Expert: Alex Wilding - 9/17/2008

Question
Dear Alex, my name is Mose and I am trying to practicing Mahayana
Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition.

With regards to Pervasive Suffering, the Buddha said "The five aggregates of
attachment are suffering".

If this is so, then why the Mahayana still affirms that the nature of the mind is
pure, since mind is also part of the five aggregates (I am also referring to the
fifth aggregate, the six consciousness)?

Thank you very much for your time.
Mose

Answer
Hi Mose,
Good question!
I think the two statements are on different levels. The first is made from a narrow perspective; let's be frank, it is very largely true. Suffering is a possibility everywhere.

The word you called "attachment" is also often called "grasping", and in the absence of grasping, things can look quite different. Even at that narrow level, it is said that it is possible to undo the causes of suffering and have the experience that "nirvana is peace".

Some Mahayana teaching would feel a bit uneasy about "the nature of the mind is pure"; all, I think, would agree that it is empty, but "pure" can sound a bit positive for some. Not for all, of course, and in the Vajrayana part of the Mahayana it is even taught that the mind is empty and blissful. Here again, though, we are talking at a different level: it is only possible to experience this when the suffering that follows from grasping and the ultimate emptiness or absence of graspable characteristics has been grasped! Sounds paradoxical, but that is the point - it is a matter of experience rather than of concepts.

Does that help at all?