I spent yesterday afternoon with the Venerable Ananda Bhante of the Maha Bodhi monastery in Bangalore discussing Western and Buddhist notions of self. The passage below is from my new book 'Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Soul' which should be available anytime now. I was keen to check some my ideas expressed there with the Abbot and fortunately he concurred with my analysis. What was remarkable was the way he could recite the 50 conditions of mental activity in the 4th skandha from memory. Sitting with Professor Jose of DVK it was an honour and privilege to discuss these matters. Afterwards as we toured the temple grounds near Bangalore's Freedom Park we saw the novices washing the Buddha and Bodhi tree (planted from a sapling from the great Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya) - I took the photograph above.
After breakfast today I travel to Vidyavanam to spend some days with the monks there.
best wishes
Peter
The Purpose of Mindfulness: The Agnostic Self
What then is the purpose of
mindfulness in this Buddhist context? Essentially it can be seen as the need to
develop freedom from entanglement with things as they seem. Desire, craving and
its consequences will create the illusion of ‘self’ and ‘I’ that will further
drive craving, desire and unhappiness (Dukkha).[1]
The Buddha wrote of the delusion of self resting on our grasping of the five ‘aggregates’ or ‘heaps’ of ‘grasping’ (Pali khandha/ Sanskrit skandha).These aggregates are not to be seen as irreducibly
elements of the personality, but rather as ‘the most prominent functions that
are involved whenever the human personality is the subject of discussion’
(Kalupahana 1992:21). They are traditionally classed as:
1.
Rūpa – material form
2.
Vedanā- feeling or sensation (that which is pleasant or
unpleasant)
3.
Saññā – perceiving/recognition
4.
Sankhārā – disposition or karmic formation/volition
5.
Viññāna – consciousness[2]
The work of mindfulness is therefore the work of
awareness of these elements of existence so that the shifting bases of
personality will inevitably be revealed. Therefore, through the practice of
mindfulness the essentially shifting nature of the self will be revealed
(Kalupahana 1992:75). Against this, write the Buddhist commentators (see
Kalupahana 1992:40), there are two human tendencies, vis: to essentialise the
self (largely speaking the contemporary Western view of personality) or to
dissolve the self into nothingness (such as is found in wrong notions of
‘non-self’). For Kalupahana ‘the middle way consists of neither succumbing to
essentialism or nihilism. Absolute self negation as well as absolute self
cessation are not only morally repugnant but also epistemologically
unwarranted’ (Kalupahana 1992:40).
Mindfulness
will accordingly assist us in moving from the grasping illusion of an
‘essential self’ to the flexibility of a de-centred or agnostic self. In the
Buddha’s terms we remove our attachment to the aggregates to realise that
over-identification with them is the source of delusion:
He regards
feeling as self… perception as self… volitional formations as self… consciousness as self, or self
as possessing consciousness, or consciousness
as in self, or self as in consciousness. That consciousness
of his changes and alters. With the change and alteration
of consciousness, his consciousness becomes preoccupied with the change of consciousness. Agitation and a constellation
of mental states born of
preoccupation with the change of consciousness remain
obsessing his mind. Because his mind is obsessed, he is frightened, distressed and anxious, and through clinging
becomes agitated. (BS: 3.16)
A well
taught, noble disciple… regards material form thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”
He regards feeling thus, “This is not
mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” He regards formations thus, “This is not mine, this I am not, this
is not my self.” He regards what
is seen, heard, sensed, cognized, encountered, sought, mentally pondered thus: “This is not mine, this I
am not, this is not my self.” And this
standpoint for views, namely, “That which is the self is the world; after death I shall be permanent,
everlasting, eternal, not subject to
change; I shall endure as long as eternity” – this too he regards thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not
my self.” (Alagaddūpama Sutta: 15
in MN: 1.136)
The mistake would be to see the Buddha’s account as a
type of ‘non self’. This is as much an illusion as the essentialism of everyday
thought, or
as Peter Harvey puts it in ‘The Selfless Mind’ (1995), the denial of any kind
of self, metaphysical or empirical is ‘quite wrong’ (1996:7). We are therefore
left with a sort of agnosticism towards selfhood. Therefore mindfulness as thus
portrayed in its Buddhist context is generally seen as that which helps to
sharpen our awareness of processes of the mind whilst generally remaining
agnostic as to the nature of self in its essence. As the Buddha puts it in the Sabbāsava Sutta, both the view that
‘self exists for me’ and ‘no self exists for me’ are equally delusory:
This speculative
view, bhikkus, is called the thicket of views, the contortion of views, the wilderness of views, the vacillation of
views, the fetter of views. (MN: 1.8)
With this Buddhist notion
of the ‘decentred agnostic self’ revealed through mindfulness before us we now
return to Teresa to see how she employs ‘oración
mental’ and ‘contemplación’ in
her works and whether, if at all, there are parallels with these Buddhist
notions of mindfulness.
[1] ‘This
delusion is the basis of māna (conceit of 'I am'), one of the samyojanas
(fetters) that bind us to the wheel of rebirth.’ Paul Trafford: Note to author,
2012.
[2] See, for
example, Mahāpunnama Sutta (MN
109:14) : ‘So it seems material form is not self, feeling is not self,
perception is not self, volitions are not self, consciousness is not self. What
self, then, will actions done by non-self affect?’ See also Williams 2000:89 passim for an extended discussion of
the later Abhidhamma fine gradations of the five khandha.
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