The Hero’s Journey
In that sanctioned mix of Myth and History that makes up early Sanskrit religious texts, Siddhartha Gautama rose in the moonlight streaming through the doors of his bed-chamber.
He glances a moment at his beautiful wife the princess Yasodhara, and his new-born son Rahula. He then turns and walks out in silence, passed the palace gates of Kapilavastu, the capital of his father’s kingdom.

He mounts his horse Kanthaka, and rides towards the river, as Channa his faithful manservant follows. On the banks of the river, Gautama dismounts, unsheaths the sword that marks him a Kshatriya, the noble warrior-caste, and cuts his long youthful locks.

He then hands the reins of Kanthaka to Channa, and orders that he return to the palace. Without looking back, he walks into the forest. Thus begins the story of the Buddha-Dharma, the final turn, the settling denouement, in the long history of the Mother-Tradition.

The Education of Gautama

Siddhartha Gautama, later The Buddha, did not begin his journey in a vacuum of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. By his day, the Tradition of the Dharma was perhaps 1,000 years old. The core literature of the tradition, the Vedas and more importantly, theUpanishadic take on the Vedas, was well-established for at least 500 years or so, judging by the style of Sanskrit and historical cross-references in the texts.
It was into this environment, its established norms of inquiry and validation, that the young Siddhartha Gautama entered when he crossed the river into the forest.
And he began his Inquiry in the proper forms of the day. He first aligned himself with five different Gurus, each with a wide reputation for accomplishment in his particular branch of theDharmic-Tree.
And along with this direct oral tutelage, Gautama’s education as was the custom of the day, included extended study of the established texts.
The oldest two Upanishadic texts at the time of The Buddha were theBrihadaranyaka Upanishad and the Chandogya Upanishad [see the Page ‘Upanishads’]. No one seems to be able to confirm which was the earlier of the two but it is of little consequence.
For what is evident beyond debate is that Siddhartha Gautama borrowed extensively from both texts, both to extend his own understanding of the Dharma, as well as to write a new terminology to express it.
Rta
The oldest mystical expression in Sanskrit sacred text seems to be the word ‘Rta‘, famously cited 400 times in the Rg Veda [No, I have not counted it].
Rta has no formal definition although linguists have claimed a link to the English word ‘Art’, an undefinable yet evident order [ we’ll, it is Rta spelt backwards, almost; a darn good reason why they are connected].
It has been used to mean variously, ‘Divine Law’, ‘Natural Order’, ‘Earthly Support’ and such. And its most frequent comparisons are with the Chinese Tao and the Greek Logos.
Do you have a definition for the Tao?
Dharma
The role of Rta was gradually appropriated by a more versatile expression called Dharma, from the root Dhri, ‘to hold together, bind’.
Dharma has been used to mean a host of things over the centuries but the core intuition underlying it was the simultaneous presence of two seemingly contradictory ideas.
The idea of ‘The way it is’, concomitant with the idea of ‘The way it ought to be’ [ its not a wise reflex to seek stern binary divides here].
The power of the word is impressive. It became the defining core of the name for the Mother-Tradition itself.
The Upanishads
Where do you go to mark the Mother-Tradition of the Buddha-Dharma? What can one point to and say: ‘This is the heart of the Mother-Tradition?’
The unequivocal answer is ‘The Upanishads‘. That body of text at the tail end of the Veda, which from the earliest commentary, has been freely and unquestioningly granted the status by the informed within the Tradition, as the keeper of its deepest truths.
‘Upanishad’: Upa [near], ni [down], and s(h)ad [to sit]. It is as Rahasya, ‘Privileged Sacred Knowledge’, to be acquired at the ‘Knee of Listening’ of ‘The One Who Knows’.
