Start Where You Are

part about seeing confusion is pretty accessible to all
of us, but the rest of the slogan requires discussion.
The word kaya means body. The four kayas are
dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, nirmanakaya, and sva-
bhavikakaya. You could say that the four kayas are a
way of describing how emptiness manifests and how
we could experience it.
First there’s a sense of the basic space of dhar-
makaya—dharma body. In our morning chants we
say, “The essence of thoughts is dharmakaya; nothing
whatever, but everything arises from it.” Dharmakaya
is the basic space from which everything arises, and
everything that arises is essentially spacious—not
fixed or clunky.
Sambhogakaya—the “enjoyment body”—points to
the experience that space is not really emptiness as
we know it; there’s energy and color and movement.
It’s vibrant, like a rainbow or a bubble or the reflec-
tion of your face in a mirror. It’s vivid, yet nonsub-
stantial at the same time. Sambhogakaya refers to
this energetic quality, the fact that emptiness is fluid
and vivid. Sound is often an image for sambhogakaya;
you can’t see or capture it, but it has vibration, en-
ergy, and movement.
Nirmanakaya—the third of the four kayas—
Cutting the Solidity of Thoughts
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refers to the experience that emptiness manifests in
form. Nirmanakaya is the means of communication
with others. The Heart Sutra says, “Form is empti-
ness; emptiness is form.” Nirmanakaya refers to the
fact that phenomena actually manifest. Trees, grass,
buildings, traffic, each of us, and the whole world
actually manifest. That’s the only way we can expe-
rience emptiness: appearance / emptiness, sound /
emptiness. They’re simultaneous. Whatever appears
is vividly unreal in emptiness. Emptiness isn’t really
empty in the way we might think of it; it’s vibrant
and it manifests, yet usually all we see is the mani-
festation. We solidify it, we solidify ourselves, we
solidify what we see. The whole thing becomes like
a war or a seduction, and we are totally caught in
the drama.
The fourth kaya is svabhavikakaya. Svabhavika-
kaya means that the previous three arise at once;
they’re not really three separate things. The space,
the energy, and the appearance arise together.
The slogan says, “Seeing confusion [the sense of
obstacle, the things we don’t want, the sense of inter-
ruption] as the four kayas / Is unsurpassable shuny-
ata protection.” Shunyata is protection because it
cuts through the solidity of our thoughts, which are
how we make everything—including ourselves—
concrete and separate. It cuts through the way we’re
over here and everything else is over there.
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Cutting the Solidity of Thoughts
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As we know from some of the other slogans we’ve
discussed, when confusion arises, it is part of the
path. When confusion arises, it is juicy and rich. The
sense of obstacle is very rich and can teach us. In
these practices it’s the necessary ingredient for being
able to do tonglen or work with lojong at all. But this
slogan is saying that when confusion arises not only
do you practice tonglen and connect with the heart,
but also you can flash on the nonsolidity of phenom-
ena at any time. In other words, you can just drop it.
We all know spontaneously what it feels like just to
drop it. Out of the blue, you just drop it.
For instance, on a meditation retreat there are noo-
dles for breakfast. Maybe in the beginning it seems
funny, but halfway through breakfast you find your-
self—instead of being mindful of the food, the chop-
sticks in your hand, the other people, and the good
instructions you’ve received—talking to yourself
about what a good breakfast would be, how you’d like
to have a good breakfast like your mother used to
make you in Brooklyn. It might be matzo ball soup or
tortillas and beans or ham and eggs, but you want a
good breakfast: burned bacon, like Mother used to
make. You resent these noodles.
Then, not through any particular effort, you just
drop it. To your surprise, there’s a big world there. You
see all these little lights glimmering in your empty
lacquered bowl. You notice the sadness on someone’s