By Eknath Easwaran
The story of the Buddha captures the heart of this luminous teacher who, in his own words, loved the world as a mother loves her only child. But there is more to the Buddha than his heart. As with a good physician, behind that immense compassion is the penetrating vision of a scientific mind.
It is this scientific outlook that I now want to touch on, for it produced a worldview of very contemporary appeal. Some years ago the BBC produced a brilliant television series called Einstein’s Universe, showing how the world would look if we could see the effects of relativity. It is a fascinating realm, full of bent rays of light, warps in time, and black holes in the fabric of space itself. Just as fascinating is the Buddha’s universe: his view of life after attaining nirvana.
Relativity and quantum theory, in fact, provide excellent illustrations of this strange world, so contrary to common sense. In the Buddha’s universe a personal, separate self is an illusion, just as substance is an illusion to the atomic physicist. Distinctions between an “outside world” and an “inner realm” of the mind are arbitrary. Everything in human experience takes place in one field of forces, which comprises both matter and mind. Thought and physical events act and react upon each other as naturally and inescapably as do matter and energy. But the basis of the natural world is not physical. As Einstein described matter and energy solely in terms of the geometry of space-time, the Buddha describes matter, energy, and mental events as the structure of a fabric we can call consciousness. His universe is a process in continuous change – a seething sea of primordial energy, of which the mind and the physical world are only different aspects.
Personality
Set the Buddha down on another world, like Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon, and he doesn’t stand around marveling; he immediately starts ferreting out secrets. Instead of basking in bliss on the night of his enlightenment, he looks around on the seabed of the unconscious and begins tracing connections.
In physics, the realization that light is not continuous led to a new view of the world. Much in the Buddha’s worldview stems from a similar discovery about thought. Like light, we can say, thought consists of quanta, discrete bursts of energy. The Buddha referred to these thought-quanta as dharmas – not dharma in the sense of the underlying law of life, but in another sense meaning something like “a state of being.” When the thinking process slows considerably, it is seen to be a series of such dharmas, each unconnected with those before or after. One dharma arises and subsides in a moment; then another arises to replace it, and it too dies away. Each moment is now, and it is the succession of such moments that creates the sense of time.
The Buddha would say these dharmas come from nowhere and they return to nowhere. Mind is a series of thought-moments as unconnected as the successive images of a movie. A movie screen does not really connect one moment’s image to the next, and similarly there is no substrate beneath the mind to connect thoughts. The mind is the thoughts, and only the speed of thinking creates the illusion that there is something continuous and substantial.
For the personal ego, which seems so real and considers its satisfactions so all-important, this does not add up to an attractive self-image. The bundle of thoughts, memories, desires, fears, urges, anxieties, and aspirations that we think of as ourselves is largely an illusion: a lot of separate mental events temporarily associated with a physical body, but nothing that anyone could call a whole.
Even in such abstract thinking, the Buddha remains in touch with his audience. Everyone would have been familiar with the village marketplace, where vendors spread their wares on mats for passersby to see. When someone wants spices for that night’s dinner, the spice-seller takes a banana leaf, doles out little heaps of coriander, ginger, and the like, wraps them up in the leaf, and ties the bundle with a banana string. That is how the Buddha describes personality: a blend of five skandhas or “heaps” of ingredients like these piles of spices in their banana-leaf wrapper. These ingredients are rupa, form, vedana, sensation or feeling, samjna, perception, samskara, the forces or impulses of the mind, and vijnana, consciousness. Without reference to an individual self or soul, the Buddha says that birth is the coming together of these aggregates; death is their breaking apart.
“Form” is the body, with which most of us identify ourselves and others. It is the sameness of body from day to day that provides the continuity of who we are. When the body dies, what is left? Even in an afterlife, we can’t really imagine ourselves without form.
For the Buddha, however, this physical identification is as ridiculous as mistaking the dinner spices for the leaf in which they are wrapped. The body is only a wrapper. Most of a person is mind, which is a blend every bit as particular as a physical body is. We identify a person by referring to his big hands, his dimple, her fingerprints, the mole on his left cheek. The Buddha would refer to a person’s mindprint: his big ego, her tender heart, her fondness for chocolate, his fear of being wrong. But these characteristics are not fixed. The blend is subtly but constantly changing in response to what we think and experience, just as biologists say the physical body itself is constantly changing at the chemical level. The skandhas are not substances but processes, and the mind, in Buddhist terms, is a field of forces.