It is Vedanta, ‘The end of the Vedas’, of Vedic Understanding, a word-play on the fortuitous convergence of the metaphorical and the literal, as the Upanishads comprise the finale of the entire Vedic opus.
The two oldest and most influential texts of the Upanishadic canon are the Chandogya and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishads [see ‘The Mother-Tradition’ for details and relevant excerpts].
And they were part of core Dharmic teaching at the time of the education of the young Siddhartha Gautama.
‘Goal’ in the Mother Tradition
The Mahavakya is an acknowledged and sanctified summary phrase expressly used with Upanishadic elaborations. A tight, often cryptic construction that packages the principal insight of the entire piece in portable, teachable form.
The Summum Bonum of the Mother Tradition can be summarized in two Mahavakyas.
From the Chandogya Upanishad: Aum Tat Sat and Tat Tvam Asi.
It can be summarized in English as follows:
‘That-ness is; That-ness is the True; Thou art That-ness’.
‘Path’ in the Mother Tradition
The means to this end vary. But the most widely authenticated one is the proposal from Yagnavalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad;
Neti! Neti!
It can be translated into English as follows:
‘It is not this! It is not this!’
Apply this rule comprehensively, uncompromisingly [see the Post ‘The Inviolable Twins] and you will find yourself back at Original Subject. The Self. Another name for ‘That-ness’.
And at its denouement, one settles in this realization [Moksha] and lives out one’s life, the program and purpose of human birth now fulfilled.
You will find the two summaries from the Chandogya, and the above delineated method from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, at the center of the commentaries, dialogues and teaching-methods of every revered teacher in the tradition, from Shankaracharya to Ramana Maharishi.
Tatha-gatha
‘I come’ said the young Siddhartha Gautama, ‘not to replace the Dharma, but to  reclaim it.’
The Buddha’s choice of appellation for himself according to the literature, was not as ‘The Buddha’ [ ‘The Awoken-One’] but as the ‘Tatha-gatha‘. ‘He who is That-ness-Gone’.
‘That-ness’ is a word chosen precisely because it files under no grammatical category, neither noun nor verb, nor any other. It fits no label, is the lexicographers torment and designed with that very purpose in mind.
Tatha-gatha, the appellation chosen by the Buddha, is a reconstruction of the same word [Tathatha] that originates in the Chandaogya Upanishad. But in that reconstruction, it gets modified by a consequential fraction. Why so?
‘That-ness’ versus ‘That-ness Gone’
From The Diamond Sutra: ‘Subhuti, if anyone should say that the Tathagata comes or goes or sits or reclines, he fails to understand my teaching. Why? Because Tathagata has neither whence nor whither, therefore is He called Tathagata‘.
‘That-ness’ is not the same as ‘That-ness Gone’.
The Buddha is not asserting anything about the nature of ‘That-ness’. For to do so would be to not have understood the nature of ‘That-ness’.
But that is precisely where the Mother-Tradition took ‘That-ness’ in its long history before his arrival. And got seriously lost.
From the Chandogya Upanishad [see the Page for the full excerpt]:
‘Then the father said: ‘Here also, my dear, in this body you do not perceive Sat (Being); but It is indeed there. Now, that which is the subtle essence—in it all that exists has its Self. That is the True. That is the Self. That thou art, Svetaketu.”
That-ness in the Upanishad was a ‘Subtle Essence’. A ‘Self’. A nuanced ‘Object’ noted from an as yet un-exhausted ‘Subject’. A description palatable only to one who has stopped short of True-Nothing and doesn’t yet have Emptyness in clear view.
The Buddha however in his modification of the appellation, is pronouncing about his own state, the state of being ‘That-ness Gone’. There is no word said about any sighted ‘Object’. Tatha-gatha is all about the Subject. Or rather the absence of it.
The Formulation of Emptyness

What about the ‘Means’ to this reformulated ‘End’?

