Zen master Fa-yung once said that “an echo in the valley already has a voice; an image in a mirror can look back at us.” At least for me, Fa-yung’s words are pointing to the predicament of embodiment to which we are presently constrained; bound, as it were, to the physical body and its contents.
Hearing the voice inside of our head is such an echo in the valley, while continually attending to our physical body is the image in the mirror. However, both the echo and the image amount to redundant duplications since mind is fundamentally liberated and self-actual; needing no other.
Clinging to the echo and the image can be likened to the problem Narcissus faced when he saw his image in the pool. Ovid writes of the delusion of Narcissus in a strikingly Buddhist way:
“As he tried to quench his thirst, inside him, deep within him, another thirst was growing, for he saw an image in the pool, and fell in love with that unbodied hope, and found a substance in what was only shadow.”
For the Buddhist, there is also the Narcissist delusion of clinging to the Five Aggregates (skandhas) that are believed to be the self or atman (the actual). The aggregates are verily the pool of Narcissus such that even our thoughts and experiences are reflections. And we, the self, are bent over them in love and clinging to something no more than a lifeless “marble statue”, to use Ovid’s words.
Because of our intense clinging as a lover to the image of the beloved, in this case, the echo and the image, we needlessly bind ourselves to the fate of an illusion (hence, our delusion, in other words). This fate is nothing less that suffering. As a result, we face countless rebirths; facing the echo and the image in which even death is part of the delusion. Ovid writes of this, profoundly, in which the deluded Narcissus is of the mind that the image of himself will die with him; and he will be without further troubles.
“And death is not so terrible, since it takes my trouble from me; I am sorry only the boy I love must die: we die together.”
But for the Buddha, death takes no such troubles away. Far from it. We are still, as mind, which is essentially eternal, under the influence (asrava) of our ignorance; our proclivity (samskara) as related to our ignorance; and our perceptual desire, connected with our proclivities of error, to see the other of the atman, which according to Ovid is, “only shadow, only reflection, lacking any substance.”
Comments