no-self | dhamma footsteps

Chiang Mai: I met somebody in a coffee shop the other day and he was saying, it’s all just words, isn’t it? We were talking about the difference between the Advaita Self and the Theravada Buddhist no-self. I was saying no-self is a deconstructed form of Self. The man in the coffee shop wouldn’t say yes or no to that (it’s all just words). Theravadin Buddhism is about seeing through the constructedness of the ordinary self we all experience as who we are. Take that to pieces through meditational investigation and wise reflection, follow the Path and you end up with the state of final deliverance, the unborn, ageless, and deathless; Nibbana.

Advaita doesn’t need to get into that because the state of non-duality is pre-existing. You can’t break it down into its parts because it’s already there. You just need to ‘see’ it. Speculative conjectures, say the Theravadins. The quest to know the Self in Brahman is simply the mind’s natural yearning for a comprehensive unity; trying to reach ‘Nibbana’ by intellectual means. What we need to do is remain grounded in actuality and by humble, sustained spiritual practice, work to liberate ourselves from the dualities contained within human experience. This living experience of things as they really are, is the starting point and framework. Buddhism attempts to diagnose the central problem at the core of human existence, dhukka and to offer a way to its solution. ‘This is suffering, this is the origin of suffering, this is the cessation of suffering, this is the way leading to the cessation of suffering.’ The Buddha didn’t say exactly what happens after that.

In Advaita there’s a kind of built-in narrative that seems to be associated somehow, more literalist than what I’m used to in the Theravadin Buddhist way. This is where I return to at the end of the day. Maybe it’s because that’s how I started out on the Path. I learned how to take things apart carefully to see how it all works; how it can be reconstructed or deconstructed and it looks like there’s no final state, the ‘world’ remains as transformation; it’s all about phenomena that are dependent on other phenomena, and nothing in the world has a true independent reality.

This is different from the Advaitist ‘absolute reality’, the single homogenous and continuous structure of Brahman, the ‘Oneness’. The question is, what’s the difference between ‘absolute reality’ and ‘no independent reality’? An intuitive sense tells me both ‘absolute reality’ and ‘no independent reality’ are relevant to the Path – I don’t see why there should be an impossible difference between them because the ‘Oneness’ includes everything. Like my friend in the coffee shop says, it’s all just words, isn’t it? Take the words away and and there’s nothing left – only conscious experience.

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‘Early Buddhism conflates subject into object. Consciousness is something conditioned, arising only when certain conditions exist. The self is merely an illusion created by the interaction of the five aggregates. The self shrinks to nothing and there is only a void; but the Void is not a thing — it expresses the fact that there is absolutely nothing, no-thing at all, which can be identified as the self.

Advaita Vedanta conflates object into subject. There is nothing external to Brahman, the One without a second. Since Brahman is a non-dual, self-luminous consciousness, consciousness expands to encompass the entire universe, which is but the appearance of Brahman; everything is the Self.’ [Enlightenment in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta:  Are Nirvana and Moksha the Same? David Loy]

Photo: People Carrier (Songtaew) Chiang Mai

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Nontaburi, Thailand: Alone in a house surrounded by trees. Leaves filter a lovely green light all around; birds, lizards, squirrels, I see something move out on the patio… is it a bird, dropped down from a branch to peck at something? There, it moves again – just a hop and it’s a few feet further on. I sit very still, don’t want to frighten it away. I see it now, in the same position, not moving. After a long time waiting for it to change position, I decide to slowly get up and see what happens when I do that. It’s still not moving – maybe it’s injured. I go out on the patio and walk up to it. Ahhh… the bird is not a bird, it’s a large brown leaf, blown by the wind across the patio surface.

Go back inside and look at it again. It looks exactly like a bird, and just then a gust of wind blows the leaf. The animation of it is absolutely convincing, but I see it now as a leaf, not a bird. How strange, believing that something is there, then having to accept that it’s not. The teaching about the rope and the snake; a piece of rope lying on the ground is thought to be a snake. It’s an analogy of ‘self’ seen in consciousness + name-and-form: I recognize that the rope is a rope, not a snake, and can see how the illusion occurs. Or I may not see it and be convinced it’s a snake… maybe for a long time – a whole lifetime preoccupied with a ‘self’ that isn’t there.

This small epiphany occurs after another curiously similar event took place in this quiet house. I’m alone here except for D who is a grad student, working part-time, and he also takes care of the place. I don’t see D much, he works night shift sometimes, sleeping in the middle of the day. The house is large and I’m never absolutely sure if he’s here or not. Usually he stays in his room so I’m used to not seeing him around. I just quietly go about the house, day after day, not making too much noise in case he’s sleeping and quite often forget about him completely.

Then, just the other day, I start to wonder what happened to him. I look in the car park and his car is not there. When did I last see his car? Two days ago, or longer than that? I go to look at his laundry – could be the same laundry that’s been there for a while… clothes without a person inside them – remembering the movie: The Time Traveller’s Wife. I have to stop for a moment and think, when did I see him last? Go up to his room, door is open, nobody there. Hard to believe, I assumed D was in the house but I’ve been alone the whole time. The leaf-seen-as-bird metaphor. Something I thought was there, wasn’t… thinking it’s one thing, then it’s not. The usual sense of ‘me’ suddenly gone… then it returns again. Everything feels light and transparent.

‘It was as if lightning coursed within my chest. The impact lasted for a while, and for the next few weeks whenever I saw people, they seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently exist but I knew that they actually did not.’ [‘How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life’. The Dalai Lama, in the sixties reflecting on the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, phenomena being dependent on conceptuality and his discovery that the “I” exists conceptually, dependent on mind and body; not an entity in itself] Source: Emptiness and Existence:

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