Again, the Buddhist approach was to take the original formulation, the sanctified ‘Means’ of the Mother-Tradition, and rearrange the two lines:
‘It is not this! It is not this!’ is rewritten as:
‘It is not this! It is not: ‘It is not this!’
Its Logical-Form is now identical with the expression for Emptyness. It is the Mother SEE. The Original Koan. The first Synthetic Self-Destroying Device.
Mother and Child
The difference between the highest offering of the Mother-Tradition and that of its brilliant, questioning progeny, the Buddha-Dharma, the point where the paths sharply separate, is to be found in the addition of a suffix and the rearrangement of two lines.
The ‘Independent and Separate Subject’
In the language of the Sutra, there is nowhere to be found an ‘[Independent and Separate] ego-entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality’.
There is not anywhere to be found, either by observation or by inference, and outside of an unexamined, inherited authority and unquestioned convention, an ‘Independent and Separate Subject’.
Or in contemporary phrase, an ‘Independent and Separate Subject’ that is:
A Physical Body, a Cell, a DNA Code, a Thought, a Mind, an Awareness, a Consciousness, a Totality, a Nullity, an Unity, an Entity, an Ego [Latin for ‘I’], an Energy, a Life-Force, an Intelligence, an Observer, a Thinker, an Inquirer, a Speaker, an Actor, an Enforcer of Will, a Receiver of Experience, a Vehicle of Emotion, a Receptacle of Sensation, a Presence, an Existence, an ‘Organizing Principle’, a ‘Hidden Abstraction’, an ‘Inner Being’, a Spirit, a ‘Soul’…
‘Center, Essence, Ground’
In particular, there is no separated ‘Mind’, no independent Model-Manufacturer, sitting between my ears and behind my nose.
And no separated ‘Observer’, no independent ‘Seer’, sitting inside my eyes and beneath my brow.
There is no Center, no Essence, no Ground that is this purported ‘Independent and Separated’ Ontological Presence that is an ‘I’.
‘I Told You Twice!’
In its common English translation: ‘Neti, Neti’ [‘Not This! Not This!’]  has been traditionally understood as an injunction of reinforced, emphatic negation.
The traditional interpretation, which is no interpretation at all, has been that Yagnavalkya, with intent to crown the significance of this seminal rule, chose to repeat it twice. There is much repetition in the Upanishadic verses, largely for ease of memorization in a primarily oral tradition. But this is not one of them.
Over the centuries it appropriated for itself authoritative status as the original and proper formula for decoding the symbol ’0′ itself. [It hasn’t changed much.]
The Ever-Spinning Reel
The rule as so interpreted is incomplete and misleading. It is the common error of making linear what is in fact a self-scuttling circular loop. It has been so practiced for centuries, however fruitless the results. But there will never be result nor fruit with this formula. It is an ever-spinning reel.
For this interpretation has no natural convergence. It has not exited the Two-ness Template. The observer stands outside the formula and it enters an insidious permanent loop. The reel will spin for ever if you don’t at some point see that you are part of the movie.
No amount of negating will lead to convergence unless the negating turns in on itself. The ‘Neti‘ loop is complete only when the aim, act and agent of negation are themselves negated in full self-scuttle.
Stopping-Short of True Nothing
If you manage to get all the way to True Nothing, you will not return without a full cognition of Emptyness.  You cannot return without a full cognition of Emptyness.
If you stop-short of True Nothing, you will find Religion.
The Modeled-Self is ‘seen through’ at True Nothing, and only at True Nothing.
The Mother Tradition got stuck because it chose repeatedly to stop short of True Nothing. The assumption of the separated-self was never fully ejected in its purported denouement.
A separated-self continued its habitation in the most nuanced of commentaries and in the most confident of pronouncements.
There is no Cosmic Game afoot
Life is not a play of ‘Hide and Seek’. There is no cosmic game afoot.
It is not that you have to struggle in sustained self-mortification to find Life’s true purpose [ a common claim of all religious traditions, but begun here; see the various Posts on this].
The very notions of ‘Final Denouement’ and ‘Necessary Struggle’, of Path and Purpose, are predicated on the presence of an ‘Independent and Separate self’.
Ignorance and Enlightenment, Bondage and Liberation, Sin and Salvation, the whole Kit and Caboodle.
They all fall out of a belief system mounted on a ‘Conventional Understanding’.
The Buddha-Dharma in its highest expression says there is no such thing as an ‘Independent and Separate Self’ except in your indulgent imagination. An inherited, uninvestigated, desecrating and profane presumption that has caused endless mischief.
