When I listened to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s song, A Thousand Kisses Deep, it suddenly came into my mind that this was about the reification of illusion. Whether it's being in love with another or doing Tibetan Ngöndro 500,000 times or even sitting in zazen we are attempting to reify the illusory.
This almost automatic process of reification has no clue that it is building a prison wall that separates us from the absolute, that is, from our true self or Buddha nature. The human being , you might say, lives in a kind of psychosis in which it has learned to over-value and turn illusion into a quasi-reality.
Buddhism intends, in a compassionate way, to throw the illusion back upon itself so that we pass through it by unexpectedly intuiting the ultimately real which is non-illusory. Thus we discover our true nature or atman which is not the five skandha, namely, form, sensation, perception, volition, consciousness.
The Buddha states, unambiguously, that the five skandha are not the true self. Still we cling to them which is the basis of suffering. In our ignorance we know nothing other than these five skandha. This leads me to say that Buddhists delude themselves when they believe that the Buddha taught the rejection of the true self.
In fact, it was Saccaka (Cūḷasaccaka Sutta) who postulated that the five skandha are the self. This is what the Buddha rejected, the skandha cannot be the self since they are perishable and above all illusory. Inadvertently, the Buddhist has thrown out the baby with the bathwater!
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