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The Flower of the Golden Lion Chapter 2
The “golden lion” is just an example: gold symbolizes the principle of dependent co-arising, “not going beyond Being and Non-being”; the lion is the self and phenomena. Two conditions come together:
- Nature arising – “from water comes wave, from gold comes lion”;
-
Form arising – “wind creates wave”, “the skillful craftsman needs gold to create the lion”.
“When one of the two is missing, it cannot be.” Because “the lion does not have a separate self-nature, and gold does not exist apart from the lion,” “all things are interdependent and inter-are.”
The word “emptiness” here “does not mean non-existence,” but means “no separate self-existence”: “the flower exists but only in a provisional way,” “flower is made only of non-flower elements.” “It is precisely thanks to the provisional existence of the lion that we can realize true emptiness,” “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”; “because of emptiness, all dharmas can be realized.”
For example, H₂O: “steam, cloud, mist, rain, snow, and ice are all different forms of H₂O.”
- steam
- cloud
- mist
- rain
- snow
- ice
“H₂O has no separate self-nature; if you want to find it, you must look for it in those very forms,” just as “do not look for water outside of the wave; the ultimate dimension cannot be found outside the historical dimension.”