Some might react to this, saying, ‘My word! Not agreeing that it is anything at all, and still professing it to be a nature that is an accidental unfabricated something that does not rely on anything else; your assertions are completely contradictory!’
Let me explain. You haven’t understood the point the Treatise is making. Its intent is this: If the interdependently arisen nature of the eyes and so forth was of the nature that immature beings perceive them to be, that nature would be something mistakenly understood, and a life of purity would then be meaningless. But since this is not its real nature, to find out what that is, a life of purity has meaning. It is from the perspective of the relative that we express it to be unfabricated and not dependent on anything else. And this, which immature beings cannot see, is considered the nature. And being in that fashion, the ultimate is neither an existent thing nor a non-existent thing, since it is by nature pacified. And the Master does not only assert this nature for himself, but as this point can potentially be convincing to others, this nature is presented as something provable to both parties.
Some say that the nature of something like fire is that it is hot and so forth, but this is completely unacceptable, because in being interdependently arisen it is something artificial and reliant. It does not make sense to say that since it is something existent it does not have artifice and is not reliant on something else, because when there is a relationship of attributes it is not something with any conclusive reality, and such aspects have relevance on the relative level. But enough digression. We shall now return to the main topic.
By saying that the eyes and so forth are empty of being eyes and so forth, their emptiness of a true nature has been made clear. It is not an emptiness of one thing being empty of another, as if saying that the eye is empty because it has no inner creator, or is empty of a real dualism of subject and object.
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Chapter 1: Pramuditā
