nac Posted November 13, 2009 (edited) Or that no one is actually behind the mask...masks on masks... like.. those Scooby Doo villains. . According to Buddhist idealism, it's these multitudinous layers or "masks" that, like an onion, constitute the entirety of the so-called relative self. Mental, then physical layers form all that exists, right down to the level of empty, undifferentiated "energy". Indians compared this situation to the trunk of a banana plant. Carefully pull down the concealing leaves, and there is no core to be revealed inside, only the overlapping, interlocking layers of leaves that, like integral calculus, give rise to the property called solidity. It's through the workings and effects of mundane phenomena that non-sentient objects as well as sentient beings function, both lacking a soul or insuperable "inner core" of any kind. Nowadays, even those layers we human beings are interdependent with for our continued happiness or survival can be drastically altered by means of surgical procedures, etc. Strictly speaking, Buddhism considers such "layers" to extend beyond the physical boundaries of an object into all external phenomena conditioning it's present state. Pull out a single card from this complex structure (eg. the condition that a wooden object has not been set fire to) and an entire wing of the castle collapses. (it's wholly or partly reduced to ashes, with corresponding ramifications) Neal Stephenson is funny, bitter, and yet brutally honest at the same time in In The Beginning… Was The Command Line: I had been in San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn’t made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file. It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back. As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you’ve been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood. Seeing this clearly is of supreme importance in Buddhist practice. Edited November 13, 2009 by nac Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nac Posted November 13, 2009 Note: Phenomena in Buddhist philosophy are perhaps best described as ever-changing Whiteheadian "potentia" rather than concrete existentia or Platonic essentia. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
