I would say overall that I believe we do not meditate enough in general, and especially not enough single-pointed meditation on emptiness.
A rather useless belief. One should care about one's own meditation, rather than going around posting unwarranted guesses about the meditation of others.
There is certainly a need for study to become clear, but more oft than not in this degenerate age, when examining our personal time closely, we clearly prefer the stimulation of intellect over actual concentration on virtuous objects.
Again a useless, unwarranted guess. Please talk about your own personal time and how virtuously or not you use it, which might be a most fascinating topic for many of us, but please refrain from advancing fanciful, patronizing, and self-promoting opinions about others.
Unless, of course, your usage of “we” and “our” is just the royal plural, as when Maggie Thatcher majestically announced that '“we” became a grandmother', or the patronizing plural, in a self-sanctifying priest-like way, to “consolate” others by suggesting that they are not alone in the sad situation you describe.
I mean no disrespect at all in saying this, but gaining deep meditative stabilization on emptiness immediately is infinitely more important than trying to figure out whether emptiness is nirvana or not.
It sounds rather ridiculous your “deep meditative stabilization” on something whose meaning you cannot even figure out. “Meditating” on something one does not understand or cannot figure out is surely the pastime of the fool.
If understanding the meanings of “emptiness” and “nirvana”, together with their distinctions, were not important and essential, then surely all the teachers, from Buddha Shakyamuni down to our lineage and present teachers, such as Je Tsongkhapa, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, and many others, would not take great pains to offer us careful and precise explanations about such meanings and distinctions, such as the previously one quoted from “Ocean of Nectar”.
Dismissing such teachings and their importance shows indeed a grossly disrespectful attitude not only towards the Dharma, but also towards all the direct and lineage gurus. You dismiss such essential teachings not because they are not important and essential, but only because you are unable to take them as personal instructions, because you are unable to make sense out of them, and because you are unable to integrate them into your meditation, let alone into your daily life.
The teaching of the old Kadampas, so much emphasized by the great and glorious Pabongkha Rinpoche, and exhaustively confirmed by his foremost disciple Trijang Rinpoche, is never to dismiss even one syllable of the holy Dharma, which would be tantamount to the great fault of abandoning Dharma, and always to take every single teaching as a personal instruction essential to reach nirvana. This is precisely what you fail to do when you dismiss correct understanding.
But how can you aspire nirvana, let alone reach it, if you cannot even understand its meaning? And how can you meditate on emptiness, let alone gain “deep meditative stabilization” on it, if you thoroughly dismiss the importance of understanding precisely what “emptiness” is or is not? If you cannot tell “nirvana“ from “emptiness”, you foolishly deceive yourself trying to gain that which is already there, and trying to “meditate“ in order to “realize” that which does not exist.
One cannot meditate on what one has not thoughtfully contemplated, and one cannot thoughtfully contemplate what one has not previously studied or heard. First to study or listen, then to think on what was studied or listened, and only then to meditate on what was thought, these are the steps taught by the Buddha, which you obviously want to abolish by proposing that people “deeply meditate” on that which they have not thoughtfully contemplated, on that which they have no clue about.
In some ways, it is enough to know that if we realize emptiness directly, we attain nirvana.
But then how can you “realize emptiness directly“ if you cannot even tell emptiness from nirvana, and if you arrogantly dismiss the careful explanations of the great teachers who took great pains to precisely point out their respective meanings and distinctions?
Just that knowledge itself should motivate us to concentrate on it single-pointedly as often as possible.
Where is the “knowledge“ if you dismiss the explanations on the meaning of the emptiness to be meditated upon, and on the meaning of the nirvana to be attained? If you dismiss the knowledge of both the path and the goal, together with the precious explanations by the great teachers about them, you are surely highly motivated to meditate only on your own pointless fantasies.
If that basic knowledge isn't very moving, this indicates that the full gravity of our predicament has not really hit us yet.
Forgetting about the “predicament” of others, the full gravity of your own predicament, which has clearly not hit you yet, is that you want foolishly to “meditate” on an “emptiness“ whose meaning you refuse to figure out, in order to attain a “nirvana” whose meaning you refuse to figure out too.
I appreciate study, and I've done a great deal of it for over 20years,
If so, why do you dismiss its importance now? This is a clear sign that your 20 years were uselessly wasted with a misguided and incorrectly motivated intellectual learning which you call “study“,
but it was Marpa Lotsawa's words in a song to Jetsun Milarepa that hit me strong - (paraphrasing as I don't have the book with me): that sometimes the search for more teachings itself becomes an obstacle; that we should concentrate on those things that touch our heart.
The meanings of emptiness and nirvana obviously did not touch your heart therefore, right? Maybe you should have chosen another subject to study, something which would have touched your heart, rather than Buddhadharma with its meaningless (to you) talks about “emptiness“ and “nirvana”.
What I see is that time is running out very quickly, not just for Dharma, but for us as an individual.
If so, why don't you try to learn Dharma with a correct attitude, rather than dismissing the teachings as “unimportant”, and why don you try to take each and every teaching as personal instruction instead of just “intellectual excitation” as you have confessedly done for the past 20 years, which is obviously why you have developed the pompous, patronizing, priest-like, hypocritical attitude of displaying a false concern for the time which is running 'for “us” as an individual' while obviously failing to take care of yourself and of your own time.
I have begun to really appreciate what elderly folks mean when they say life passes in the blink of an eye. If we spend most of our time studying rather than meditating on the essentially points of the instructions, what a shame to have missed out on a golden opportunity to go deep, and go far.
If you had studied with the proper motivation, this very study would have brought you to fruitful meditation, rather than being the waste that even you recognize it was in your case. And since your “meditation“ is not the outcome of proper study, it is not an actual meditation but just a hollow pretense serving only to inflate your ego and make you so grossly dismissive of the Dharma.
Imprints of studying Dharma are wonderful. Imprints of realizing Dharma is even better.
The sad thing is that your imprints are neither of studying nor of realizing Dharma, but rather of dismissing and abandoning it, and of uselessly wasting your life with wrong study and wrong meditation, thus becoming the hypocritical, preposterous teacher of that which you do not practise yourself.
