Diamond Cutter

Right, lets do another book discussion, probably the last one for Blogtober 2020. Today's book is Thich Nhat Hanh's The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. This book is Thay's explanation and commentary on the famous Buddhist Sutra, Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra, or also known as the Diamond Sutra. And it is also one of the most difficult sutras to understand! Even up till now, I still haven't fully grasped it haha. I think I will give this book another read one day.

I once read this sutra in the temple once. And of course it's made more complicated with the fact that I read it in Chinese hahaha. This book cleared up a lot and wow, this is truly a wonderful sutra. I used to wonder why it's called the Diamond Sutra. Turned out the real name is actually the "Diamond Cutter" sutra. And the reason why it's called a cutter, is because it cuts through our illusion!

What illusion you might ask? It's the illusion of self. I'm happy that I read this book after I read Mingyur Rinpoche's book, cause it helped me clear a lot of things about non-self haha.

Once again, it's rather a difficult book to explain fully in a blog post. But Thay, as usual, has made the commentary on the Sutra into something very pleasant and easy to comprehend text. I read his commentary on the Prajnaparamita Sutra too and it's very enlightening as well.

Personally, I think the sutra has been wonderfully summarised into this passage in the book:

"Whatever a bodhisattva thinks, says and does can give rise to limitless virtue and happiness, but he or she is not caught in this. When we volunteer to wash the dishes, if we think that our work will bring us some happiness or merit in the future, we are not true bodhisattvas. We only need to live joyfully in each moment while we wash them. After they are washed, we don’t need to tell everyone that we have just finished washing their dishes. If we do that, our work will have been a waste of time. Washing the dishes just to wash the dishes, on the other hand, brings us inestimable virtue and happiness."

I think this passage talks beautifully about doing things without a "self". Via washing dishes. How often do we actually do this? To do things for the sake of doing it. Not because we dread it, not because we "love" to do it, not because someone wants us to do it. If we can practise doing this, I think we will be able to "freely" do many things without being chained into the torments of egoism. 

We shouldn't just limit this to doing good deeds, but hmm, possibly, everything!