And it is possible to see this with complete conviction and in that very act, be ejected from it.
The Fix
By the time of the Buddha, the intent of Tathatha was egregiously miscued, hopelessly mauled beyond all possibility of reinstatement.
It had to do as always, with a stopping-short of True Nothing and proffering a modeled-view of a mystically sighted ‘Object’ which was then titled ‘Self’. The very choice of name is an alert that the ‘Subject-Object’ divide, always ejected as a pair, was still in place. A terminal state more insidious than the beginning one because it erroneously believes the Subject is no more.
A new, more transparent and tamper-proof expression had to be put-together. The Scholar-Monks of the Prajna-Paramita went back to the drawing-board to come up with a simple way to communicate their denouement.
And this time they were not going to risk another miscue. They designed the formal Self-Eating Expression [SEE], the synthetic self-destroying device that is Emptyness, that upon proper cognition took with it the Seeker.
And no Guru, no commentator, could now maul its meaning as was done with Tathatha, stalling generations of trekkers on the open-road.
This was the offering of the original verses of the Prajna-Paramita Sutra. The first scripture that finally sets forth Emptyness without equivocations, hedges, and qualifiers. The perfected formulation in other words, of this fundamental formula that was Yagnavalkya’s original and radical claim.
The First Reformation
The Buddha saw his teaching, not as a break from the past, but as the fixed-up, final link in a long chain that went back to the birth of the Dharma, the Mother-Tradition itself.
But his denouement was provably and not just as claim, the definitive insight. The insight on the nature of sight-insight itself [see the Page: ‘Prajna-Paramita‘]. The final and categorical break from the Two-ness Template in the awakening to Śūnyathā.
In a larger spirit, the Buddha saw the entry into Emptyness as the final reclaiming of the Mother-Tradition itself.
A Tradition that had now fallen low, mired as the literature of that era so copiously demonstrates, in rote-ritual, bartered rule and petitionary prayer. Virulent superstition paralyzed the devout and sophisticated cant silenced the seeker.
Similar events occurred 500 years later in Palestine as Christianity effectively birthed from Judaism at the hands of a vocal Rabbi. And 1500 years later in Germany as Protestantism broke from Catholicism with the help of a Priest, a Wittenberg Professor.
[As for Islam, the imams and mullahs have been far more successful than the prophets and priests in staying any serious intellectual revolt, in keeping the pious kneeling at prayer].
The Buddha’s attempt at reclaiming the Dharma was the first attempt at reformation. The Reformation that failed.
Exit
By the 10th Century, Buddhism as Religion and certainly its high-point, the Prajna- Paramita interpretation, was a spent force in the region of its birth.
About the same time, the symbol ‘О’, went West [via Venice] becoming the base of the ‘Hindu-Arabic’ system of Number Representation in the Decimal code. It’s original meaning, now long lost in the region of its birth, descended further to become the modern ‘Concept of Nothing’.
In the new Sangha culture, the exotic mingled with the inchoate to throw up all variations of Buddhism that was made-up of teachings read in books and heard in whispers. Pious monks with the purest of motives had reduced the Buddha-Dharma to another Religion.
The New Passage
BodhiDharma left Kanchipuram,  the most likely point of his origin, and sailed East. His way conjoined teaching with the views, practices and mediums of the day.
That is as it should be. The teaching needs always to integrate with the prejudices and paradigms, the gods and demons of the place and the period. For there is nothing outside the terrain of the teaching and that is the first teaching.
Today, a thousand years after Buddhism left its region of birth, the compass orients West. It crosses to new lands , new  centers of energized inquiry, picked up by men and women with the same spirit of defiant courage that marked the first foreign hosts.
This Site, written in American-English, speaking from a familiar dais of Western idiom, housed in a recognizable intellectual infrastructure and mounted on a wide and free medium that is the Internet, is part of the new passage.

‘Aum Tat Sat ;Tat Tvam Asi’

The Author’s ambition continues to stay alight, in spite of the manifest triumph of history over hope. The reclamation of the original and authentic Dharma in the region of it’s birth.END=NAM MO SAKYAMUNI BUDDHA.( 3 TIMES ).WORLD VIETNAMESE BUDDHIST ORDER=VIETNAMESE BUDDHIST NUN=GOLDEN LOTUS MONASTERY=THE EIGHTFOLD PATH.THICH CHAN TANH.THE MIND OF ENLIGHTMENT.AUSTRALIA,SYDNEY.20/3/2015.