PRESENTED TO THE BUDDHA CENTER ON AUGUST 10 AND 13, 2013, AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2024.

In previous talks, we discussed the importance of wisdom in the spiritual quest. However, what kind of wisdom is this? The Buddha compares wisdom to the lights of the moon, sun, and fire; he declares the light of wisdom to be greater than these. In a remarkable simile, in a sermon presented, not to monks, but to nuns, the Buddha compares the supermundane wisdom of the teaching to a butcher’s knife “that cuts, severs and carves away the inner defilements, fetters, and bonds just as the butcher cuts, severs, and carves away the inner tendons, sinews, and ligaments of a cow.” This striking simile is remarkable, in the context of the universal Indian veneration for the cow and the quasi-tradition of Buddhist vegetarianism (I say “quasi,” because the Buddha never made vegetarianism mandatory).

The Indian reverence for the cow must be very ancient. The Rigveda says, “[t]he fiend who consumes flesh of cattle, with flesh of horses and of human bodies, who slaughters the milk producing cow, O Agni, tear off the heads of such with fiery fury.” Nevertheless, the ancient brahmans also sacrificed cows and ate their meat in a ritual context. The Buddha’s words must have struck the ears of his listeners as a powerful and even offensive metaphor. Perhaps he designed to offend the Brahmans, to shake them up, who the Buddha criticized openly, often, and severely. The Buddha may also have been calling attention to the sacred context of this ritual slaughter, not unlike the Western notion of “eucharist.”

Perfect View

The Buddha identifies eight conditions for developing true wisdom. These conditions include an attitude of reverence toward a teacher. The teacher may include a fellow monk – another indication of the Buddha’s egalitarianism. Also included are receiving teachings from a teacher; physical and mental withdrawal; ethical self-restraint; investigating and penetrating the teachings; effort directed toward abandoning the unwholesome and cultivating the wholesome; not engaging in rambling and pointless talk, either talking about the teaching or keeping silent; and deeply realizing the truth of change.

When asked, “What is Perfect View,” synonymous with the realization of wisdom, Sariputta, renowned as the arhant foremost in wisdom, identifies sixteen realizations. These realizations constitute Perfect View, viz., understanding the root of the wholesome and the unwholesome; the four “nutriments” so-called, which include food, contact, volition, and consciousness; the truth of suffering; ageing and death; birth; existence; attachment; desire; feeling; contact; the six senses; name and form; consciousness; volitional formations; ignorance; and the taints, consisting of sensuality, existence, and ignorance. These realizations lead to the realization of the Eightfold Path. Twelve of these, starting with ageing and death and ending with ignorance, correspond to the twelve links in the chain of cause and effect. These include three of the four nutriments.

The Five Aggregates

The Buddha says that his enlightenment arose out of a state of direct knowledge or gnosis based on the realization of the Five Aggregates. The chain of cause and effect, the general principle of interconnectedness, resolves itself into twelve links. The links consist of ignorance, volitional formations, consciousness, mind and matter (name and form), the six senses, contact, feeling, desire, attachment, becoming, birth, and ageing and dying. The Five Aggregates are a subset of this list. They consist of volitional formations, consciousness, form, perception, contact-feeling, and attachment. The latter is applied to the previous five, all rooted in desire. Thus, the Five Aggregates constitute a subset of the links, but in a different order. Perhaps the Aggregates preceded the links as an early version of the latter.

One must understand all these factors in dynamic process terms, rather than as objective elements or “things.” It is hard to convey this concept in English, due to the linguistic distinction between verbs (actions) and nouns (things). The closest one can come in English is the use of the process-participle, indicated by the suffix “ing.” Although presented in linear order, the doctrine of interconnectedness connects all the links. Therefore, they are not truly linear – the links are all aspects of a singular, aggregate, and universal process, all aspects of which condition and connect to each other. The Buddha compares this to a “hairball.” Thus, they are ultimately inseparable.

The Buddha states that the Five Aggregates are rooted in desire, the craving that constitutes the eighth link of the twelvefold chain of cause and effect. He emphasizes, through desire or intention, that one can profoundly influence the state of one’s future rebirths. The idea of self arises from attachment to the Five Aggregates. Non-attachment to the Five Aggregates based on the realization of their essential nature, results in non-identification with them. In this way, the realization of ‘not-self,’ the third characteristic of existence, arises. Another basis for the arising of the realization of not-self is the inability to control form. If form were self, then form would be amenable to change based on volition. However, this is not the case. So for the remaining aggregates. In other words, one experiences oneself as subject to the Five Aggregates. The fact that the aggregates are not subject to volition proves that the Five Aggregates are not a self.

