Category Archives: buddhism

The Self

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On the Buddhist path one of the exercises that is popular is to try to find the self.  This naturally leads to a thorough investigation of all the possible things that could be self.

Am I my legs?  Would I exist if they were gone?

Am I my head?  Would I exist if it was gone?

Am I my mind?

Am I my thoughts?

Am I my feelings?

What am I?

This investigation is typically pursued as an analytical meditation.  I imagine my legs separate from the rest of my body.  Someone comes into the room and says there is Dorena and over there are her legs.

But what are they calling Dorena?  How many body parts do I need to lose before they no longer call me Dorena? If Dorena is a collection of things, what are the essential things?  Can a collection be truly called one thing? one self?

And what of my mind?  If I am in a coma or dead, people might still say, “Dorena is in that room”.  People would call my body “Dorena”.  So I must not be my mind.  Yet, if I lose my mind, people might also say, “She is no longer herself”.

To be told you have no self can sound absurd.  However, what is your defense to that?  Can you find something that you can definitively label yourself?

This process of beginning to understand ultimate reality is deepened by realizing intellectually that there is no self and then progressing to a direct experience of that reality.  Emptiness does not mean that there is nothing there, it simple refers to the fact that their is no self there.  When a room is empty, it usually means there are no people present.  Yet, there may be carpet, furniture and other things.  Similarly in order to talk about emptiness one must define what it is absent.  The object that is absent is the gakja.

Je Tsongkapa meets Manjushri

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Tibetan depiction of the manjushri mantra "oṃ arapacana dhīḥ"I have always been intrigued by some of the stories regarding Je Tsongkapa, a leading figure in Tibetan Buddhism.  I was taught that he was able to be so prolific, and impart such great understanding of the difficult points of what the Buddha taught, due to the fact that he talked directly with Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom.

Spiritual traditions have a tendency to accumulate errors over time, especially in the hands of less realized humans that introduce their own ideas based on thought and not on actual practice and realization.   In the 14th century, Tibetan Buddhism was in such a shamble.  Je Tsongkapa took Tibetan Buddhism, studied with all the great masters of the time, and then cleaned the traditions up by teaching and writing over 10,000 pages of detailed commentaries (without an iPad).  He essentially reorganized Tibetan Buddhism and founded the school that started the tradition of the Dalai Lamas.

Since I have many friends and associates that have direct contact with “spirit guides”, it is not surprising to me that Je Tsongkapa could talk to Manjushri, however, it is surprising to me that Je Tsongkapa could not talk directly with Manjushri at first. Indeed, when he was in his thirties he went to another person (Lama Umapa) that had direct contact with Manjushri.  He would take his questions to Lama Umapa, who would then get the answers from Manjurshi.  As such he began studying with Lama Umapa or should we say Manjushri via Lama Umapa.

Later, after a four year retreat, Je Tsongkapa had cleared enough personal obstacles to be able to “see” Manjushri himself.  The Lama Tsongkhapa website site tells this marvelous story in detail.  Worth the read.

The part that always intrigued me was the fact that if Lama Umapa was able to speak to Manjushri directly, why didn’t he write 10,000 pages of commentary and become the person that reorganized Tibetan Buddhism?  It is intriguing that some people that have “supernatural” gifts have “lower” realizations than people without those gifts.  But wait, here I am judging Lama Umapa as lower simply because he didn’t manifest more.  Actually, he may have simply a different karma.  Perhaps he was already enlightened when he met Je Tsongkapa, but did not have Je Tsongkapa’s desire to write or teach.

Matrix

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The Matrix is another Buddhist philosophythe matrix movie review film in my list of top ten movies for Buddhists.  This movie, like Inception, demonstrates the basic Tibetan Buddhist tenant that the world we see and experience is deceptive.  Deceptive, in this instance, means that it appears one way when it actually is a different way.  Sometimes people use the analogy that this reality is really just a dream or say it is an illusion, but this is not accurate.  If I dream I am being hurt, I will wake up to find myself unharmed.  If, in this reality, I experience my finger being cut off, that reality is persistent, at least for as long as I maintain my identity.

What this boils down to is that this reality, for all intents and purposes, is not a dream.  It is “real”.  It just is a “deceptive” reality.  The basic deception is that things seem to come from outside of ourselves.  They seem to be “solid”, self existent things.  For instance, when someone gets mad at us, we think that that is coming from them and not about us.  Well, it might not be about us in our current state, but the whole situation is created by our mental potentials or karmic seeds planted by our past thoughts and actions.

An intellectual understanding that the reality we live in comes from us is not enough to set us free.  The characters in the Matrix demonstrate this.  The ones that are no longer plugged into deceptive reality continuously, still cannot control the happenings when they do enter the “matrix” of deceptive reality.  However, the main character, Neo, does gain the ability to use his mind to transcend what normally would be considered human limitations.  He is then able to move in ways that are not humanly possible, such as fly and dodge bullets.

The movie also could be seen as a metaphor for the enlightenment process. Like in the movie, the majority of people we see around us are not aware that the world they see around them is actually an elaborate deception.  If we tried to point that fact out to them they might become angry and would certainly dismiss us.

In the movie, a small number of people have realized the deception, yet their awareness of the deception does not allow them to change things.  They know the matrix world is not ultimately real, but they act like it is when they are in it.  These people are like Buddhist aryas.  A arya (stream-enterer) knows that they are not a separate self and the world is not occupied by self-existent objects, but they are (initially) unable to experience the world as it is ultimately.matrix movie review picture of neo stopping bulletsNeo represents someone that is progressing rapidly along the path to enlightenment and as his experience of ultimate reality increases his ability to manipulate deceptive reality increases.  While this type of manipulation is not part of the goal of Buddhism, many advanced practitioners experience these changes naturally.  Indeed, Bernadette Roberts a few weeks before she entered the permanent state of “No-Self” found she could know the future, levitate, and leave her body.   (All of which she disliked and quickly found a way to extinguish.)

If you would like to see the films you can borrow a copy from me or use these links to purchase. Your purchase using the links supports TESLI. Thanks!

Reference:  Bernadette Roberts. (1991). The Path to No-Self.  State University of New York Press, Albany. p 169