What makes the Buddha’s teaching extraordinarily difficult to teach and to have faith in is the position he wants us to take with regard to the Five Aggregates which constitute the psychophysical person of which we are. In short, he wants us to dissociate from the psychophysical person. In one Sutta in the Pali canon he likens the psychophysical person to be external from us.
“Suppose, bhikkhus, people were to carry off the grass, sticks, branches, and foliage in this Jeta’s Grove, or to burn them, or to do with them as they wish. Would you think: ‘People are carrying us off, or burning us, or doing with us as they wish’?”
“No, venerable sir. For what reason? Because, venerable sir, that is neither our self nor what belongs to our self” (S. iii. 34).
According to the Buddha this body does not actually belong to us despite our intimate connection with it through desire. We are conscious of being a body which contains mental processes and language. We are even conscious of being conscious of this. But we are not conscious (at least yet) of being unbound from it.
Our consciousness still remains deeply and firmly locked on the temporal body together with its thoughts and language. This lethal connection is the thought of "I am this" which is to say, I am conscious of being this temporal body with its thoughts and language. I also realize that my consciousness has never been able to resonate with what is bodiless or even accept the possibility. I have only known the present state I am in that this body is mine. On the other hand, if I were to enter into conscious identification with the unbodied, resonating with it, I could say of my present body: This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self. But I cannot.
For those who are committed to following the path of Buddhism learning to give up one’s over identification with their temporal body is a daunting challenge and certainly one that is unusual for Western culture which asks us of the opposite, that we should over-identify with the temporal body in which it becomes our master and we become little more than its servants.
What are valid reasons to become a buddhist?
Posted by: willy | August 04, 2009 at 04:30 PM