A further subset of the Five Aggregates includes eye, form, eye-consciousness, eye-contact, and so for the remaining senses. The senses, the sensations, and the sensed altogether constitute ‘the all.’ Feeling, perception, and cause/effect, are the essential core set. The Buddha says that one cannot overcome suffering without detachment from and renunciation of the All. In a famous simile, the Buddha says that the All is burning with lust, hatred, delusion, birth, ageing and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair. Detachment liberates the mind and destroys rebirth; one has lived the spiritual life; there are no more rebirths through liberation from the taints by non-attachment. Detachment is the result of realizing the essential truth of change. In this way, one sees that the immediate causes of liberation are ultimately reducible to the realization of wisdom or insight, i.e., the realization or recognition of the true nature of beings. Ananda declares the world empty. The Mahayana further developed the ontological realization of emptiness, culminating in Dzogchen. The Buddha affirms Ananda’s insight. He declares that the world, consciousness, and the rest are empty of self. Nothing worldly is or can be self.

Samsara

The Buddha compares form to a bubble, a mirage, the coil of a banana tree, or to a magical illusion. The Buddha refers to the magician who creates the illusion of the world as doing so at a crossroads. The shamanic practice of meeting at a crossroads is a universal archetype. In India, the god Bhairava, a wrathful form of Shiva, guards the crossroads outside villages. Stone phalluses and statues of Bhairava’s watchful eyes represent him as a guardian of the boundaries. The Buddha recognizes form as inherently void, hollow, and insubstantial. It is remarkable that quantum physics explains the underlying subatomic structure of matter as quantum “froth.” It is as though one were to investigate the intricate structures of the froth of a wave breaking upon the shore. It exists for an instant and then is gone. However, if one looks at it closely and quickly enough, it contains worlds within worlds. Through this understanding, one is liberated.

We have referred to the world, the cycles of change, commonly translated as ‘existence,’ as a mirage. The Theravadin claim that the Buddha did not talk about the transdual, despite explicit references to duality and its transcendence all through the Pali Canon. The Buddha says of the world,

This world … for the most part depends upon a duality – upon the idea of existence and upon the idea of nonexistence. But for one who sees the origin of the world as it really is with correct wisdom, there is no idea of nonexistence with respect to the world. And for one who sees the cessation of the world as it really is with correct wisdom, there is no idea of existence in regard to the world. … ‘All exists’: … this is one extreme. ‘All does not exist’: this is the second extreme. Without veering toward either of these extremes, the Tathagata teaches the dhamma by the middle. 

Similarly, in the Udana the Buddha says,

There is, bhikkhus, that base where there is no earth, no water, no fire, no air; no base consisting of the infinity of space, no base consisting of the infinity of consciousness, no base consisting of nothingness, no base consisting of neither-perception-nor-non-perception; neither this world nor another world or both; neither sun nor moon. Here, bhikkhus, I say there is no coming, no going, no staying, no deceasing, no uprising. Not fixed, not movable, it has no support. Just this is the end of suffering. (Ud. 8.1)

Compare,

Here, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus: “In the seen will be merely what is seen; in the heard will be merely what is heard; in the sensed will be merely what is sensed; in the cognized will be merely what is cognized.” In this way you should train yourself, Bahiya. “When, Bahiya, for you what is seen is merely what is seen … in the cognized is merely what is cognized, then, Bahiya, you will not be ‘with that.’ When, Bahiya, you are not ‘with that,’ then, Bahiya, you will not be ‘in that,’ When, Bahiya, you are not ‘in that,’ then, Bahiya, you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering.” (Ud. 1.10)

These passages and others suggest that the Buddha did teach non-duality.

These passages imply the Mahayana doctrine of the two truths: relative and absolute. Therefore, to describe the world simply as illusory is oversimplified. Illusions do not simply “not exist.” Even if the world is illusory from the perspective of the absolute, or reality itself, it is nevertheless experienced and therefore in the sense in which it is experienced, from the perspective of the relative. The Buddha’s discussion of causality in the context of emancipation “with residue” confirms this view.

