The Eternal Buddha

The Buddha's teaching is often understood as describing phenomena not as entities but as an interconnected weave of related things where there is being but no independent self. To see like this is certainly a shift of view in the right direction. But if we can see deeper and view all things as truths or dhammas, then they are things no more. There is no being, only knowing. Things are not then relational in any mechanistic way. They are information or meaning, true or false, right or wrong. They relate more as a dialogue or debate. Taking birth in a human body will naturally generate the same debates within the mind of different people, which form actions and their consequences. They are expressed and feed back into the culture, into a greater mind. The repeating patterns of information constitute a kind of rebirth over and over in different people. Strong perceptions will be formed that dominate thought within any particular culture. Just as the information in our genes can be passed on from one person to another, so can these cultural or religious truths.

If we start to think in these ways it can open up our minds to other possibilities of life after death.

What about the ultimate possibility? When the Buddha is asked about what happens to an arahant after death he says 'existence does not apply, non-existence does not apply.' What could this mean? If the mind finds an abiding in emptiness then it does not exist but is not annihilated either. In another sense this also applies to information or truth. The truth of something is not the substance of it so it does not exist in this way and yet it is real. When the mind sees the truth it can enter and abide in emptiness. This is how the transcendent mind is part of nature – or we might say it is and it isn't. Within the mind there is no knower or known there is only knowing.

When this knowing is raised to the level of wisdom and results in the experience of samādhi this is no different. The space of samādhi is empty, there is nothing there. The brightness of the emptiness can fool us that there is a being there, a Knower, that we have become something or found our true nature or Buddha-nature through samādhi. The Thai forest tradition calls the Buddha the 'One who Knows' but that need not suggest a being. The eternal Buddha is not a being but is the result of an eternal knowing. So whenever this brightness arises in the mind we must not grasp it, either as an experience nor by way of an idea, but shine it on the world. If it arises within the breath we can shine it into the body. This is the way to the ultimate for 'here in this fathom long body lies the beginning and the end of the world' (AN 4.45.).





I offer this for your reflection,

Ajahn Kalyāno
http://www.openthesky.co.uk/