“Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction!”
~ The Butterfly Dream of Zhuangzi (Translation by Burton Watson taken from Wikipedia)
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts...”
~ William Shakespeare
Such questions concerning the nature of our existence have occupied the thoughts of man through the ages. They have both intrigued and confounded him at the same time. Mystics, meditators, philosophers, thinkers, even scientists, in their quest to make sense of the world, have attempted various answers. And we have all been fascinated or turned off by their answers.
The Buddha's teaching is one among many teachings in the world that have arisen out of a need to address man's problem of existential suffering. But to solve this problem necessitate first of all an understanding of the nature of our existence. Therefore, since the Buddha did claim to have found a solution to this problem, we would expect that the Buddha's teaching also provides some answers to these questions about the nature of our existence. But what are it's answers if any? What do the Buddha and his enlightened disciples see when they look at this world of our existence and how do they describe it?
We can catch a glimpse of the Buddhists' vision and understanding of the nature of this world of our existence from the following illuminating reply of the Ven. Bhikkhunī Vajirā to a question from Māra:
Māra's question:
“By whom has this being been created?
Where is the maker of the being?
Where has the being arisen?
Where does the being cease?”
…
Ven. Vajirā's reply:
“Why now do you assume 'a being'?
Māra, is that your speculative view?
This is a heap of sheer formations:
Here no being is found.
“Just as, with an assemblage of parts,
The word 'chariot' is used,
So, when the aggregates exist,
There is the convention 'a being.'
“It's only suffering that comes to be,
Suffering that stands and falls away.
Nothing but suffering comes to be,
Nothing but suffering ceases.”
~ Saṃyutta-Nikāya, Bhikkhunīsaṃyutta, Sutta 10
In her reply to Māra Ven. Vajirā said that the assumption of the existence of 'a being' on the part of Māra is merely his speculative-view, and that in reality what we call a being is but a heap or collection of sheer formations.
These formations or saṅkhāras refer to conditioned phenomena, things which arise when suitable conditions that support their existence are present and which cease once they have arisen, i.e they are phenomena that have the nature of arising and passing-away due to the law of conditionality. The five aggregates subject to clinging (materiality, feelings, perceptions, mental-formations, and consciousness) are all formations. They are conditioned and have the nature of arising and passing-away.
The idea of a being arises out of the presence of this heap of formations or aggregates. A being on its own cannot be found in the absence of these aggregates, just as the idea of a chariot is not obtained without its component parts being present and assembled in a certain fashion.
To explain further, what we call a being is actually made up of a series of never ending momentary experience of the world. All the various moments of our experiences, of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thought processes, occurring one after another in a continuous series is what a being really is. And each moment of these experiences are composed of a group or aggregate of formations that, being conditioned by various conditions, arise in that moment and work together to accomplish the task of either seeing, or hearing, or smelling, etc. Once they arise and have performed their task they pass away. So according to the Buddha's teaching the so called existent being is really groups of formations or aggregates that arise and pass away every moment in a continuous and never ending series.
But this series of groups of formations arise and pass away so rapidly that it is said that billions of such moments arise and pass away one after another in a blink of an eye. Each preceding moment of experience is so closely followed by each succeeding moment at such a blinding speed that, in the absence of sharp penetrative wisdom, our experience of the world appears to us not as the series of momentary experiences that it actually is, but as one compact, undifferentiated, continuous, and unchanging whole. And under the influence of delusion (moha) this appearance of an unchanging whole is distorted to give rise to the mistaken idea of a permanent unchanging being, i.e. that there is this same being or person who had had all these experiences in the past, who is now having these experiences in the present, and will in the future have other experiences. And once we take these heaps of formations that arise in our own experiences to be our own being, our own person or self, we will infer from this that there are also other beings around us, i.e. those other animated heaps of formations that we perceive around us, that arise in others' experience. Thus the world of beings (satta-loka) appears to us.
But a being, as mentioned earlier, is in reality only these groups of formations or aggregates incessantly arising and passing-away in a continuous series. And because their nature is to arise and pass-away they are impermanent. And what is impermanent is suffering or unsatisfactory, not being able to provide any real satisfaction. And what is suffering is also non-self. (Saṃyutta-Nikāya, Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta, Sutta 1) Therefore, as Ven. Vajirā puts it, this so called being comprising of formations or aggregates is really just suffering that arises and passes-away, that stands and falls away and there is nothing but this suffering that comes to be, and nothing else but this suffering that ceases.
