The self and causation.

Nevertheless in disregarding a separate self as unreal reification Buddhist theory is not simplistic. A person, although transitory, is composed of five components called skandhas that are labeled form, feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness. What constitutes a person is the temporary composition or arrangements of these components. If we remove one of these skandhas there would be no construct that we can call a person. In more definitive terms the person has no reality except in the configuration of the components. Even the skandhas have no enduring meaning or existence as each is composed of the other four skandhas. For example we would have no conception of the form of our bodies if not for perceptions. Consciousness of others only has meaning because of the additional components of form, feelings, perceptions and occasional impulses. In summary, skandhas are interdependent in origin and function (Hanh, 1988). The fundamental teaching of Buddhism is a law of causality that everything in the universe is interconnected. Objective events or subjective experiences all have causes without which nothing exists.

Fundamentally that means that nothing exists independently or separately. Think of any object, and follow the infinitesimal connections of its history to all happenings in the universes. A flower does not exist separately, but is connected to a seed, then perhaps to a bird that carried the seed, the bird is connected to parents that laid the egg, in turn the parents are dependent on a nest, that is found in a tree, that would not have grown except for the nutrients in the soil, and so forth. In Buddhism all “things” are mere points that have infinitesimal causational extensions in the universe and can be seen as analogous to the particle-wave theory of Quantum physics (Soeng, 1991). In the self there is no little man behind the screen and no soul. A person is a temporary cognition or gestalt formed by the arrangements of the components or skandhas. This gestalt cognition is called anatta; however the permanent self is considered an illusion.

The person is still important in the Buddhist perspective once the illusion of the self is dropped and the interconnectedness of people to all elements of the universe is understood. Rather than being isolated and feeling helpless and powerless, the enlightened person in Buddhism is an interconnected part of the universe. When the boundaries between the person and all other elements disappear, the person in a process of total identification becomes the universe and experiences enlightenment (Mosig, 1998). Again, by contrast a person that perceives a wave in the ocean as separate from the ocean is experiencing a delusion. Although the gestalt of your perception tells you that the wave has substance in reality there is only transitory movement of the water, and it is only possible to separate the wave from the ocean through a delusionary abstraction. From the Buddhist perspective enlightenment is important because suffering will only disappear when we give up on the delusion of separateness of the self from the universe. When we accept the universal oneness of all the outcome is a more selfless person that has compassion and caring for everyone and for the natural world.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 870