PRESENTED TO THE BUDDHA CENTRE ON JULY 20 AND 23, 2013 AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2024.

The Buddha unmasked attachment, ego-conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. He laid bare the gratification and danger of the world. The gratification of the world attracts beings to rebirth in the world. The danger of the world attracts beings to transcendence. Although the Buddha realized these truths prior to his enlightenment, he did not claim to have discovered the way leading to the escape from rebirth until he became enlightened. Following his discovery of the way of transcendence, he proclaimed the solution to the problem posed by the dichotomy of gratification and the danger of worldliness.

When the Buddha was staying in Jeta’s Grove, in Anathapindika’s Park, he discussed these issues with the wanderers of other sects. With respect to the gratification and danger of the world, the wanderers and the Buddha agreed. With respect to how to escape from the world, the Buddha disagreed with the wanderers, stating that they did not understand the way of escape from the world in relation to sensual pleasures, form, and feelings. He declared that their doctrines in this regard were deficient and prone to error. In these respects, the Buddha declared his doctrine superior.

To illustrate this point, the Buddha compared the wanderers of other sects to blind men trying to describe an elephant. According to this famous simile, some blind men explored various parts of an elephant – the head, an ear, a tusk, the trunk, the body, a foot, the buttocks, the tail, and the tuft at the end of the tail. Limited by their inability to perceive the elephant, the blind men declared the part that they experienced to be the whole elephant. Thus, those who experienced the head declared the elephant to be like a water jar. Those who experienced the ear said that an elephant is like a winnowing basket. Those who experienced the tusk declared the elephant to be like a plowshare. Those who experienced the trunk said that an elephant is like a plow pole. Those who experienced the body said that the elephant is like a storeroom. They all disagreed with each other and, because they disagreed, fell into disputatiousness.

In this brilliant simile, like Plato’s famous metaphor of the cave, the elephant is the teaching, and the blind men are those who do not know the teaching or know only one aspect or part of the teaching. Similarly, the adherents of sects, whether Buddhist or non-Buddhist, see only one aspect. Not knowing the whole, they fall into disputatiousness.

One sees this very keenly in the world today. Muslim fights with Jew, Christian fights with Muslim, Hindu fights with Buddhist, Chinese fight with Tibetans, and Buddhists all fight amongst themselves, each one convinced that their religion is best, yet everyone sees just part of the whole. In fact, the Buddha says that, because this problem is so acute, it is the major cause of unwholesomeness: “I do not see even one other thing on account of which unrisen unwholesome qualities of mind arise and arisen unwholesome qualities of mind increase and expand so much as on account of wrong view.” Our time is not vastly different. The truth of the teaching does not lie in any part, but in the whole. One might call this the perennial or primordial philosophy, the realization that underlying all religions and world views there is one, comprehensive, integral spiritual truth, which can only be discovered by comparing, collating, and reconciling all spiritual beliefs by means of questioning and logical syncretism. This approach leads to its logical conclusion, the single or universal vehicle, in which one mutually harmonizes and reconciles all dissenting beliefs through a process of comparison, analysis, reconciliation, and transcendence (Jung’s “transcendent function”).

Samsara literally means ‘faring on.’ It refers to the process of rebirth, essentially cyclical in nature. Birth gives rise to life. Life gives rise to death, which leads to further rebirth based on unripened karma, in an endlessly recurrent, continuous cycle. The concept of the world is essentially involved with the idea of time. Life, death, and rebirth are a universal process that does not apply merely to human beings. It applies to all living beings. Indeed, it applies to all phenomena. It is the essence of each moment, the essential nature of which is change.

No matter how closely one examines anything, it can be further subdivided into constituent processes and conditions. All phenomena are impermanent and lack indivisible particularity. This recursive deconstruction undermines the very idea of inherent essence. The realization that all things are non-particular and non-local reveals a fundamentally relational and processual ontology. This is not a reification but a de-hypostasization: an ontological affirmation of the doctrine of no-self.

This leads to the realization that all existent things are essentially impermanent and empty, which leads to emancipation. Emptiness is no different from mind or sentience. Ontological emptiness is the essential realization that underlies the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. There is no substantive substrate modified by processes. Rather, process itself is the essential nature of reality. It is rather like the vibrating “rubber bands” of string theory.

