The Buddha’s gaze shattered even the mirror of consciousness
Re: “Take a good look in the mirror”, Have Your Say, yesterday.
I am puzzled. I believe it was in his first letter to this column that Michael Setter defined himself as a practising Buddhist. But in his latest letter, he attributes to consciousness a status approaching that of an absolute. He claims that “nature arises in consciousness”, making nature thus dependent upon and inferior to consciousness. He also refers to “the mirror of consciousness, which itself never changes. Thus consciousness has no nature.” Well, which is it? Is consciousness like an unchanging mirror, or does it have no nature? If it’s like a mirror, it would be nice to know the status of what the mirror reflects.
This does not sound to me like Buddhism. It sounds more like the Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta of the 7th-century Indian philosopher Adi Shankara. He declared, “Brahman is real; the universe is unreal.” Brahman is the absolute in Hinduism: the ground of being, the sole reality, which contains, constitutes, and yet transcends all phenomena. The English term that comes closest to describing it is universal spirit. Shankara defined it as pure consciousness.
This is quite different from Buddhism. As I understand it, Buddhism has no absolute. Everything is transient, ephemeral, relative. A major difference between Hinduism and Buddhism is that Hinduism believes in an absolute; Buddhism doesn’t.
What, precisely, did the Buddha have to say about the consciousness which Michael so ardently extols? He downgrades it considerably. “Consciousness,” he says, “is named from that in dependence on which it comes into being.” If it’s dependent on anything, it can’t be such hot stuff. What is consciousness dependent on? The Buddha names six organs: the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind. (Indian philosophy considers the mind to be a subtle organ.) Each possesses its own type of consciousness. (HC Warren, “Buddhism in Translations”, p 183; Majjhima Nikaya, Sutta 38.)
Not only is consciousness plural and dependent on six organs, collectively it is one of the Five Aggregates: matter, feelings, perceptions, mental states, and consciousness. (Narada Mahathera, “The Buddha and His Teachings, pp 90 and 100.) All five aggregates are transient and break up with the death of the individual.
So either Michael needs to go back to his Buddhist books for a refresher course on consciousness, or he needs to rethink his position.
Ye Olde Theologian
