Public Talk, Vienna, Austria

James Low

Vienna, 14 May 2009
Download the PDF
Transcribed by Jo Féat
Edited by Barbara Terris
Excerpts
All the obscurations that have built up over many lifetimes and aeons of karmic activity have no power to inhibit the union of the radiant nature of the person doing the practice and the radiant nature of the deity.
This is a central point to understand: you don’t have to remove the obscurations. We all have a lot of obscurations, and if we take the Bodhisattva Vow we also take on the obscurations of all beings, so that’s a lot of obscurations!
Near Edinburgh there is a river called the River Forth which had a big steel railway bridge built across it in the 1880s. People are employed just to paint this bridge. They start at one end and they paint and paint. The bridge is huge so that when they finish painting the bridge, they go back to the other end to start again because the paint is already peeling off! Although they can spend their whole lives painting the bridge, the whole bridge is never freshly painted. This is the problem of trying to remove obscurations one-by-one.
However, the path of tantra enables us to directly merge with the nature of the deity. The immediacy of this fusion is the transformation of our ordinary, alienated self into the divine form which is inseparable from the pure ground of all, the dharmadhatu.