Thusness

   All phenomena have the same essential nature, that is, each phenomenon is empty of its own self-existence.   All phenomena are nondual, meaning that apparent diversity is only an illusory appearance.  In whatever way any thing may seem to appear, its real essential nature cannot differ from every other thing, and this sameness is not a concept but the true fact of nonduality.  All phenomena are beyond any sort of thought fabrication because the limited human mind is not capable of conceiving correctly all the details and characteristics of everything in existence, of all the infinite causal and relative correlations and endless potentialities and possibilities inherent in the totality of conditional relations.  What is ultimately real is beyond thought constructs since it is both immanent and transcendent, within and beyond each particular objective form. Elaboration by means of concepts and ideas cannot ever truthfully or completely represent the infinity of form or emptiness. In Buddhistic thought, the one word that indicates this inconceivability is “thusness”.

    The relative and the ultimate are seen as a unity. All is thus, as-it-is. There is no interference between form and emptiness and there is no barrier between the relative and the ultimate.  Waves in the ocean cannot be isolated from the ocean; the ocean is differentiated into waves only descriptively, conceptually.  Waves are the same as the ocean, but they do have difference, but the difference and the sameness must be fused together in the mind of thusness.  There is no real duality anywhere.

“Buddhas abide in the matrix of the kosmos of real thusness, signless, formless, free from all the taints… In each mental moment they observe all things abiding in the state of true thusness; they comprehend the ocean of all phenomena.” (∼Buddhavatamsaka Sutra)