| | Thank you C4, glad you liked that. Now Japanese Vajrayana is extremely rich yet condensed, almost an super-abundant overload begging to be down-translated into something like what Shinzen is proposing. His touch/body, sight/image, sound/talk is a great application of body, mind and speech trinity, or the mudra, mandala, and mantra principles, the "three actions" and "three mysteries" through which individual practitioner and "cosmic Buddha", i.e. actual dynamic reality, come face-to-face and then inter-penetrate to merge. It was an exquisite challenge for me to discuss this stuff with hardcore vipassana colleagues, without relying on - or hiding behind :-) - the arcane symbolic language of esoteric transmission.
Strictly speaking, Shingon doesn't use shamatha and vipashyana as stages in practice, seeing them as mutually inclusive, but I find the sequential logic useful for training purposes, i.e. calm as platform for insight, at least for initial stages. Further on, the relationship between shamatha and vipashyana gets much more flexible, and eventually they become one and the same thing.
Developing a broad, hybrid terminology allows sharing and transparency across traditions, and this was an utterly open-minded gathering in that respect. Such sharing then enables a common experience to be recognized and confirmed, which in itself is delicious. |