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Diamond Sutra (2)
The practical question of Subhuti is: upon what should a good man or good woman who wishes to accomplish the highest aspiration rely, and how should they regulate their mind? Before this, Subhuti observed that the World-Honored One is truly rare, for he always protects, remembers, and entrusts the great work to the Bodhisattvas. A true Bodhisattva needs two essential elements:
- Bodhicitta—the great aspiration to help all beings cross over to the shore of liberation
- Non-discriminative wisdom or the wisdom of equality—the wisdom that pierces through individualism, seeing oneself in the other and the other in oneself, making no distinction between person and person, person and animal, person and plant, person and earth or stone
In the Diamond Sutra, the World-Honored One teaches that to attain non-discriminative wisdom, the Bodhisattva must transcend the four basic notions, that is, not be caught in the following four ideas:
- the notion of self (the idea of a separate self)
- the notion of person (the idea of a separate human being)
- the notion of living being (the idea of a separate life form)
- the notion of lifespan (the idea of a being’s birth and death)
When these four notions are transformed, the Bodhisattva’s practice of giving—and all the six paramitas—truly becomes action free from form, not based on form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or dharma, thus maintaining the insight of non-discrimination in daily life.
