The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
Vasubandhu. Here, the process by which the phenomenal world
evolves as perception or awareness from the seeds planted by
karma is called abhutaparikalpa—literally, the "construction of a
nonreality" or, less literally, the "imposition of false constructs."
By this process the constructs of subject and object are imposed upon
Emptiness, but the process is itself no more an entity than what it
produces: it "has the characteristic of both existing and nonexisting."
Asaiiga writes:
The construction of a nonreality occurs:
duality is not found therein.
But Emptiness is found in it,
and it is found in Emptiness.
To construct a nonreality, says Vasubandhu, is to construe awareness
as being bifurcated into a subject and an object, but, when
freed from this dualism, the same nonreality is Emptiness. He
quotes from Asanga's work, Stage of the Bodhisallva: "When something
does not exist someplace, one sees truly that it is ' empty' with
regard to it; and when something remains there, one knows that it
is really there." 150
When nonreality is emptied of subject and object,
what remains—what is "really there"—is Emptiness. Thus the
metaphysical axiom of public reality is reasserted: nonreality exists,
since it occurs, but it nonexists as a duality; everything is determined
to be neither one-sidedly real nor one-sidedly unreal. And this, says
Asanga, is the Middle Way.
Given the ontological status of nonreality, karmically impelled
awareness hypostatizes the appearance of duality and obscures—"defiles"—the
substratum of Emptiness. If the Emptiness of events
were not defiled, says Vasubandhu, then all beings would be liberated
even without effort; but if events were not Empty—if there
were no "purity"—then any undertaking for the sake of liberation
would be fruitless, for we would all be bound implacably by the
causal chains of nonreality.
Thus awareness takes place, evolving psychologically in eight
forms, the first six of which are (1-5) the five sense perceptions and
(6) mental perception—the perception of mental events such as
dreams and memories, and the faculty of discrimination and
attention with regard to the sensory input of the five senses. These
m a
y be diagramed as follows: