Buddhism sees the human body and the phenomenal world as illusory. This doesn’t mean that Buddhism denies the existence of phenomenal reality, just that it is not the way we presently imagine it to be. The true reality of the world is much different, in fact, which makes our perception of it an illusory one. According to the Lankavatara Sutra, “Generated things do not exist the way the immature discriminate them" (na bhavo vidyate satyam yatha balair vikalpyate).
The world and our body, of course, appear to us as being real but then appearance is always deceiving. Moreover, it is only when appearance becomes completely extinguished that we are finally able to see and to realize the Dharma-body, and of course, our Buddha-nature both of which are not an illusion.
If we first understand what ‘illusion’ means it will be easy for us to understand further Buddhism’s position with regard to the world be believe is real, but isn’t.
First of all, illusion isn’t the same as a hallucination or a delusion. With both of these trustworthy data is absent. You might even say, for example, that belief in God is a kind of delusion since the determining elements are entirely imaginative.
Illusion, unlike a hallucination or a delusion, involves a mistaken interpretation which is based on reliable data in the example of Adelson’s checkered-shadow illusion which is not a mistaken perception but reflects, instead, our inability to realize and understand, fully, the mechanism that generates the illusion that squares A and B are different when in fact they have identical luminance!
The essence of illusion, we could say, reveals a radical difference between what we immediately perceive and believe to be a fact, and the real process which underlies and produces it. Another example of this is our three dimensional view of the world which arises from a two dimensional retinal image. More profound, we have a real sense or impression of being in a body when in fact we are not in it at all. Still, it is almost an unconquerable illusion that we are situated in a body. But for a Buddha who has conquered this illusion, the true body (dharmakaya) precedes and is anterior to the illusory one. The illusory one is continually arising and falling in front of us where no spatial separation exists between the primary transcendent body and the samsaric, arising and falling one. Lack of spatial separation acts to make the illusion compelling and almost perfect. We believe we are this body. When we add craving to the equation, which acts to keep us in bondage to the body so that the body’s pain we even consider to be our own pain, stepping out of the illusion proves almost impossible.
Nevertheless, while we remain victims of this apparently insidious illusion with little or no hope of waking up from it, a way out of it is provided through the study Buddhism in which the Buddha never tires of telling us that the Five Aggregates or skandhas, are not our self. These aggregates, according to the Buddha, are like foam, a bubble, a mirage, a plantain-tree (when the leaf-sheaths are taken away, no core remains), and a magician’s creation. Likewise the world we perceive through them is illusory and empty like sky-flowers.
I have always thought that Immanuel Kant's notion of "transcendental illusion" is useful for understanding Buddhist illusion.
Posted by: Joe | March 16, 2010 at 11:09 AM