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The Depersonification of the Personality

THE TEACHING OF THE SKANDHAS

If we were to subject what we generally regard as our human personality to an exact philosophical examination, we would discover that this "personality" is merely a process of spiritual and physical phenomena that actually has no more substance than a dream or a bubble on the surface of the ocean.

According to Buddhist interpretation, human beings in their physical-psychical manifestation are made up of a constantly changing combination of individual existence factors, which in functional interdependence emerge and then fade away to make room for new factors to follow. These existence factors can be divided into five groups, referred to as skandhas which are listed below in order of decreasing density and substantiality:

corporeality (rupa-skandha)

sensation (vedana-skandha)

perception (samjna-skandha)

mental formations (samskara-skandha)

consciousness (vijnana-skandha)

The skandhas should not be viewed singly or collectively as making up a self-sufficient, independent self; nor should consciousness, which in its purest form comes closest to the concept of the soul, be viewed in this way.

In truth, existence factors possess no reality at all and only have a momentary, quickly subsiding presence. The singular moments of all processes of spiritual and physical life change constantly and so quickly that we do not perceive the change. The only thing that exists is a chain of momentary existences and combinations thereof. Both the individual and the existence factors, which belong to the individual's experienced phenomenal world, last but an instant. At the next moment, nothing remains of that which just came into existence.

Sensations, perceptions, and mental formations merely make up the various appearances taken on by these uninterrupted, successive, single instants of consciousness, which flare up at every moment with unimaginable speed just to disappear in the same instant forever. Our identification with these functionally interdependent fleeting moments of consciousness gives rise to the delusion of a separate personality.

Regarding the "nonpersonality" and the "emptiness" of the skandha processes, which are in perpetual motion, Buddha says:

Supposing a man views the many bubbles in the waters of the Ganges. He observes and examines them closely. Afterwards, they will appear to him empty, unreal, and without substance. In the same manner, a monk views all corporeality, all sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and all consciousness, whether of the past, present, or future, inherent or extraneous, coarse or fine, common or noble, far or near, and sees them as empty, void, and unreal. And so he says to himself: "That is not mine, I am not that, that is not my self."⁸

Once we recognize that the existence factors which create the illusion of personality are really not our true self, we no longer need fear their death! On the contrary, the collapse of the skandhas would signify the ascent of the inner light for those free of all identification. Concerning this, Zen master Huang-po says :

If an ordinary man, when he is about to die, could only see the five (existence groups) as void; that they do not constitute an "I"; the real mind as formless and neither coming nor going; his nature as something neither commencing at birth nor perishing at his death, but as whole and motionless in its very depths; his mind and environmental objects as one, he would receive enlightenment in a flash.

He would no longer be entangled by the myriad world; he would be a world-transcendor. He would be without the faintest tendency toward rebirth. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditioned being.⁹

THE TEACHING OF ANATMAN

In view of the gross misinterpretation of the skandha doctrine, which belongs to the foundation of all schools of Buddhism, we should note that Buddha never taught that there was not a self apart from the skandhas. Instead, he taught that a self, in the sense of a permanent, death-defying, reincarnating "I," was not to be found among the existence factors. Of all Buddha's teachings, that of the "non-I," the anatman, is the most misunderstood.

Buddha's anatman doctrine is really leveled against the illusion of personality that propels people narcissisticaly toward a kind of self-shackling, in which they understand their "self" to be a separate, self-contained ego. Buddha's intention was to show the way to an experience of self that is not egotistically-egocentrically bound, but rather is realized through first detaching from itself in a state devoid of "ego-delusion." For as long as individuals live under the impression that their self exists apart from other selves, their true eternal self will remain concealed under this delusion.

Buddha rejected the equation of the true self with the ego-delusion evoked by identification with the skandhas. Due to the confusion of the universal foundation of human consciousness with illusory ego-consciousness bred out of ignorance, Buddha felt compelled to substitute for the term atman (self), the term anatman (nonself), meaning non-ego.