These formations or aggregates that are incessantly arising and passing-away in a continuous flux are also called ultimate-realities (paramattha), the true constituents of our experience of the world. They each possess their own intrinsic-nature (sabhāva), eg. hardness (earth-element), motion (wind-element), heat (fire-element), cohesiveness (water-element), knowing (consciousness), perceiving (perception), contacting (contact), grasping (greed), etc., which the mind can experience directly through direct contact with them at the sense-doors.
Based on this fundamental fabric of ultimate-realities and their appearance as a compact, undifferentiated, continuous, and unchanging whole, the mind conceive of or conceptualize, with the help of delusion, the idea or concept (paññatti) of a permanently existing being. This concept of a being is conventionally called by various conventionally agreed upon (sammuti) terms such as a being, a person, an individual, a man, a woman, an animal, a deva, a peta, a self, or a soul.
And it is not just the concept of a being that the mind conceive. The mind conceives many other concepts as well out of these ultimate-realities: time and space, languages, gender, race, all the mundane things we see around us (tables, chairs, cups, plates, etc.), the labels we use to identify them, the ideas we have about them, etc. And in every society there are also conventions, standards generally agreed upon (sammuti), either explicitly or implicitly, by the members of the society, that govern the usage of these concepts, e.g. the standard unit of measuring time and space, ethics governing speech (use of language), roles of the gender, etc. These are also conceived in the mind.
All these concepts and conventions are mere fabrications of the mind that do not have any concrete existence in reality. They do not possess any intrinsic-nature of their own which the mind can experience directly through the sense-doors. The mind cannot experience concepts and conventions directly. What the mind experience directly are the ultimate-realities. Then based on these ultimate-realities it fabricates, through the mental process of conceptualization, concepts and conventions.
Therefore ultimate-realities are the basic building blocks of our experience of the world. We can think of ultimate-realities as similar to the Lego blocks that children play with and concepts as the various things they think they have build out of the blocks - cars, buildings, animals, etc. Or we can think of ultimate-realities as the clouds in the sky and the concepts conceived by the mind as the various shapes and forms that we think we see in them, e.g. heart-shaped cloud, dragon-shaped cloud, or even a goddess riding on a dragon's back! The heart, the goddess, and the dragon exist only in our mind. In truth only the clouds really exist. In the same way, ultimately only ultimate-realities exist, whereas concepts and conventions are only ideas that the mind fashioned out of these ultimate-realities that it experiences. They are ultimately not real and therefore cannot be experienced by the mind directly through the sense-doors. Our mind can only think of (conceptualise) concepts and conventions.
Concepts and conventions are also subject to change according to time and place. For example the concept of transportation just a century ago is very different from what it is today. The idea of transportation that a dweller in a modern city of a developed country has is also very different from the idea of transportation that a dweller in a remote village of a developing country has. The convention of gender roles is also slowly but surely shifting away from its more traditional and conservative mold as people in each society become better educated and more open to change and new ideas.
Ultimate-realities on the other hand does not change its intrinsic nature according to time and place. For example in the Buddha's time in India the greed that arise in the minds of the Indians has the nature of grasping at things. At that same time in China the greed that arise in the minds of the Chinese also has the nature of grasping at things. Today also when greed arise in minds of people, regardless of which country it arise in, it also has the nature of grasping at things.
However, although in the ultimate sense only the ultimate-realities are real, in Buddhism we still speak of and recognise two kinds of truth (sacca): ultimate-truth (paramattha-sacca) and conventional-truth (sammuti-sacca). The former refers to ultimate-realities and the latter to concepts and conventions which are agreed upon by general consent (sammuti) in the world, such as the various names we use to address people, labels we use to refer to things around us, way of doing things and conducting ourselves, ideas, etc. We can understand why ultimate-realities are called truth. But why are concepts and conventions called truth?
They are truth because they are true in the conventional domain. For example if we say that the butcher slaughter a cow, even though the conventionally accepted terms we used, butcher and cow, are not ultimately real or true, our statement is still conventionally correct and true. The utterance of this statement is not a violation of the precept of refraining from falsehood, and no unwholesome kamma is accrued as there is no intention to deceive anyone on our part.
In our normal everyday life we live almost exclusively in the world of concepts and conventions. Even for veteran vipassanā meditators, when they are caught up in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the worldly life and earning a living, their mind is engaged with a lot of concepts and conventions. Only rarely do their mind contact with ultimate-realities directly. This being the case we cannot really avoid using conventional truth.
