Kadampa Precepts 3

"Once the venerable Atisa was staying at Nyay-Thang, south-west of Lhasa. He was asked by the teachers of Shang-na-chung, Kyur, and Hlang-tsang, 'What are the teachings of logic (pramana)?"
Atisa replied, "There are many, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, all of which are endless chains of ideation. They are not necessary, and there is no time to be wasted on them. It is time to condense the essential meaning of the Teaching"
One of the teachers then asked, "How do you condense the essential meaning of the
Teaching?"
'Practice love, compassion, and Bodhi-mind toward all sentient beings. Make effort to
accumulate merit and wisdom on behalf of them all. Dedicate all roots of virtue to the
attainment of Buddhahood together with all sentient beings, whose number would fill the sky. Understand that all these things are empty of self-nature, like a dream or a magician's illusion." 

Don't forget that Atisa came from the University of (Vikramasila) and he had studied
logic and many other subjects and was quite an expert in it. The word for logic is pramana. Pramana means 'a source of valid cognition', and logical studies were pursued very very vigorously throughout the whole medieval Indian period both by Buddhists and non-Buddhists. In fact it was the Buddhists who started it to a great extent. The Buddhist idea was that the Bodhisattva should be able to convert and convince as many living beings as possible, therefore he has to be able to persuade them and convince them. Which meant he had to have reasonings at his disposal, he ought to be able to reason, he should understand the science of reasoning, in other words should understand logic. 
But eventually it became a sort of study in itself and there were tremendous discussions and controversies about various fine points of logic. And an immense
logical tradition developed to which both the Buddhists and Hindus contributed. 
So Atisa is apparently discouraging the study of logic, and he says, 'there are
many', that is many teachings of logic, 'both Buddhist and non-Buddhist all of which are endless chains of ideation. They are not necessary, and there is no time to be wasted on them. It is time to condense the essential meaning of the teaching. 
One of the teachers then asked, how do you condense the essential meaning of the teaching?.' 

First of all, 'Practice love, compassion and Bodhi-mind toward all sentient beings'. 

In other words love and compassion practised to the extent of egolessness, these constitute the Bodhicitta. Sometimes it is said that ones love and compassion should pass through the fires of the Voidness and re-emerge the other side, purified, and they would then be the Bodhi-citta. 
The general Theravadin view is that it is a samatha type practice and that you cannot gain Enlightenment, you cannot develop insight, even, simply by practising the metta bhavana. But this would seem to be doubtful, at least from the Mahayana point of view. 
when we had the reading of the Karaniya Metta Sutta it rather seemed from the end of that Sutta that metta could lead quite naturally into insight Which would be more the Mahayana point of view. Because you make the metta infinite and you make it equal to all living beings. If this equal love towards all is developed to an infinite extent this surely amounts to, at least a form of vipassana, even a form of Bodhicitta. So one mustn't too rigidly separate the samatha from the vipassana or think of the metta bhavana too exclusively in samatha terms. 
When you have equal love towards all then you have equanimity, 
I think the trouble is we think of insight and egolessness and so on, much to much in abstract, metaphysical terms rather than in terms of actual concrete living attitudes and behaviour. We speak in terms, for instance, of realizing the truth of egolessness, but what we really mean is being unselfish. Being unselfish or being egoless. 

And then finally, 
'Understand that all these things are empty of self nature, like a dream or a magician's illusion'. 
Try to see them as something completely spontaneous and free, detached from any subject, any agent, anyone who is doing these things as a separate subject apart from the actual action itself. So this represents Wisdom in the full sense. 
It means that seeing things as events of which there is no subject separate from the
event itself. Separate in the sense of subject and object. 
in loving and compassionate activities... you lose all sense of self. That you are just an impersonal force, as it were, operating. Although impersonal, in another sense you are more personal than ever. Then that impersonal operation in that way would be the Bodhicitta. It's a personal impersonality. I say personal impersonality because usually if you say someone is impersonal this suggests coldness and formality but it isn't impersonal in that sense but only in the sense that when you perform the action there is no sense of a subject of the action, a subject performing that action as distinct from the action itself. 

This is the sort of thing that the teaching of Sunyata is getting at. Life is bigger than your ideas about life. Life cannot be reduced to your ideas or to any system of your ideas. This is what sunyata really means, about higher and higher levels of the experience of life. That life is unique and indefinable, unconceptualizable. 
The Mahamudra is usually described as a direct application of the Sunyata principle, if you can call it that .