Trikaya

Today is Friday (TGIF), September 17th, the 260th day of the year 2021.  105 days remain until the end of the year. Today is the day of honest speech, and with it, the elimination of lying, silencing of dissent, abusive language, and two-faced speaking. 

It's Reinhold Messner's birthday.  Messner is an Italian mountaineer and explorer and in my opinion, the  greatest  mountain climber of our time, probably of all time.  In 1978, along with climber Peter Habeler, Messner made the first ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen.  Two years later, he made the first solo ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen, a feat he accomplished during the challenging monsoon season.  He was the first climber to ascend all fourteen peaks over 8,000 meters (26,000 feet) above sea level. He has a long list of "first ascents" and of difficult "first routes." Messner was the first to cross Antarctica and Greenland with neither snowmobiles nor dog sleds. In 2004, he crossed the Gobi Desert alone.  It's almost impossible to compile even a short list of mountaineering firsts without mentioning Messner's name at least once, if not several times.  Happy 77th, Reinhold!

It's a dreary, overcast day in Atlanta, but they tell me the sun rose at 7:23 a.m. somewhere behind all those clouds.  It will set at 7:40 p.m. this evening.  After sunset, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn would be visible in the night sky but for the clouds, and Neptune would be visible with binoculars or a telescope.  The waxing gibbous moon is 88% full and will rise at 6:13 p.m. and set at 4:45 a.m.  

Hurricane watch: the remnants of Nicholas are still lingering over the rain besodden Louisiana bayou. The disturbance out in the Atlantic has already moved north to the approximate latitude of Virginia, and appears very unlikely to impact anything south of New York City, if it even makes landfall at all.  Meanwhile, two other storms, both with the potential of becoming hurricanes, are currently crossing the Atlantic from Equatorial Africa, so we need to keep an eye on them.  For now.

I've started reading Cixin Liu's trilogy, The Three Body Problem.  I'm not far enough in yet to know what the "problem" is, but there is a three-body doctrine in Buddhism.

As I understand (or misunderstand) it, early Buddhist teaching, and current Theravadin Buddhist dogma, holds that a Buddha, and only a Buddha, has three "bodies." The three bodies, or trikaya, include the physical form, the dharmakaya, this sack of skin in which we go through life.  But since everything is intimately interconnected with everything else ("everything is everything"), the whole universe is our second body, the sambhogakaya.  Finally, a Buddha has a third body, the so-called "reward body," known as the nirmanakaya.  As only a Buddha can attain the nirmanakaya, only a Buddha can know what it is.

Sometime around the 2nd or 3rd Century A.D., Buddhism went through a transformation and the Mahayana school emerged. I won't go through the differences between Mahayana and Theravadin Buddhism now, but the Mahayanans taught that everybody, not just Buddhas, have the three-body trikaya. In addition to the corporeal dharamakaya and universal sambhogakaya, we can realize the reward body, the nirmanakaya, upon understanding the simultaneous existence of the two other bodies. When we realize that our bodies and our mind are one with the universe, but we experience it from the limited perspective of our individual form, we attain the nirmanakaya.

Zen Buddhism takes it one step further.  In everyday, mundane life, we occupy the physical dharmakaya, this meat skeleton we consider our "body."  But in meditation, when thought and mind drop away, we experience oneness with the universe, and attain the sambhogakaya.  The nirmanakaya is achieved when we emerge from meditation with an understanding of these dual existences - nirmanakaya is dharmakaya and sambhogakaya merged as one.  I'm told that Matsuoka Roshi, my teacher's teacher (whom I've never met), explained nirmanakaya wordlessly by crossing his middle finger over his index finger, merging two separate "bodies" (fingers) into one.

For the record, I've really only studied Zen Buddhism, so apologies if I've made errors in the Theravadin and Mahayana interpretation of the three-body problem.

Fir the record, I sincerely doubt that the "problem" in The Three-Body Problem trilogy has anything to do at all with the trikaya.