< Issue No. 2 (2006)Article
The Homology of Emotionality and Rationality (Part 2)
Guenther, Herbert V., University of Saskatchewan
Abstract
The dichotomy between emotion and reason has been a feature of western thought extending back to Plato in the 3rd century BCE. From the Buddhist point of view, however, both emotionality and rationality are seen as obscurations of the individual’s original luminous being. Rationality obscures the lumen naturale by differentiating original experience into subject and object, understood both egologically and egocentrically. Emotionality obscures the lumen naturale by responding to rationality’s depiction of reality positively or negatively, by embracing or resisting it, and by attempting to abet or curtail it. Both rationality and emotionality are biological phenomena: rationality is an intellectual obscuration and emotionality a kind of instinctual obscuration. Both together poison the atmosphere for human experiencing.
Tibetan rdzogs-chen ‘ultimate completeness’ thinking starts from the idea of Being, which—as Martin Heidegger has shown—is not a thing or being, and thus not quantifiable. It views all objects of experience from the vantage point of the integral unity of wholeness that, in its lighting-up, unfolds its inner dynamic spontaneously as a holo-movement, displaying itself and enhancing its performance and beauty. Basing himself on the sources pertaining to the emergence of rdzogs-chen thought, and elaborating the ideas of Padmasambhava, Vimalamitra and Arisingha (the Daoist Hva-shang Mahayana), the scholar-poetk Long-chen rab-byams-pa (1308-64) has given a most lucid interpretation of the homology of rationality and emotionality.