Fivefold confidence

Emptiness, form, and the Big Bang 𐡸 How understanding creates students 𐡸 Buddhism outside institutions

This short video explains two stanzas from the Evolving Ground invocation liturgy. The first is an origin myth, and the second explains the prerequisites for successful Buddhist teaching. Each reworks traditional themes and scriptural motifs in a contemporary worldview.

The video is extracted from a recording of an Evolving Ground Vajrayana Q&A session. I host those monthly, and they’re free for all Evolving Ground members. Membership in Evolving Ground is also free.

Transcript

Origin myth, metaphysics, physics

Primordial chaos and eternal order:

Quantum flux and unified field:

Emptiness explodes into form:

Diversity and unity emerge.

I would say this text is simultaneously extremely traditional and also extremely untraditional.

There’s an order to it, which is emanational. “Emanational” is the idea that everything comes from emptiness, and there are successive waves of manifestation out of emptiness. Emptiness is perfectly simple, and form emerges through, initially, energy; and then form.

And this can have a metaphysical interpretation, and that’s very traditional. I don’t like the metaphysical interpretation. The first paragraph is just very slightly snarky in this way. It is saying: traditionally we have the emanation from emptiness, and this is a little bit metaphysical. This is an allusion to the big bang, in current physics. And this is a sort of a slightly snarky commentary on, look, if we have to have an origin story, let’s have one that is modern Western understanding instead of this thing; but at the same time, it’s being the traditional emanational story. So it’s, it’s kind of doing both things at once!

Fivefold confidence

Because emptiness and form exist, time and place come into being.

Because receptive awareness exists, understanding comes into being.

Because understanding exists, students come into being.

Because students exist, teachers come into being.

The fivefold confidence is traditionally called the “five perfections” or the “five certainties.” It can be taught in a variety of quite different seeming ways. I will briefly sketch a religious or metaphysical interpretation, a practice interpretation, and a pragmatic interpretation.

The five things are the time, the place, the teaching, the— traditionally, the word is “retinue”— the students; and the teacher.

So there’s those five things, and the religious way of presenting this is that every Buddhist scripture begins with that: “Thus have I heard: Once the Blessed One was teaching at Raja Griha on Vulture Peak Mountain,” yada yada yada, this is the way scriptures begin.

So it’s setting the place and the time and the teacher. It’s like, “together with a great gathering of bodhisattvas.” This is the Heart Sutra version. There’s who’s there, and then what the teaching is, and the whole rest of the scripture is what the teacher said on this particular occasion.

In Tantra, the teacher is a Sambhogakaya Buddha. That means a Buddha made of energy. And the retinue is a group of enlightened supernormal beings. And the place is some kind of fairyland. And the time is eternity. The tantric Buddha is timeless and is speaking to us right now in this instant. One can find that inspiring, and it makes sense of the structure of a scripture.

The practice of this is a practice of pure vision. This is describing a gathering, in which teaching occurs. We can pr