These days, it is possible to be a modern Buddhist or even a Zen abbot and never read or believe that the Buddha mentioned such a state as the “immortal-element”; much less that we can turn to it, directly. I have no idea why Buddhism has come down to this, but I see signs that it, in fact, has. Yet, for anyone who has read some of the Pali canon, the Buddha did mention such a thing as the immortal element.
“He turns his mind from these things [the psychophysical body or the same, the Five Aggregates]; and when he has turned his mind from these things he focuses his mind on the immortal element (amatadhatu), thinking: This is the real, this the excellent, that is to say the tranquilizing of all activities, the casting out of all clinging, the destruction of craving, dispassion, stopping, nibbana” (M. i. 435–36).
The above passage has a number of important implications for modern Buddhists the first one being that Buddhism does, in fact, teach immortality and that we are fundamentally, as minds, able to link with the immortal element if we are willing to work hard; trying to access it by means of introspection.
On the other hand, for those Buddhists strongly espoused to the physical sciences in which the ultimate yardstick is sensory consciousness such news, if we can call it that, is unsettling. At least for me, this means that some Buddhists are refusing to be real Buddhists who may even wish that such a passage never existed, either in the Pali canon or in the Mahayana canon or in the works of Bodhidharma who, incidentally, had this to say about the immortal.
“Something so hard to fathom is known by a Buddha and no one else. Only the wise know this mind, this mind called dharma-nature, this mind called liberation. Neither life nor death can restrain this mind. Nothing can. It's also called the Unstoppable Tathagata, the Incomprehensible, the Sacred Self, the Immortal, the Great Sage. Its names vary, but not its essence. Buddhas vary too, but none leaves his own mind” (trans. Red Pine).
To speak of the immortal element or the immortal (amrita), not to mention the Sacred Self or Mind says something definitive about Buddhism—and Zen. It is a religion which teaches us how to connect with that most precious part of ourselves which is immortal; which is neither this lump of transitory flesh nor does it concern flesh’s eventual death. Still, it is something quite real and certainly not abstract. And to engage with it is what Buddhists are supposed. Less than this is not real Buddhism nor are its practitioners, I dare say, real Buddhists.
Equating this "immortal element" to immortality implies the wrong thing, I think.
The element itself is always immortal, but that doesn't necessarily mean you get the immortality after you're turned to it.
Probably semantics.
Posted by: Greg | January 05, 2010 at 05:01 PM
In the "Buddhist" mainstream, the only acceptable buddhists are those three blind men touching an elephant. To one its a rope, to another its a tree, to the third, well...(grins).
We live in a collapsing society going downhill faster than most can grasp. How can you expect any "real" buddhism in such a corrupted enviroment?
Posted by: minx | January 05, 2010 at 04:10 PM