It would be equally wrong to compare the idea of atman, as used in the Upanishads, to ego-delusion. Buddhist scholar Daisetz Taitaro Suzuki explains:

To say there is no atman—that is not enough. We must go one step further and say there is an atman; however, that this atman does not exist on the plane of the relative, but on that of the absolute.¹⁰

To equate the the denial of an illusory and limited self with the denial of the eternal in humankind would be a gross misunderstanding of Buddha's message. Buddhist authors who likewise write that nothing beyond the skandhas outlasts death teach what Buddha never taught. If we really want to grasp what Buddha meant by the pronouncement of his anatman doctrine, we must leave all philosophical speculation far behind and turn to our inner source of knowledge, the atman itself. This is where the inexpressible mystery will unveil itself to us, where that which is beyond all designation of being or nonbeing manifests itself as our true nature. The Katha Upanishad it says:

No word nor thought can reach him, No eye can see him. How else can he be reached Unless you realize: He is?¹¹

And Chinese Zen master Huang-po says:

Our original Buddha-nature is, in highest truth, devoid of any atom of objectivity. It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy— and that is all. Enter deeply into it by awaking to it yourself. That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside.¹²

Even though Buddha taught that there was no self-sufficient, separate, individual self, he still left the self intact—but with a difference! He lifted it out of the bounds of duality into the unlimited vastness of original being, beyond space and time.

As long as we continue to ask ourselves whether or not we possess a certain spirit, self, or soul, we are on the wrong track with questioning that has its roots in discriminating, dualistic thinking. We should not focus on having a spirit or self, but rather on being the indivisible reality of the one mind. This inexpressible reality, which lies beyond all human concepts, is the unborn, eternal, unchanging self, the foundation of all we experience. In ancient Buddhism, it is Buddha's words that most clearly attest to this unborn true self:

There is, monks, that which is unborn, undeveloped, unmade, unformed. If this were not so, there would be no escaping from the world of the born, the developed, the made, the formed.¹³

We know that our body had a beginning and is destined one day to perish. Yet this has no effect on our true self, which is unbounded and unlimited, and thus untouched by changes that occur in the phenomenal world to which the body and all physical things belong. The Katha Upanishad says:

This realized self is not born,

Nor does it ever die.

It comes from nowhere and is nobody.

Unborn, eternal, imperishable, original,

It is not killed, though the body be destroyed.¹⁴

The following words of Meister Eckhart (14th century) read almost like commentary on the above passage:

Therefore I am my own cause according to my essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is temporal. Therefore I am unborn, and according to my unborn mode I can never die. According to my unborn mode I have eternally been, am now and shall eternally remain. That which I am by virtue of birth must die and perish, for it is mortal, and so must perish with time.¹⁵

In deep sleep we are unaware of our being as "I am." Nonetheless, we know that we have not ceased being. The self of this morning when we awoke is no different from the self of last evening when we went to sleep. Although we were not aware of its continuity during sleep, it did not cease being. This self is the eternal, self-existing original essence of divine being, which is the foundation of the three states of existence (waking, dream, and dreamless sleep). It is the being from which all things emanate and constantly change themselves, and to which they return at the end; as is written in the Mandukya Upanishad:

It is the lord of all, the all-knowing,

The inner guiding force, the womb of all things,

The origin and end of all beings.¹⁶

I AM THAT I AM

The self is not dependent on nor is it supported by anything other than itself, for it has no purpose apart from itself since there is nothing else besides it. For that reason, the Chandogya Upanishad says:

I am below, I am above, I am behind,

I am before, I am to the right, I am to the left.

I am truly all this! . . .