I prefer the metaphor of a mirage – a metaphor that the Buddha also used – to that of an illusion. From the latter, one may infer, absurdly, that the world is not grounded in reality. It becomes appropriate to inquire into how the world comes about in the context of the absolute, i.e., what is the ontological function of the world? The world must fulfil some function in relation to reality. The Buddha says in the face of the doctrine of change that the Four Truths are actual, unerring, and invariable. However, the doctrine of change itself is relative. The “absolute” truth of the world is also relative from the perspective of the absolute since the experience of emancipation transcends suffering.

The Nirvana Element

The Buddha refers to emancipation as the non-disintegrating, the non-manifest, the non-proliferated, the deathless, and the non-conditioned. He explicitly alludes to the ontological character of emancipation as absolute reality. The Buddha says, “There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks, there were no unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned.”

People think of emancipation as singular. I have alluded to the view of Hanshan that there are two emancipations – one imperfect, one perfect. I have also referred to the emancipation of the Buddha’s enlightenment and the emancipation associated with the Buddha’s passing. The Buddha himself identifies two emancipations – one “with residue,” and one without. The “residue” referred to is karma. One inherits causal residue from the past. Therefore, it does not seem that the realization of emancipation necessarily destroys all past cause/effects. The arhant who has attained emancipation with residue still experiences pleasure and pain. Final knowledge upon his passing completely liberates the arhant without residue. Presumably, an arhant who attains emancipation with no causal residue will die immediately upon his awakening. Arhantship is a state of perfect liberation and transcendence in which there is no experience of pleasure and pain. A bodhisattva, then, at least potentially, is an arhant with residue, the residue in this case being the karma of loving-kindness.

Karma

The common view of moral causality is that causality is the product of action. However, this is simplistic. It is more like the Jain than the Buddhist view. The Buddha says, “what one intends and what one plans and whatever one has a tendency toward: this becomes a basis for the continuance of consciousness. … But … when one does not intend and does not plan and does not have a tendency toward anything, no basis exists for the continuation of consciousness.” Non-intentionality is the true meaning of Buddhist detachment. Similarly, Jesus said, “You shall not be concerned about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be concerned for itself.” Intention and not action is the essential causal factor. Once one realizes this fully, one realizes that all rules, observances, social and ethical norms, beliefs, rituals, and practices are mere skilful means. Skilful means are not at all like the imperious absolutes that have been the bane of so many religions, Buddhism included. However, this does not mean that one becomes passive. Rather, undertake any actions without attachment which and are therefore non-intentional, not unlike the teachings of Laozi. The evidence for this is the life of the Buddha himself.

The Universal View

Some might think that the Buddha taught the entirety of the spiritual life. Therefore, there is nothing concerning the spiritual life that he did not teach. However, the Buddha, as the most recent buddha, was also the shortest-lived. He taught during the most degenerate age, when the lifespan of human beings is only 120 years. They cite for this view the statement of the Buddha that he held nothing back, holding nothing in secret. However, the Buddha directly contradicts this notion when he says, “the things that I have directly known but have not taught you are numerous, while the things I have taught you are few.” He compares the things that he has taught to a handful of leaves in relation to the leaves of the simsapa tree. The simsapa was probably rosewood, the leaves of which are very numerous. It is more correct to say that the Buddha taught what is fundamental or essential to the spiritual life. He did not teach it all. This is consistent with our view that the Buddha taught the perennial philosophy. The perennial or primordial philosophy comprises the totality of the spiritual life. In other words, the Buddha limited what he taught to the limitations of his students in this degenerate age. It follows, therefore, that the horizons of the spiritual life should open before one as one progresses, rather than being limited to what the Buddha did and said. The fundamentalist view limits the spiritual life and is therefore false.

When the Buddha says that he avoids speculation, he is not saying that the subject matter of speculation is empty of meaning. Rather, the Tathagata has experienced the truth of it all. For this reason, he avoids speculation. In its totality the teaching transcends the comprehension of his (unenlightened) audience and still does.

Revised May 11, 2024

---

---

Note

Bodhi appears to support the philosophical concept of a fundamental and non-reducible ontological dualism. Dualism has had a rather checkered history in philosophy.