Removing the Obstacles Preventing Liberation and Enlightenment
The Fourth Panchen Lama now continues with the method for gaining a decisive understanding of the deepest devoid nature of mind in accordance with the intentions of Chandrakirti and other masters of the prasangika-madhyamaka tradition of explanation. According to them, the first of the two sets of obscuration, those that are disturbing attitudes and which prevent liberation, refer to all disturbing emotions and attitudes, including ignorance or unawareness of voidness, as well as their seeds or traces. When we have removed this entire set, we attain nirvana, total release from samsara, or uncontrollably recurring rebirth filled with true suffering and true causes of suffering.
The attainment of the non-abiding nirvana of Buddhahood, however, is a much greater achievement. It requires eliminating not only the obstacles preventing liberation, but also those preventing omniscience, namely the obstacles concerning all knowable phenomena. These refer to the instincts of unawareness of voidness that cause mind to make things appear as if they ultimately existed as inherently findable, and thus preventing mind from giving rise simultaneously, as its object of cognition, to the two truths about anything. Because of this second, deeper set of obstacles, mind makes all phenomena appear as if existing ultimately, although they do not exist in this way. The setting, like a sun, of all discordant appearance-making like this into dharmadhatu, the sphere of devoid nature, such that it never rises again, is non-abiding nirvana.
But isn't this nihilism? When all discordant appearance-making has set into the sphere of devoid nature, doesn't this negate everything? Aren't we left with nothing at all, like seeing nothing when our eyes are closed? No, this is not at all the case. While training ourselves through a course of pathway minds, we strengthen our enlightenment-building networks of positive force and deep awareness jointly. Consequently, even though the veiling mist of mental fabrication and fabricating has set forever into the sphere of devoid nature at the time of the resultant state of Buddhahood, still, by the force of compassion, prayers and altruistic acts, there is someone remaining who spontaneously and effortlessly fulfills others' purposes. There is still someone remaining who is straightforwardly and omnisciently aware of everything knowable, whatever exists, while simultaneously knowing that anything mind produces an appearance of cannot ultimately be found existing under its own power as something solid and tangible we could touch. It simultaneously knows that phenomena indeed perform functions yet cannot ultimately be touched.
This is quite extraordinary and difficult to explain. Omniscient awareness has two aspects that operate simultaneously with full understanding – one that validly apprehends the deepest truth about everything and the other everything's pure conventional truth. It can do so because it is free of the obstacles preventing omniscience. The aspect that sees the deepest truth apprehends the devoid nature of everything. This is the sphere of devoid nature upon which all appearance-making that mentally fabricates relies, and thus out of which it arises and into which it sets. Although this aspect of omniscient awareness that apprehends voidness does not make phenomena having devoid nature appear before its own face, yet the other aspect of an omniscient mind, valid for seeing conventional truths, makes these phenomena appear before it. Apprehending both simultaneously, omniscient awareness, as an integrated whole, starkly sees both devoid nature and phenomena having this nature, fully aware that, with an absence of true and inherent existence, these phenomena cannot ultimately be found and touched like something solid and tangible. Thus an omniscient mind has combined total absorption on voidness which is like space – the absence of anything tangible and obstructive – and subsequently attained deep awareness of appearances to be like illusion. This is very difficult to understand and explain. When we gain actual experience, we see it is unlike anything else. It is, not only figuratively, but literally beyond imagination.