QotD: the Diamond Truth

[liveonearth]

The best doctor of all the doctors, the best medicine of medicines, and the best technology of technologies cannot save you from your life. The best consultants, the best bank loans, and the best insurance policies cannot save you. Technology, financial help, your smartness or good thinking of any kind - none will save you. That may seem like the dark truth, but it is the real truth. In the Buddhist tradition, this is called the vajra truth, the diamond truth, the truth you cannot avoid or destroy.

We cannot avoid our lives at all - young or old, rich or poor. Whatever happens, we cannot save ourselves from our lives at all. We have to face the truth - not even the eventual truth but the real truth of our lives. We are here. Therefore, we have to learn how to go forward with our lives. This truth is what we call the wisdom of Shambhala.

-Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Ocean of Dharma.

Comments

[calizen.livejournal.com]

An interesting quote. But I would like to know -- westerner that I am -- what all this cannot save us from? Death? Disappointment? Tragedy?

I have mixed feelings with this because perhaps blithering and happy denial is what keeps us going in spite of the fact that we know, maybe on a denied basis, that it's all going to end.

blithering and happy denial

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

I suppose that is the Buddha's point, that this enjoyable diversion from the truth does not prevent us from experiencing the hard parts; birth, suffering, and death.

[quayme.livejournal.com]

"huh"