The second skandha is sensation or feeling. When we identify with the body, it is only natural that we identify also with the sensations it experiences, whether pleasant, painful, or neutral.
Many people, for example, register a pleasant sensation when they smell fresh coffee brewing. They will tell you that coffee has a pleasant smell, as if this were as factual as saying it has a brown color. But these attributions are personal, conditioned by past experience and association. In my native state of Kerala, South India, if people see you drinking coffee they are likely to ask, “Aren’t you feeling well?” Kerala is tea country; coffee is something you would drink only if you were sick. In reality, the smell of brewing coffee is neither pleasant nor unpleasant; it is just a smell. But when we identify ourselves with the skandhas, we cannot usually see this; we identify with our response.
The third skandha is usually called perception, but more accurately it is the act of naming the sensation experience. If the nose reports a deep, strong aroma of roasted beans, the next thing the mind does is label it: “Coffee!” That name carries all the associations our conditioning to coffee has built up for us, depending on our culture and context.
The fourth skandha is the strong, instinctive, gut-level reactions triggered by this naming. In the case of coffee, the Buddha would say, we react not so much to the coffee itself as to our perception or label of it: the conditioned habit of liking or disliking. The Sanskrit name for this is samskara, which means literally “that which is intensely done.” Samskaras are thought, speech, or behavior motivated by the desire to get some experience for oneself. We can think of samskaras as grooves of conditioning, compulsive desires. It is this skandha which prompts action – or, more accurately, which prompts karma, for “action” here includes thought.
A person with a strong coffee samskara will smell it brewing and think, “I want some!” Someone from Kerala might say, “How unappealing!” Whatever the label, if we act on a samskara it becomes stronger. The conditioning is reinforced, making it more likely that we will act on that samskara the next time. Samskaras are the key to character, but their root is deep below the level of conscious awareness. We see what they do, but we have very little control over the forces themselves.
The last skandha is vijnana, “consciousnes.”: the appropriation of each unit of experience to the mass of conditioning formed by the experiences of the past. Vijnana is like a river, carrying the accumulated karma of all previous thought and action. When I smell coffee, the sensation may awaken a coffee samskara. If it does, my response to that samskara becomes one more piece of flotsam in the stream of consciousness, joining the experiences which represent the whole history of my contact with coffee, beginning with the first time I smelled it brewing.
It is this stream of consciousness that we identify with a self, because its experiences seem to have happened to a particular individual. But according to the Buddha, this self is only imagined, superimposed on momentary, unconnected mental events. If the mind is compared to a movie, vijnana is like the series of clicks of the camera shutter: “This frame (and nothing outside it) is I, this is I, this is I.” The Buddha would ask, “What is I?” What we see is simply not there. We see the images flash by and think we are watching Clark Gable; but in reality, of course, we are watching no one, only a series of stills.
The World
This is unsettling enough, but it is only the beginning. The opening verse of the Dhammapada takes us the next step: “Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.”
These simple lines are both the subtlest and the most practical in the Dhammapada. The words are too rich for any translation to convey their full meaning. Literally they say, “Mind is the forerunner of all dharmas. All follow the mind; all are made out of mind.”
Dharmas has a double edge here: it means, at the same time, both “things” and “thoughts.” To the Buddha, everything is a dharma, a mental event. We don’t really experience the world, he observes; we experience constructs in the mind made up of information from the senses. This information is already a kind of code. We don’t actually see things, for example; we interpret as separate objects a mass of electrochemical impulses received by the brain. And of course this information covers only a narrow range of sensibility, limited to what the senses can register. But from this scanty data the mind makes a whole world.
We have grown used to the idea that there is much more “out there” than we can be aware of. But this is not what the Buddha is saying. He drops the convention of “out there” altogether. Everything in experience is mind. What we call “things” are objects in consciousness: not that they are imaginary, but their characteristics are mental constructions. Like the other skandhas, form is a category of mind.
