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By Root 684 0

the existence of a soul, some unchanging thing that is somehow “the essence” of a person. Instead they see a human being as a composite of five skandhas. The word skandha literally means “heap.” Imagine a heap of junk: take away all the individual pieces of junk that make up the heap, and the heap is gone. There is no “heap essence” or “heap soul” aside from the pieces of junk on the heap. In Buddhism, the five “heaps” that make up a person are these: form, feelings, perceptions, impulses toward actions (and the actions themselves), and consciousness.

The denial of the idea of a soul is central to Buddhist understanding. Gautama Buddha was responding to the Indian idea of atman. This idea says that a little piece of God, called the atman, exists within each one of us, and that this atman is eternally separate from the body. The Judeo-Christian idea of a soul is pretty much the same except that the soul is seen by Jews and Christians as being eternally separate not just from the physical body but from God as well. It can go hang out with God, but can never merge into God as can the atman in the Hindu view.

Gautama Buddha looked carefully and exhaustively and could see no reason to accept the permanent existence of anything that could be called self or soul or atman. This is the basis of the teaching of anatman, “no self”—which has been verified by generation after generation of Buddhists for 2,500 years.

Nothing in the universe is permanent—and the thing we call “self” is no different.

Form Is Emptiness

Emptiness is the single most misunderstood word in all of Buddhism. The original Sanskrit word for this is shunyata, which ultimately points to the as-it-is-ness of things, the state of things being as they are without being colored by our views and ideas. But really, no matter how you define this word, it is still used to express something for which there simply were and are no adequate words, definitions, or concepts. The set of tools we’re given to write about Buddhism are simply not up to the task. Nor were they up to the task 2,500 years ago.

Emptiness is not a nihilistic concept of voidness. Emptiness is not meaninglessness. Emptiness is that condition which is free from our conceptions and our perceptions. It’s the world as it is before we come along and start complaining about the stuff we don’t like.

Nishijima translates the famous line “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” as, “Matter is the immaterial, the immaterial is matter.” John Lennon expressed the same idea in Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey: “Your inside is out and your outside is in.” The world we perceive and the thing that perceives the world are one and the same. Another modern Indian teacher, a guy named Krishnamurti, was fond of saying, “The observer is the observed.”

This all sounds pretty weird to most people when they begin studying Buddhism; it sounds so bizarre as to seem meaningless. But it is really a very concrete statement. It may, in fact, be the most concrete, most clear statement you can possibly make.

This book is you, you are this book. Reality is you, you are reality.

It’s like the scene in David Cronenberg’s movie The Fly. Having subjected himself to a scientific experiment involving teleportation, Professor Brundle (played by Jeff Goldblum) gets his molecular structure combined with that of a fly that gets into the machinery. Brundle becomes progressively more and more flylike, both physically and mentally. As he comes to terms with this, even begins to revel in it, he starts referring to himself as “Brundlefly.” He understands the two—fly and Brundle—are really one, but language can’t handle that concept. Same deal here. It’s not “you” and “the universe.” It’s “universeyou.”

The matter of matter and its relationship to mind is one of the most interesting aspects of Buddhism. Buddhist ideas about mind and matter are at once very much at odds with most Western philosophy, as well as the “commonsense” interpretation, and also similar in many ways to the notions being expressed recently