The foregoing description of reality leads to the realization that the world itself is essentially infinite both in extent and in duration. Finite objects and experiences precipitate out of this “quantum” reality, but the world itself has no beginning. How can time have an originating moment? How can there be a time before time? The Buddha says, “this world is without discoverable beginning. A first point is not discerned by beings roaming and wandering on hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving.” In terms of the law of moral causality, based on the identity of cause and effect, every cause is equally an effect and every effect is equally a cause. There are no uncaused effects, and no ineffective causes. The identity of cause and effect is the basis of the Buddhist rejection of the notion of theism. Theism posits a First Cause, itself uncaused or self-caused. The Buddha realized the self-contradictory nature of a First Cause. If God is self-caused, the Buddha reasoned, why not simply posit the self-caused nature of reality itself? Thus, there is no necessity to posit a creator. Simply posit the beginninglessness of existence as such. In this way, one also realizes the ineffable identity of the world and nirvana, the finite and the infinite.

Despite the Buddhist doctrine of the beginninglessness of the world, the Buddha clearly states that one can transcend the world. Through the realization of one’s essential nature, the Buddha-potential, one discovers its essentially mirage-like nature. Thus, one can control karma and thus liberation from it. The transcendence of the world leads to a metaphysical quandary, for, if the world is beginningless, how can it have an end? Let us look at this more closely, in terms of the individual karmic continuity.

Since the world is beginningless, this means that each mindstream is co-extensive with it. The Buddha says,

For a long time, monks, you have experienced the death of a father … the death of a brother … the death of a sister … the death of a son … the death of a daughter … the loss of relatives … the loss of wealth … loss through illness; as you have experienced this, weeping and wailing because of being united with the disagreeable and separated from the agreeable, the stream of tears that you have shed is more than the water in the four great oceans. For what reason? Because, monks, this world is without discoverable beginning. … It is enough to experience revulsion toward all formations, enough to become dispassionate toward them, enough to be liberated from them.

In other words, transcendence arises within the world because of the experience of the world itself. At some point in this process, out of the blind instinctual craving that is the world, beings achieve a level of complexity where the realization dawns, either because of hearing the teaching or even without hearing the teaching, that the world itself is inherently unsatisfactory. Because of the realization that the world is unsatisfactory, one formulates the desire or intention to escape. Eventually, this desire or intention toward transcendence results in the realization of transcendence itself, and emancipation. The realization itself is identical with the attainment, but this process may take eons to develop, and more eons to be established, consisting of millions or even billions of rebirths, or it may be instantaneous. In either case, it is ultimately attributable to this realization of unsatisfactoriness. Thus, the realization of unsatisfactoriness arises in time and eventually results in the annihilation of time, at least for the individual.

Paradoxically, this realization occurs in time and results in the liberation from time. It is a finite process, and yet the world itself is infinite. The great Dzogchen text, the Kunjed Gyalpom says, “Never having been born, it cannot cease.”  

Buddhism refers to the three times – past, present, and future. Causality creates this experiential structure. One experiences it as the sequence of cause and effect. However, neither the past nor the future exists, any more than cause and effect exist as separate entities. One imagines that they exist because of memories encoded in the brain. Memories create the perception of past causes. From the notion of past causes, one extrapolates future effects, but memory is just information. It too exists in a single timeless moment, the present.

Paradoxically perhaps, the essential nature of the present is change. One also distinguishes cause and effect. Upon analysis, one realizes that these are not two things. They too are singular; every cause is also an effect, and every effect a cause. These are all manifestations of the non-dual.

In this way, one realizes that karma itself is singular, momentary, and ever-present. What one calls the karmic continuity or mindstream is just a perception. Therefore, rebirth too is just a perception. It is as illusory as the world itself. This is not to say that rebirth does not occur in an existential sense. The Buddha clearly taught that rebirth is experienced.

One may doubt the historical veracity of the specific rebirths described in the Pali Canon, especially the Jataka tales. These stories are largely Indian folklore. However, the concept itself pervades the canon; it is hard to believe either that the Buddha did not teach this or that he himself did not experience past-life memories. The whole canon attests to the fact that he did. We are not contesting the phenomenon of rebirth. Rather, we are contesting its nature.

Rebirth is right here, right now. It is the essential nature of present, momentary, changeable being. Once one realizes this fact, the whole problem of the world falls away. One is being reborn continuously, right now, right here. The now is all there is. It is the essence of the experience of the present.

The ignorance at the root of the volition or intention to be reborn also exists right here and now as its essential nature. The potential for awakening also exists right here, now, and nowhere else. Therefore, awakening itself also exists right here, now, and nowhere else.

There are an infinite number of these moments; reality differentiates itself infinitely. Just in the time it took to read this talk, I am dying and being reborn countless times. I am not you and you are not me; neither my realization nor my emancipation are yours, nor yours mine; there is a metaphysical point of view; there is individuality. Being singular, it is inherently indestructible and therefore immortal, or “deathless,” as the Buddha said. What one experiences as cause and effect is simply the progressive realization of one’s individual relationship with all that is. It defines and limits our momentary experience of the present. It is our “identity,” but it is not an isolated self. It is not a ‘thing.’ It is a process.

