The literal translation of Bhaddekarata is This Wonderful Night. The sutra is very short and poetic, and in this sutra the Buddha instructs his disciples on how to experience the enlightenment he experienced. He explains that when disciples contemplate, they should let go of their grasping of the past. They should not seek happiness and memories of the past. The mind should not seek reality in the past. The grasping should be let go. He also explains that the mind should not wander in future aspirations. The Buddha suggests concentrating on the present, recognizing the illusory nature of the present.

This teaching is important because in this sutra the Buddha emphasizes the illusory nature of the three times. The Dharma is often interpreted as explaining that there is no past, no future, and only the present.

It is worth noting that this is not what the Buddha says. He suggests concentrating on the present in order to recognize its illusory nature, and not because the present is reality. There is a huge gap between the two approaches. When we suggest concentrating on the here and now, we concentrate on the present as reality. When the Buddha suggests concentrating on the here and now, he does so in order to discover their emptiness, to discover the illusory nature of existence. The here and now is only a means, and it is not the goal. When we think that the here and now is the goal, we bang our heads against the wall of samsara. When we see the here and now as a path, as a gateway to emptiness, instead of breaking our heads, we enter into an experience of enlightenment. The Buddha describes in the sutra the illusory nature of the three times. He instructs us not to cling to the past, since all our memories of the happiness and losses we experienced in the past only bind our consciousness. There is no way to hide from the suffering of the past, and we should not seek refuge in those thoughts, since we will not find refuge in them.

The Buddha does not suggest erasing the past. In other sutras he indicates that there are memories that are important to keep. These are not memories of sensual happiness, or memories of our successes, and certainly not memories of pain we have experienced. Right memories are memories that allow us to experience the presence of the Three Treasures. There is a significant difference between memories of sensual happiness that bind us, and memories of the Three Treasures. The memories of the Three Treasures that connect us to wisdom and good deeds are not limited to the past. They are above the impermanence of time, and they belong to the liberated state. These memories are already free from grasping. What connects us to the past of the Three Treasures continues to be relevant both in the present and in the future. When the Buddha suggests not to wander in the past, he is essentially suggesting not to look for temporary things in our past: temporary pleasure or temporary pain.

The Buddha also suggests not allowing the mind to wander in the future. The intention is not to wander in our aspirations. Not to wander in thoughts about how we want our lives to be, how our bodies will feel, what thoughts to think, and what experiences to have. When a person is busy with his future desires, he is actually wandering in fantasies that are not a real future, but a structured and artificial future. The person builds his future on the basis of previous and limited experience, and due to his limitations, he can create a future image based solely on the limitations of previous experience.

This approach is not the path to enlightenment that gives us direct experience, deeper recognition and expands our capabilities. Therefore, we should not artificially create, from past information, in an artificial manner, a puzzle of a successful future. This is actually the meaning of the advice not to allow the mind to wander in the future. The Buddha suggests thinking about the future in a different way. It is appropriate for a person to have a strong aspiration to reach enlightenment. It is appropriate for him to think about how he will be freed from ignorance and the shortcomings of consciousness. These aspirations do not define what he will experience and how he will feel. It is appropriate for a person to strive to reach peace, but this is not an artificial peace that has a specific form that we can expect before we have experienced it. True peace is like an ocean. It is larger, deeper, and wider than all our ideas and experiences. This peace that we strive to reach is the real future full of uncertainty, relative to the current state of consciousness. As long as we have not reached the ocean of peace, we will not be able to know its qualities. We can believe based on the testimonies of the Buddha and our teachers, and on the intuition of our heart that allows us to believe the teachers. We know that peace liberates us from suffering. Due to right actions we develop this belief, since every good action strengthens right belief. But we still cannot imagine the liberated state. When we begin to imagine it, it begins to be limited. Therefore, the Buddha did not describe this state in words. He explained that there is no possibility of describing this state in ordinary words. The path to it can be described, based on right knowledge and right belief. When a person realizes, he knows that he has reached his desired destination, since he experiences the disappearance of all the fetters that were in the mind.

The Buddha also recommends observing the impermanence of the present. The way to observe the impermanence of the present is to see that what we perceive as the present is constructed from the actions of our five skandhas, which are impermanent and based solely on emptiness. There is nothing permanent and stable in the present, but only five skandhas that revolve within themselves: matter revolving within matter, senses and feelings revolving within senses and feelings, thoughts revolving within thoughts, desire revolving within desire, and consciousness revolving within consciousness.

When we talk about consciousness, we are talking about memory. There is memory in a temporal sense, and there is memory in a karmic sense, like a stream of consciousness. An example of this is when a person wakes up in the morning from sleep, we don't call it memory, but it is also an act of memory, since the person can remember himself, and then he wakes up in the morning. We remember ourselves. This is an expanded definition of memory. In the Buddhist Dharma, waking up in the morning is defined as the remembrance of the consciousness in the body. When we observe in this way, we discover that the world that we perceive through the senses, in fact, according to the Buddha's definition, is like a dewdrop that disappears with the rays of the morning sun, like a magician's trick, like lightning that appears in the sky and disappears. This is how the Buddha defines the present. These are not descriptions of a stable reality, but descriptions of a temporary reality that appears suddenly and suddenly disappears. When we recognize the suddenness of phenomena, the sequence of sudden actions, we can also see emptiness when phenomena appear in it as waves in the ocean. When we develop a right view of reality, we experience emptiness as an ocean, and we experience all phenomena in the world as waves in this ocean. The waves in the ocean have no nature of their own. Because of the winds and because of the changing nature of impermanence, they rise and fall, and never exist independently. This is only the totality of the ocean. This is how all phenomena behave. They are born and disappear. Every moment, before the phenomenon appeared, when it appeared, and after it disappeared, it exists only as part of the ocean. There is nothing that is not part of the ocean. There is only the illusion of uniqueness and independent existence of this or that wave. In reality, this state does not exist. This is how the Buddha defines reality as a unified totality. This definition corresponds to the enlightened state. When we reach the enlightened state, we experience ourselves as an ocean. We experience ourselves as the totality of all life, including our body, our senses and emotions, our thoughts, our will, and our memories. All of these rise and fall. In this sutra, the Buddha describes himself in the third person, as the observer, and says that this is what he discovered on that wonderful night.

This experience is the basis and essence of the entire history of the Buddha's Dharma, because when we talk about the history of the Dharma, we describe a succession of lineages of people who awakened to the direct perception of themselves as that ocean of totality. And so they guided their disciples by various means. In general, there are many schools of thought in Buddhism, and many of them talk about different methods, different techniques, and different philosophies. Buddha Dharma is an ocean, and in Buddhist culture the largest amount of scriptures was written, of all the traditions that exist in the world. Buddhism has always been based on explaining the different ways to overcome suffering. There is so much suffering in life, and there are so many variations.

The Buddhist Dharma takes many forms to eliminate all manifestations of suffering. However, with all the variety of schools, it is impossible for a person to know all the methods and techniques. It is important to remember that all the approaches, methods and techniques describe the same ocean, how rich and infinite our consciousness is. Everything that the Buddhas of the past said, the Buddhas of the present say, and the Buddhas of the future will say. Everything that is said exists in our nature, in the nature of the infinite ocean of wisdom.