..续本文上一页 Hinayana Abhidharmists of doing) but demands deep absorption so that awareness moves from the merely superficial to the profoundly intuitive. This is true for the celestial bodhisattva as it is for each one of us. In the Mahayna cosmology, "Prajnaparamita" (the perfection of wisdom) is a goddess who has been called "the mother of the Buddhas"; her presence here can be interpreted either cosmologically or etymologically.
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"...perceives that all five skandhas are empty..."
It is in this state of intuitive awareness that the bodhisattva perceives the five skandhas to be empty. Before we look at the term skandhas, it might be useful to deal first with the term "empty" since it is the central teaching, not only of the Heart Sutra but also of the entire Mahayana literature. A translation of the Sanskrit word sunyata into western languages has always been problematic. When translated as "void" or "emptiness," it has a nihilistic undertone, which is how the orientialists of the nineteenth century saw Buddhism and portrayed it accordingly. Fortunately our understanding of the term (and of Buddhism) has grown in recent decades and has outlasted the earlier malformed interpretations. Our current understanding of Buddhist meditative experiences has been greatly faciliated by the findings of quantum physics into the nature of ultimate reality; these findings have added a new dimension to our efforts to understand the meaning of the term sunyata and what it stands for.
For a very long time, the Newtonian/Cartesian scientific view of the world rested on the notion of solid, indestructible particles as the building blocks of matter and all life, moving in space and influencing each other by forces of gravitation and interacting according to fixed and unchangeable laws. This myth disintegrated under the impact of experimental and theoretical evidence produced by quantum physicists in the early decades of this century. The experiments of quantum physics showed that the atoms, the presumed fundamental building blocks of the universe, were, at their core, essentially empty. In experiments, subatomic particles showed the same paradoxical nature as light, manifesting either as particles or waves depending on how the experiment was set up. Quantum physicists, confronting the mysteries of the universe, were left facing Zen-like koans of their own: the sound of a quark, the shape of a resonance, the nature of strangeness!
Quantum physics has thus brought about a radical new understanding both of the particles and the void. In subatomic physics, mass is no longer seen as a material substance but is recognized as a form of energy. When a piece of seemingly solid matter--a rock or a human hand or the limb of a tree--is placed under a powerful electronic microscope:
the electron-scanning microscope, with the power
to magnify several thousand times, takes us down
into a realm that has the look of the sea about
it... In the kingdom of corpuscles, there is
transfiguration and there is samsara, the endless
round of birth and death. Every passing second,
some 2-1/2 million red cells are born; every
second, the same number die. The typical cell
lives about 110 days, then becomes tired and
decrepit. There are no lingering deaths here, for
when a cell loses its vital force, it somehow
attracts the attention of macrophage.
As the magnification increases, the flesh does
begin to dissolve. Muscle fiber now takes on a
fully crystaline aspect. We can see that it is
made of long, spiral molecules in orderly array.
And all of these molecules are swaying like wheat
in the wind, connected with one another and held
in place by invisible waves that pulse many
trillions of times a second.
What are the molecules made of
As w…
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