As I was driving to the beach for a walk, it struck me that from far off, the sand appears solid. Only when we stand on it and touch it can we see it is really billions of particles. The same is true even with things that are “really” solid, such as a boulder at the water’s edge. Physicists resolve even subatomic particles into energy, making “substance” a tool for everyday communication rather than a description of reality. Similarly, the Buddha reduces all experience – of things and of ourselves – to dharmas. Deep in consciousness, a commonsense experience like a beautiful sunset resolves into skandha-events like “sight-contact of color patterns accompanied by pleasurable sensation.” There is no self in such events, and no real distinction between observer and observed.
The Buddha, I think, would not have been surprised by the discoveries of this century which turned classical physics upside down. The essential discontinuity in nature observed by quantum physicists follows naturally from the Buddha’s experience of the discontinuity of thought. So does the idea that time is discontinuous, which may find a place in physics also.
We have to be very careful of misunderstanding here, for the Buddha is not saying that the physical world is a figment of imagination. That would imply a “real” world to compare with, and this is the real world. We are not “making it up,” but neither are we misperceiving a reality “out there” where things are solid and individuals are separate. What the Buddha is telling us is precisely parallel to what the quantum physicists say: when we examine the universe closely, it dissolves into discontinuity and a flux of fields of energy. But in the Buddha’s universe the mind-matter duality is gone; these are fields in consciousness.
When Einstein talked about clocks slowing down in a powerful gravitational field, or when Heisenberg said we can determine either the momentum or the position of an electron but not both, most physicists felt a natural tendency to treat these as apparent aberrations, like the illusion that a stick bends when placed in a glass of water. It took decades for physicists to accept that there is no “real” universe, like the real stick, to refer to without an observer. Clocks really do slow down and electrons really are indeterminable; that is the way the universe actually is. Similarly, the Buddha would say, this universe we talk of is made of mind. There is no “real” world-in-itself apart from our perceiving it. This doesn’t make physical reality any less physical; it only reminds us that what we see in the world is shaped by the structure of consciousness.
This has radical implications, one of which is that “mind” and “matter” are different ways of looking at the same thing. Today we are used to thinking of matter as “frozen energy.” Mind too can be considered energy in a different form. You may remember Bohr’s principle of complementarity: to get a whole picture of light, we have to describe it as waves and as particles at the same time. Similarly, the Buddha would say, if we look at experience one way – in the ordinary waking state – we see physical reality; if we look at it another way, we see mind. In profound meditation, one goes beyond sensory appearance and eventually beyond the very structure of the phenomenal world: time, space, causality. Time stops; there is only the present moment. Then everything is pure energy, a sea of light.
We want to ask, “Matter and mind are different aspects of what ‘same thing’? It’s all very well to say ‘consciousness,’ but what does that mean?” Like most quantum physicists, however, the Buddha doesn’t try to explain further. The question doesn’t make sense. It can’t be answered without creating confusion and contradiction, and anyway it is unnecessary. When you ask a physicist what “ultimate reality” is like, he or she is likely to reply, “We can describe accurately, and that’s enough. The laws are the reality.” The Buddha does the same. He says, “This is the way the universe is. If you want to know more, go see for yourself.”
This is not heady philosophy; it has some surprisingly practical implications. One is that we see life as we are. The world of our experience is partly of our own making, colored and distorted by the past experiences that each person identifies with a personal ego. My relationship with you is not with you as you see yourself, but with you as I see you: a waxworks creation in my mind. As a result, two people can share the same house and literally live in different worlds.
If these ideas were better understood, they could make our planet a very different place. We have a story in India about two men, one high-minded and generous, the other very selfish, who were sent to foreign lands and asked to tell what kind of people they found there. The first reported that he found people basically good at heart, not very different from those at home. The second man felt envious hearing this, for in the place he visited everyone was selfish, scheming, and cruel. Both, of course, were describing the same land. “We see as we are,” and our foreign policy follows what we see. Those who see themselves surrounded by a hostile world preparing for war tend to make that vision a reality.
