They call it a tree.

On Reference, Convention, and Change.

Ego is not an object…what we call ego is really an ever-changing perception, and although it is central to our narrative story, it is not a thing. The term ego can still provide a useful reference; but we need to be careful not to set ourselves up for battling something that is not there.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Many months ago in Hong Kong, I attended a Dharma talk by Dzongar Khyentse Rinpoche. Much of what he spoke about was familiar to me, except his translation of a single word.

He spoke about the impermanent nature of all phenomena and how, through meditative practice, we can embody this understanding and bring about the end of suffering.

In order to convince ourselves that reality is impermanent, we must engage in a systematic investigation of phenomena. In the Buddhist tradition, we practice the fourfold Satipatthana, the four foundations (patthana) of mindfulness (sati). These foundations serve as four locations where we can focus our awareness and investigate the changing nature of our experience. They are the body, feelings, the mind, and mental contents. The final foundation, mental contents, refers to the categories that our mind uses to understand reality. These range from mundane and general concepts such as form, perception, chairs, dogs, people, and exalted ideas such as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

However, Khyentse Rinpoche translated the fourth satipatthana as reference points.

All reference points are impermanent.

Our mind loves the idea of stability; it constantly searches for some point or some place to hold as fixed. Reference points orient us and help us map the textured landscape of reality. We only know there if we know what here is. We only know that if we know what this is. However, all reference points are impermanent, and if we seek well-being in this lifetime, we must reconcile the duality between their necessity and their transience.

Bhikkhu Analayo writes that:

"As long as there is even a subtle sense of a somewhere, a something, or a someone, it is not yet an experience of Nirvana”

Let us explore the notion of reference and pierce through its veil of solidity.

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Physical reference points are landmarks, places, and anything tangible.

A reference point could be your house, home country, a grande monument, or a mundane object. Yet, no matter how substantial it may be - the physical world is of the nature to decay. Percy Shelley makes this poetically salient in his masterwork on the pharaoh Ramesses II, known in Greek as Ozymandias.

He writes of a huge monument that lies shattered in the desert, thousands of years old.

“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away”

Yet, on the pedestal of the once mighty sculpture, read the following words:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Ye Mighty and despair! These words may have frightened his contemporary rivals, but to us, they serve only a stark reminder that all empires will fall, and all heads must bow to the law of transience.

Rulers come and go, countries form and dissolve, and homes are built and perish - but surely physical objects are permanent?

We orient ourselves in space using the objects in our immediate vicinity, and most of these objects serve as self-evident reference points. For instance, no matter how close they get, the boundary between a coffee cup and a pencil is clear. It’s implausible that you’d ever mistake them as coinciding or being the same object.

Yet, suppose we were sensitive to infrared radiation – if the cup and pencil were the same temperatures, their boundaries would begin to blur. Imagine if we could visually resolve the bacterium present on each object; again, the difference between them would begin to fade. This line of reasoning can be applied to all the entities we perceive. The boundaries between objects and how we intuitively parse the world is deeply rooted in our psychology. It is highly contingent on the specific regions of the electromagnetic, auditory, olfactory, and particulate spectrums we have evolved to be sensitive to. As such, our perception of objects, and the names that we give to them, is less a statement about reality as it actually is and more a statement about how a human with well-functioning senses perceives reality.

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The names that we give to objects are mental reference points, and the names themselves are as transient as their physical substratum.

A mental reference point is as simple as “I am me,” “My family consists of so and so,” “I believe in X,” or “This is called a chair.” We can also have shared mental reference points that become physical - we call these conventions.

In the 12^th century, King Henry I of England proclaimed that a yard was the distance from his nose to the thumb of his outstretched arm. If the King was different, or if someone else was in charge of fixing the length of a yard, then that unit would have been different. I think that everything works like that – everything is a convention – a product of the human situation. Yet, for the sake of progress, we need to take conventions seriously. The creation of the International System of Units (SI), which consists of seven basic quantities from which we derive all other units of measurement, is an example of a basic convention shared by the global scientific community.

Yet, while holding these conventions seriously, we must also hold in frame their transience. Spiritual well-being abides in this liminal space.

“Those who believe in substantiality are like cows; those who believe in emptiness are worse.” The Mahasiddha Saraha

Saraha gets right to the point: do not be extreme. If you take reality as substantial and enduring and all reference points as eternally fixed, you have been afflicted by delusion. Similarly, suppose we insist that everything is arbitrary and lose sight of the usefulness and necessity of reference points, using their contingency as an excuse to shirk responsibility. In that case, we have equally been afflicted by delusion.

We must discern the context of here and now - ever mindful of the situation at hand and never falling victim to a one-sided view of phenomena. Use reference points and conventions as they lend themselves to a given situation - then let them go as you would any other tool. A life lived in this way; a life lived in the reality beyond reference, is magical.

The world's vibrant luminosity would again shine if we could pick up and put down ideas with the same ease as physical objects.

Some beings live like this. They have walked the spiritual path to the end. They enjoy their time, marvel at the world, and laugh tremendously at the wonder of it all.

“Trungpa Rinpoche told this story about how he once was sitting in a garden with Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of his most important teachers. They were just enjoying their time together in the beautiful setting, hardly saying anything, simply happy to be there with each other. Then Khyentse Rinpoche pointed and said, ‘They call that a “tree,”’ and both of them roared with laughter. For me this is a wonderful illustration of the freedom and enjoyment that await us when we stop being fooled by our labels. The two enlightened teachers thought it was a riot that this complex, changing phenomenon, with all its leaves and bark and fragrance, could be thought of merely as a ‘tree.’ As our labels loosen their grip on us, we too will start to experience our world in this lighter, more magical way.”

Ani Pema

It is as it is.

Sasha