In fact for practical reasons, in order to make it possible to communicate with each other, we need to use conventional truth. In our daily life we cannot refer to other people as five-aggregates even though that is what they really are. We cannot communicate effectively in this way. We have to use the convention of names and refer to them by their given names. One who insists on living exclusively in the world of ultimate-realities even in daily life will come into danger when crossing a busy road. Because they keep their mind away from concepts their mind will not conceive of any idea or concept of a car travelling at a high speed coming towards them. But they will be aware of materialities clashing with materialities, as a consequence of which the mind will experience a lot of unpleasant feeling. The life-faculty may be cut off!
So we need conventional truth in our daily life. And that is why in Buddhism concepts and conventions are accepted as truth, albeit not in the ultimate sense. They are true in their own conventional domain. Buddhists respect these two levels of truth: ultimate and conventional. We make use of these two levels of truth. We use conventional truth in our daily life. Even Buddhas and arahants make use of it in their daily life, and even to teach Dhamma. But they do so without being deceived by them into thinking that they are real.
As for ultimate truth we use them when we are practising satipaṭṭhāna vipassanā meditation. They serve as the objects of contemplation for vipassanā meditation. By contemplating the nature of these ultimate realities we develop insights into their true nature of impermanence, suffering, and non-self.
So far we have discussed, based on Ven. Bhikkhunī Vajirā's reply to Māra, how the concept of a being, as well as other concepts and conventions, arise out of sheer formations consisting in the five aggregates subject to clinging that arise and pass-away continuously and incessantly each moment of our existence. This continuous and incessant flow of arising and passing-away of the aggregates is what is called saṃsāra or, literally, the faring-on. It is the faring-on in the cycle of birth and death, of arising and passing-away, of appearing and disappearing, of origination and dissolution. It is but a cycle of suffering.
When the Buddha and his enlightened disciples look upon this world of our existence this is what they see, this never ending saṃsāric cycle of suffering. They see how beings, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, create a conceptual world out of it and take delight in this illusory world of permanence, pleasure, and self. They see how these untaught ordinary people are caught up in this saṃsāra and are compelled by ignorance and craving to go on and on experiencing cycle after cycle of birth, aging, disease, and death.
But more than and beyond this conditioned world of suffering that is buzzing with the unpeaceful activities of arising and passing away of the formations, the enlightened vision of these Buddhist saints also sees another more profound reality. Their vision enables them to perceive, when all these unpeaceful buzzing arrives at cessation, a reality beyond which is utterly peaceful due to the absence of any conditioned activity of arising and passing-away. This is the unconditioned reality that Buddhists call Nibbāna, the anti-thesis of saṃsāra. While the nature of the formations or saṃsāra is suffering in the sense being oppressed by incessant arising and passing away (udayabbayappaṭipīḷanaṭṭhena dukkhā), Nibbāna is characterised as simply peaceful (santilakkhaṇa). Nibbāna, like the formations, is also an ultimate-reality. It possesses the intrinsic nature of peace which can be experienced by the mind directly. But unlike the formations which are conditioned it is unconditioned.
But how did these Buddhist saints developed this enlightened vision? How did they realised this unconditioned reality wherein the continuous flow of the arising and passing-away of the formations comes to cessation? They do so by developing vipassanā insights. For it is through developing the wisdom of vipassanā insights, seeing into the true nature of impermanence, suffering, and non-self that are inherent in the ever arising and passing-away formations, or saṃsāra, that one is able to dispel ignorance and develop the strength to let go of the clinging to the formations. When clinging to formations is let go off one is then able to transcend beyond to touch the unconditioned reality beyond.
So just as in the case of Zhuangzi where the question is whether it is Zhuangzi or the butterfly he dreamt that is real, in the case of this Buddhists' vision of the nature of our existence it can be asked, which is real? Concepts, formations, or Nibbāna? Concepts are true in the realm of conventional-truth where they serve many useful purpose. We accept them as real in this context and make appreciative use of them. In the ultimate sense, however, they possess no concrete existence since they are mere fabrication of our mind. So while we make use of them we must also learn not to take them too seriously.
Both formations and Nibbāna possess their own intrinsic-nature or sabhāva through which their existence can be known directly by the mind. So they exist in the ultimate-sense. They are real. But because the formations are conditioned, subject to the law of conditionality, they arise and pass-away every moment and are therefore impermanent and subject to suffering. Nibbāna, on the other hand, is unconditioned and so not subjected to the law of conditionality. It does not arise nor pass away. It is a reality that simply is. In this sense it is more real than the impermanent formations.
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