareness in our being, which in its stripped-down essence is pure, clear-naked, and liberated from becoming and ceasing... there is nothing in this consciousness that is missing: nothing needs to be subtracted and nothing added... we can perhaps call it a kind of primordially original clarity-balanced awareness... an awareness that is freed from darkness, ignorance, conceptualizations, limitations, and everything composite... an omnipresent reality-consciousness that enables our perception of the impermanent world... this composite world we will then be able to see as consisting of projections and dynamic reflections in a more or less constructed world... we can also describe it as we and our living conditions being creations of producers, scriptwriters, directors, or creator gods who are generally unaware of the difference between reality and illusion... in films, one often seeks to dramatize, so that events appear more tangible and "realistic", whereby one mostly rather distances oneself than approaches the more originally unconstructed reality...

...if we examine this subject further, we will of course see that even the so-called producers and creator gods constitute creations of various causes and conditions, etc. As long as we lack wisdom awareness, this process of becoming and impermanence will continue... it is in a certain sense our thoughts that cause this... well, not only cause... our brain's thought activity is indeed a necessity for us humans... it enables us to orient ourselves in this worldly world... it is among other things our tool and coordinator for the human body's fantastic orchestra... but, our thinking can, as mentioned, also cause problems for us... in these times, human identity perceptions are fairly consumed by cognitions... and to have a refined intellect and good thinking ability is in many places among the best one can have... and herewith our helpful instrument can also become detrimental... supported by certain pride expressions and identity fixation, our well-honed intellect can restrict us... instead of leading us to the insight that at a certain level we can learn to use our reflection in a more lighthearted and wisdom-tinted way... we have however here not - if we are enlightenment-oriented - to simply remove our cognitions to then become spiritual and, for example, let ourselves become symbiotic with states like the divine light as the final thing... this can of course be a valuable and healing experience, if we consider it in a significant way, but it would be a mistake if we generalized this perspective and saw it as becoming fully enlightened... we can here unconsciously become victims and servants of spiritual so-called mares... instead we have to dharma-orientedly cultivate our thought life so that it assists us towards a reflection that can also be beyond conventional thinking, so that on the way we can become acquainted with increasingly both spiritual and wisdom-spiritual and bodhisattva conditions and learn to distinguish these different oceans, which cannot be done if we are consumed by only a spiritually oriented system that does not encompass, among other things, reflecting reality consciousness, which is the case with god-centered systems...

...then there can also arise conditions where we have to learn new ways of being where our thinking can no longer help us, however refined it may be... we need however to have dharma-orientedly cultivated our reflections and prepared ourselves sufficiently for beyond-cognitive understanding and communication...

...if we now also perceive reflections, projections, and theatricality with increasingly penetrating and clear impermanence awareness, then events and us beings will be revealed more significance-consciously, which among other things means that what has hitherto been experienced as substantively real can now instead begin to appear as insubstantial and illusory... this can perhaps be challenging for persons who are not prepared for such a perspective shift... yes, if we lack security, stability, and many other favorable conditions, not least having taken refuge in Buddha-consciousness and the dharma teaching and with others who have also tread this path, and having also established a relationship with a sufficiently experienced dharma guide, then it will generally not be easy for us to sail further in cosmic oceans... we will then, among other things, lack lighthouses...

...if we are prepared and want to become acquainted with wisdom-spiritual reality-consciousness, we can let ourselves be guided by Buddha Vairocana-consciousness, which - when increasingly integrated - will gradually become more accessible everywhere...

...the pure and clear reality-consciousness is from one perspective not mixed with any kind of phenomenal configuration or any being... but, from another perspective, it is also not separate from anything at all... reality-consciousness is thus both separate from all compositeness and simultaneously not separate from it anywhere... contradictory if we seek to understand it within the framework of the relative and cognitive world, but self-evident and natural when the non-relative and cognition-free wisdom-consciousness is naturally part of the play... it can become like a completely clear-naked and beyond-space-time endless and omnipresent eternal reality-consciousness that spontaneously reveals itself and is always available... so, let us disperse our limiting, dualizing, and darkening ignorance and instead calmly and harmoniously open ourselves to this consciousness and be permeated by it... thereafter we can also tone this consciousness, which excludes nothing, with heartfelt love, compassion, and increasingly significant method-reflections, whereby we can naturally and in various ways contribute to everyone in the universe also becoming more aware of our more genuine holistic conditions...

...Vairocana-consciousness is a naturally clarifying understanding of reality's true nature... Vairocana-consciousness comes into being through the other Buddha families' consciousness... of purposeful mobility, understanding of essential similarity, infinite light, and of reflection-consciousness... together this brings clarifying understanding and thus dissolution and dispersion of obstacles in the way of enlightenment... Vairocana-consciousness thus clarifies thanks to the other Buddha-consciousnesses... the clarifying understanding-consciousness is thus Vairocana's "own" consciousness... Vairocana polishes the unpolished glasses... Vairocana glasses are simply polished and clear... they have no own color, like the white and clear reality-light that penetrates all colors that exist here...

...thus, Vairocana's reality-consciousness is in itself completely colourless, yet without being separate from the rainbow's all transparent colors, which enable reality's clarification... and which in turn enables the clarification of rainbow-becomings... we have here to do with the most essential mutual dependence in the entire multiverse...

...let us then schematically summarize the Vairocana family's ingredients... the ailment is ignorance and unknowing... the remedy is clarifying reality-consciousness... the symbol is the dharma wheel... the mudra is the dharma teaching's gesture in front of the heart, where the gesture the hands express means the circle of completion is closed and enlightenment comes enigmatically from within... the energy sphere is the crown chakra, like the lotus flower crown above the water surface... the animal is the snow lion... two central bodhisattvas here are the nectar-cleansing Vajrasattva and life-promoting Ushnisha Vidjaya... the female aspect of Vairocana-consciousness is the soft wisdomunderstanding and the male is the clarifying method aspect...