It follows that when we change ourselves, we have already begun to change the world. Heisenberg taught physicists that in subatomic realms, the observer affects the obser vation. The way we ask an experimental question determines the kind of answer we will get. In the Buddha’s universe this is true for all experience. If a hostile person learns to slow down his thinking enough to see how much of what provokes him is projected by his own mind, his world changes, and so does his behavior – which, in turn, changes the world for those around him. “Little by little,” the Buddha says, “we make ourselves good, as a bucket fills with water drop by drop.” Little by little, too, we change the world we live in. Even the grand earthshaking events of history have their origins in individual thought.
Karma, Death, and Birth
Placing physical phenomena and mind in the same field may seem confusing at first, but like Einstein’s marriage of matter and energy, it leads to a view of the world that is elegant in its simplicity. Much in the Buddha’s universe, in fact, can be understood as a generalization of physical laws to a larger sphere.
The law of karma, for example, which seems so exotic when mind and matter are relegated to different worlds, simply states that cause and effect apply universally and that the effect is of the nature of the cause. Every event, mental or physical, has to have effects, whether in the mind, in action, or in both – and each such effect becomes a cause itself.
To the Buddha, the universe is a vast sea where any stone thrown raises ripples among billions of other ripples. Karma raises ripple-effects within personality and without, for both are in the same field of forces. When we pursue our own self-interest, we are adding to a sea of selfish behavior in which we too live. Sooner or later, the consequences cannot help but come back to us.
Karma is stored in the mind. What we call personality is made up of karma, for it is the accumulation of everything we have done and said and thought. So karma follows wherever we go. “Fly in the sky, burrow in the ground,” says the Buddha, “you cannot escape the consequences of your actions.” You can run, but you cannot hide. All of us have karmic scores to settle, a book of debits and credits that is constantly growing.
The end of the body cannot clear these accounts, for although the skandhas of personality come apart, I-consciousness is not destroyed. Thus we come logically to the last theme of the Buddha’s universe: the cycle of death and rebirth.
Here again let me illustrate from Einstein, who proposed that instead of talking only about particles, we talk also about fields. At very small distances, the field we call an electron is so intense that it behaves like a particle. At a greater distance the strength of the field drops off rapidly, but strictly speaking it never vanishes. For practical purposes, it has local definition. But a universe of such fields is a whole, not a collection of parts, and to speak of particular fields as separate is like isolating currents and whirlpools in the ocean: sometimes practical, but superficial.
To the Buddha, the field of forces we think of as personality is similar: it can be talked about meaningfully, yet it is not separate from the rest of life. As a subatomic particle seems to form out of states of energy and then dissolves into energy again, individual creatures come into physical existence and pass from it again and again in the ceaseless process called samsara, the flux of life. However, while the creation or destruction of an electron may be a matter of chance, I-consciousness reenters physical existence according to the karma that remains to be worked out. We choose the context in which we are born – not consciously, of course, but by the sum of our previous actions and desires.
Think of the way an oak tree propagates itself. An acorn ripens and falls, germinates when physical conditions are right, and grows into another oak. We see two separate oaks, but on the atomic level a biologist can trace a continuous flow of energy from tree to acorn to tree. In a similar way, the Buddha would trace the individual packet of forces we call personality. When these forces are expressed physically, that is the interval between birth and death. But after death, just as the basic characteristics of the oak tree lie dormant in the acorn’s genetic code, the forces of an individual personality still cohere, waiting to burst into life again when the proper conditions are present.
Personally, I find this no more miraculous than what the acorn does. A seed does not contribute much materially to the plant it grows into; the material comes from the soil, sunlight, water, and air. What the seed contributes is information. It has the same DNA as every other living entity, but when its genes begin to be expressed, it pulls from the environment what is needed to make a plant of just a particular kind. We wonder at this, but we accept it because it is physical. The Buddha finds personality processes just as real.
Those who question him on this level of observation play a dangerous game, for no one is more relentlessly logical. If we object that what he calls a “person” is not the same from one life to the next, he will ask, “Are you the same from one day to the next?” We think of ourselves as the same individual who went to school in Des Moines many years ago, but what is the basis for such a claim? Our desires, aspirations, and opinions may all have changed; even our bones are not the same.
Yet, somehow, there is continuity. “I wasn’t the same then,” we object, “but that wasn’t a different person either.” The Buddha replies, “That is the relationship between you in this life and ‘you’ in a past life: you are not the same, but neither are you different. Death is only the temporary end of a temporary phenomenon.” To those who grasp this, death loses its fear. It is not the end, only a door into another room.
