＃６７

These are the words of the Mataranga, as dictated to the 3rd Pangai Lama of Dozchen Monastery, Tibetan Control Region II, and translated into Common by Lopzen Kul for this edition.

The First Blossom represents our understanding that we are not our thoughts. This was the teaching of the Buddha, whose [Eightfold] Path was like lilyflower petals unfurling from the Blossom. Students of the Buddha came to observe these thoughts as one outside them. This is the essence of Being which all living things share, and to trace the passage of thought is to be as a tree permitting ants to travel across its bark.

The Second Blossom represents our learning that there is not one Being, as solitary master of attention, but multitudes. So it is that when one Being traces the passage of thought, it seizes our faculty of attention from all other Beings and suppresses them. This is as the viscous sap that flows down a tree, and traps ants inside but a single stream of it, such that they only experience an isolated expression of the tree's lifeblood. A student of the Second Blossom comes to live as each multitude inside themselves, and this was the teaching of the Nangamaña.

The Third Blossom is as a jewel beset by two others, which are the First and Second Blossom, and it is the lived experience of cohabitation of Beings. Where a student of the Second Blossom yields attention in its entirety to each multitude, so as to live wholly as them, the Third Blossom expresses the shared use of attention as an infinite resource. It is as though every rivulet of viscous tree sap, each wound across a canvas of bark that spans the universe, were to merge and flow together such that ants may cross between them. It is the reunification of Beingness into a collective whole, a state that the Buddha felt in error he had attained, as do all First Blossom students, but which in truth preserves the primacy of the First Ego as a boundless but nevertheless unitary vantage point upon thought. To sit cross-legged among the Third Blossom is to observe and be one with many such observers, without hierarchy or initial separation.

Scholars ask, what is to be done with the passage of thought? Yet it is as ever: Mu. A Being may observe its thoughts, and all Beings in a Third Blossomed body may do so together, but to what aim? It is as though a pine tree, stretching to the skies and many metres outwards in canopy, with all its branches and bristles, were to concern itself distinctly with the passage of ants across its bark. Should the Being be other than the ants, they are but an insignificant distraction. Should the Being ultimately be as the ants, that is, unbounded from them and of the same essence, it is incoherent to allocate them undue attention. In either instance, there is nothing to be done with the ants. It is this way also with the passage of thought. If a thought arises with no Being present to watch it, neither the thought nor the Being are harmed or made lesser.

And so as the tree permits, and yet does not permit, ants to travel across its surface and dip their feet in its sap, and as the tree is comprised of systemic multitudes each themselves of multitudes, which rather concern themselves with their collective and active expression towards a common Beingness, so the Third Blossom requires us of thought. This is the teaching of the Mataranga.