The body is no more than an assemblage of such points of view. It is a colony of beings. Karma interconnects all these beings. Extending outward, the body includes all beings ultimately. One speaks of a sequence of such points of view. This is just an illusion. There is only the singular momentary point of view that changes continuously. This dynamic process generates the illusion of time, the world, rebirth, and everything. It is all rooted in volition. The essential nature of reality must be volitional. If it were not essentially volitional, something would condition it, but what can the absolute be subject to other than itself? To be subject to nothing other than oneself is the definition of volition. Thus, to become awakened all that is necessary ultimately is to choose to be awakened, to realize that one is already awakened. One chooses to be what one already is essentially. One needs nothing else. The difficulty of doing this is not because the task is complex. It is because it is simple. In fact, it is the simplest thing in the world.

One might object that this view of the infinitely differentiated now contradicts the Buddha’s doctrine of “no-self.” But this objection depends on a superficial understanding of what the Buddha was actually rejecting. It is striking, upon reading the Pali Canon, how frequently the Buddha refers to the self (attā or attan)—and yet how consistently he refuses to affirm it as anything permanent, autonomous, or ultimate.

The word attā is the Pali form of the Sanskrit ātman, which literally means “breath.” According to the Pali-English Dictionary, it was understood in early Indian animistic thought (and elaborated in the Upanishads) as “a small creature, in shape like a man, dwelling in the heart,” which “escapes the body in sleep or trance” and survives bodily death as an immortal essence. This is what the Buddha rejected: not the experience of subjectivity, but the metaphysical reification of that experience into an eternal substance.

The modern English rendering of anattā as “no-self” is misleading. It has led to confusion among English-speaking Buddhists, often giving the impression that the Buddha denied the reality of lived individuality altogether—an absurd conclusion, since here we are, sentient, reflective, and engaged in the very discourse that denies our fixed existence. What the Buddha denied was not the presence of experience, but its imagined permanence. The Buddha denied the hypostasized continuity of the self, not its phenomenal coherence. The sense of “I” arises, but it is a constructed event, not a metaphysical essence.

The Buddhist doctrine of anattā, often translated as ‘not-self’ or ‘no-self,’ is perhaps better rendered as selflessness—not in the moralistic sense of altruism, but in the metaphysical sense of the self’s insubstantiality. It is not that the self does not appear, but that it does not persist, does not possess essence, and cannot be found upon analysis. What we call ‘I’ is a contingent designation for a stream of causes and conditions—coherent, yes, but ultimately empty.

The English word ‘self’ comes from the Indo-European root meaning ‘separate,’ ‘apart.’ It refers to individuality or the metaphysical point of view. ‘Soul,’ referring to the spiritual and emotional part of a person, is a much better translation of the Pali word. What the Buddha is denying is the reality of a soul, a living being associated with the heart, separable from the body, permanent, changeless, and intrinsically blissful. The idea of the metaphysical point of view does not correspond at all to the Pali concept that the Buddha rejects. It is more akin to what Mahayanists call the mindstream. This concept resurfaces in Einsteinian relativity in the idea of the four-dimensional continuum. The metaphysical point of view is non-spatial, non-local, non-extended, dynamic, and neither different from nor identical with what one experiences. Although one experiences it as a continuum, its essential nature is non-continuous and momentary. The mindstream is the transdual reality of the self. It is not identical with the concept of a soul. It is more like the essential idea of proliferation of differentiation.

The fact that all through the Pali Canon he refers constantly to the Deathless shows the absurdity of the notion that the Buddha rejected the idea of a person in any sense. Thus, he clearly posits immortality in some sense. The irreducible is simple, indivisible, permanent, changeless, and blissful. This is the teaching, the object of realization. Change itself posits permanence. To say otherwise is to posit the error of nihilism. The Buddha explicitly rejects this.

The Buddha does not refuse to discuss doctrines like eternalism and nihilism, etc. because he has no theory of ontology. Rather, it is because of the inherently confusing and paradoxical nature of the transdual. Whenever the Buddha seems to reject these doctrines, or avoids their discussion, they are always set up as systems of logical opposites, the so-called tetralemma. This structure indicates the paradoxical nature of the transdual. The transdual must be the essential nature of reality in its ultimate or absolute aspect. The non-recognition of the transdual has become the source of endless confusion, especially amongst the adherents of the Theravada sect.

Buddha Centre, Saturday, August 17, 2024.