Nirvana
During the first watch of the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha tells us, he traced the personality known as Siddhartha Gautama back over many lives. In the second watch, he saw the world “as if in a spotless mirror” – the countless deaths and rebirths of other creatures, their context in life determined by the karma of past action. “And compassion welled up within him,” for he saw only blind paths of stimulus and response: no understanding of the laws that govern what we call “fate,” no awareness that we can take our lives into our own hands.
In the last hours before dawn, he focused his attention on how to break this chain of suffering once and for all.
The first link, he saw, is ignorance. Instead of seeing life as a flux, we insist on seeing what we want it to be, a collection of things and experiences with the power to satisfy. Instead of seeing our personality as it is – an impermanent process – we cling to what we want it to be, something real and separate and permanent. From this root ignorance arises trishna, the insistent craving for personal satisfaction. From trishna comes duhkha, the frustration and suffering that are the human condition.
With our glimpse into the Buddha’s universe, it is clear why human grasping seemed to him so ignorant and blind. We are trying to get from life something that is not there – trying to find a real Clark Gable in a movie, trying to find some experience that will last. And what we are trying to hold on with isn’t there either. We want to gratify a process with a process. The ego cannot be satisfied, and the more we try, the more we suffer.
But the frustration of this grasping, because it derives from ignorance, is not real. It is a shadow which can be dispelled by seeing life as it really is. The Buddha says succinctly, “This arising, that arise.”: whenever there is ignorance of life’s nature, suffering has to follow. “This subsiding, that subside.”: as self-will dies, we awaken to our real nature. Then personal sorrow comes to an end.
What is this real nature? Here the Buddha remains silent. He comes to us to point the way, to show a path, but he steadfastly refuses to limit with words what we will find.
Yet he does tell us that there is more to life than flux and process and the mechanical working out of karma. “There is something unborn, unbecome, not made and not compounded. If there were not, there would be no means of escape from what is born, become, made, and compounded.” In the limitless sea of samsara, in the midst of change, there is an island, a farther shore, a realm of being that is utterly beyond the transient world in which we live: nirvana.
When the mind is stilled, the appearance of change and separateness vanishes and nirvana remains. It is shunyata, emptiness, only in that there is literally nothing there: “no-thing.” But emptiness of process means fullness of being. Nirvana is aroga, freedom from all illness; shiva, happiness; kshema, security; abhaya, the absence of fear; shanta, peace of mind; anashrava, freedom from compulsions; ajara, untouched by age; amata, unaffected by death. It is, in sum, parama sukha, the highest joy.
Those who attain the island of nirvana can live thereafter in the sea of change without being swept away. They know what life is and know that there is something more. Lacking nothing, craving nothing, they stay in the world solely to help and serve. We cannot say they live without grief; it is their sensitiveness to the suffering of others that motivates their lives. But personal sorrow is gone. They live to give, and their capacity to go on giving is a source of joy so great that it cannot be measured against any sensation the world offers.
Without understanding this dimension, the Buddha’s universe is an intellectually heady affair that offers little satisfaction to the heart. When we hear that our personality is no more real than a movie, we may feel dejected, abandoned in an alien universe. The Buddha replies gently, “You don’t understand.” If life were not a process, if thought were continuous, we would have no freedom of choice, no alternative to the human condition. It is because each thought is a moment of its own that we can change.
“Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.” That is the essence of the Buddha’s universe and the whole theme of the Dhammapada. If we can get hold of the thinking process, we can actually redo our personality, remake ourselves. Destructive ways of thinking can be rechanneled, constructive channels can be deepened, all through right effort and meditation. “As irrigators lead water to their fields, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their lives.”
“The universe is hostile,” Wernher von Braun once said, “only when you do not know its laws. To those who know and obey, the universe is friendly.” When understood, the Buddha’s universe too is anything but alien and inhibiting. It is a world full of hope, where everything we need to do can be done and everything that matters is within human reach. It is a world where kindness, unselfishness, nonviolence, and compassion for all creatures achieve what self-interest and arrogance cannot. It is, simply, a world where any human being can be happy in goodness and the fullness of giving.
We have the path to this world in the Dhammapada.
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