He who realizes this ... is perfectly free,

He possesses unlimited freedom in all worlds.¹⁷

Everything that we in our experiential world call being only has being insofar as it exists of, through, and to the absolute being; for "of him, through him, and to him are all things" (Romans 11:36). The absolute being gets its being from itself and is thus the pure reality above being. Gregory of Nyssa (4th century), one of the ancient fathers of Christian mysticism, says:

Nothing at all perceived by the senses or viewed by the intellect has true being except the essence above being, which is the ground of the universe, and upon which all things depend.¹⁸

All of our questions regarding the self and being are ultimately about our self-nature. Yet these questions can only be answered if we surpass the realm of distinction and recognize our true self as the self common to all beings. For if the same essence is the heart of selfness of every individual, then there cannot be a separate, self-sufficient individuality. Consequently, a totally separate, self-determining individuality is nothing more than an illusion stemming from the reciprocal identification of body and psyche and their numerous activities and abilities. The illusion of a psuedoself is simply a complex grounded in ignorance that has no exis tence of its own. That is why Meister Eckhart says, "All creatures are nothing in themselves." And Buddhism says, "All things are emptiness [sunyata]."

That all things are "emptiness" does not mean that beings and their perceived world do not exist, but rather that they are only pure phenomena without reality. In other words, they are not nonexistent, but unreal. These two concepts have different basic meanings and should not be used interchangeably. It is, for example, impossible for us to imagine a round triangle, which thus is nonexistent. A mirage, on the other hand, belongs to existent things although it has absolutely no reality, which is to say it is unreal.

The Buddhist view of the emptiness of all phenomena is not nihilistic. Its purpose is to make clear that all things lack basic substantiality. All things are governed by the principle of dependent arising and therefore lack self-nature (svabhava). The term "dependent arising" (pratitya-samutpada) means that there are no final realities that are independent and cannot be traced to something else. Hence, everything we perceive in the world, including our own skandha-conditioned personality, is a relative phenomenon of a transitory nature.

The truth behind all phenomena can only be imparted to us through a dissolution of ourselves, or a depersonification of the personality. To experience the emptiness of all objective phenomena in the universe is simultaneously to awaken to our true self.

As long as we continue to cling to the transitory through our identification with external appearances, we will be unable to experience our true state of unlimited, universal mind. Hence, we seek the eternal in the transitory without recognizing that the original source of all being, as the sole being and foundation of all experience, is present within us at all times. This source of all life finds expression in the divine relevation of the burning bush: "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14), as imparted to Moses on Mount Horeb.

Divine being, the eternal "I am," shines in the light of pure consciousness The final mystery of all existence is experienced as the "I am" of the absolute self of which we become aware in the depth of our own being. "You will know that 'I am' " says Christ (John 8:28). He also says, "If you do not believe that 'I am,' you will die in your sins" (John 8:24). What this means is that we will die in our separation from the divine ground of being, which is the source of all life. For sin means "separation."

Separation from the source is an estrangement from the true self, in which the ego behaves autonomously because it has forgotten that it comes from this true self. The ego wants to be its own master and to realize itself. However, "ego-realization" is not the same as true self-realization; it is best likened to a self-estrangement that leads to the senselessness and waywardness of a poor, world-bound existence. That is why Augustine (5th century) writes, "How poor he must be, he who is without that without which he cannot be." And Christ says, "Abide in me, and I in you, for without me you can do nothing" (John 15:4-5).

Separation from the divine original source is also a separation from life. It is the original sin that stems from our ignorance of the presence of the divine self at our center. Our liberation from the cycle of birth and death, which is at the same time a release from our attachment to the world, can hence only be achieved by a radical turning inward, by a true "conversion" (metanoia). When we turn within ourselves and in our innermost unbecome ourselves and all things, we will then become what we have sought, aware only of "is"—in itself.

In the search for divine being, the soul disappears from itself. For "no one shall see God without dying" (Exodus 33:20). As paradoxical as it may sound, we can only experience our true self when there is no self left to experience it. Those who relinquish everything will regain everything as the divine truth itself, which all the time lay hidden as the eternal "I am" beneath the phenomena they used to pursue.

"I am" is the eternal divine WORD that says of itself, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). It is the truth in everything that is. It is pure being, the original source from which all life flows forth in unending profusion. It is the all in everything, and whoever realizes it experiences all of creation as "I am" and can declare with the seer at the end of the Taittirya Upanishad:

How wonderful! "I am," even before the Gods were. I am the center and the source of immortality. And I shine like the sun.¹⁹