While cleaning out some boxes I found this small text written by Kalu Rimpoche. While many who read this may not understand some of the references to Tantric Buddhism, I think the fundamental import is very clear. It's all about our understanding of things and how errors in that understanding underpin our predicament...
There is nothing to be gained, nothing to be found which is not there already.
Truth is so simple, Buddhahood is so simple, Bodhicitta is so simple.
Truth is here, even in this very cell. Truth is in you. The silence, sunyata is in you. You are the silence, you are the truth; you are the Buddha. It is here at this moment, so simple and so near. Yet we make it so distant when it is so near, so complicated when it is so simple. Do you know what it is like to be ready to set out, to be at the roadside and beside your motorcar, but to have lost the way?
You are the Buddha.
Then why do you not feel it? Why do you not know it? Because there is a veil in the way, attachment to appearances, the belief that you are not Buddha, that you are a separate individual, (an atma). If you cannot remove this veil wholly and at once, then you must dissolve it little by little.
It is because we have made what is simple so complicated, and what is so near so distant, that complex exercises, mandalas, tantric meditation, the creation of mental images, yoga and so on, are necessary. A complex discipline is necessary in order to deal with all the aspects of the human being, all the aspects of that barrier which we have set up between us and truth.
But, for someone who wished to be persuaded, who wished to know that that is so near and so simple, all those techniques which are the inheritance of Tantric Buddhism and for which it is famous, all that skill would be completely useless.
-H.E. Kalu Rimpoche, 1970
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