CHAPTER  8

THOUGHTFUL REFLECTION

The Arising of Cintamayiprajna

 With the completion of the study of the terms and their meanings used in the Heart Sutra, a
broader and more penetrating review of their implications is now in order.  While theories and
conjectures can never provide proof of anything, thoughtful reflection and a deeper analysis
can aid in the perfection of reason that can, at least, give a clearer indication of reality.  Finding
the truth and living in accord with truth is possible by exercising reason, once the right way of
comprehending reality is found (right view), no more questions need be asked, and no more
statements need be made regarding the matter.  All the entanglements and delusions anyone
experiences are due to ignorance, wrong knowledge, and lack of thoughtful reflection.  But
through the powers of reason these problems can be overcome.

 The Heart Sutra is very short, very compact, and has broadly influenced Buddhist thought.   It
focuses primarily on the doctrine of sunyata, emptiness. The experience of emptiness is
substantially different from knowledge that arises due to study, reasoning, or logical thinking.  
Yet these very steps are necessary as prerequisite for a direct understanding that will transcend
the limitations of the discriminative intellect.   Although the four lower aspects of prajna, sruti,
cinta, bhavana, and niscaya have their arising from proper reason and analysis initially,
adhiprajna results as the evolving fruition of wisdom.  Adhiprajna is an integrated and holistic
blossoming of wisdom, and leaves nothing uninspected.  Yet this wisdom is beyond any
function of intellect that uses descriptions, words, indications, or other symbolic tokens of
expression such as analogies or similes.  Thoughtful reflection is an extension of study and is
necessary to further prepare the ground for insight that ultimately transcends reason and logic.

 Sunyata, as found in Mahayana Buddhism, is the central and paramount doctrine around
which all phenomena can be understood. Every effort, every means available at every available
opportunity should be used to meticulously examine, understand and realize its implications.
Everything that can be known as an objective phenomenon is subject to the application of the
doctrine of emptiness.  All objects and events are impermanent, have no inherent self, and are
of the character of suffering.  Whatever is commonly conceived as an individual object or
person does not exist in the sense of its being a permanent, independent, or substantial
individual.

 Anatman means not-self.  It is a specific Buddhist doctrine that defines a person as being
empty of an eternal and changeless self-essence, sometimes referred to as a soul, often
described as being an eternal soul, an aspect of selfness inhabiting the body.  Atman (meaning
self, soul), is a Vedic concept referring to an independent, unchanging and eternal identity.  
This identity as defined in this concept is the essential self-ness that is found at the very core of
individuals and entities.  It is thought to be the very essence of the particular form in which it
finds a home.  The implication behind this concept would be that these essential selves exist
somewhere, in some warehouse of waiting selves, and become activated only when an
appropriate body/form is available, and that after the demise of that body/form, it returns in
its pristine, unchanging and unchanged form to home-central warehouse for whatever comes
next.

 Anatman, our Buddhist concept, finds its expression based on the teaching of interdependent
origination; these creative steps in the process of all phenomenal conditions point to the fact
that everything is impermanent, that everything is in a constant state of flux, and that
everything draws on the interactions of other things in the becoming process.  So if someone
then identifies himself as being the five skandhas, or as being the body or the mind, this is
simply called ego which is, even as a mistaken notion, also impermanent, changing and prone
to suffering, a so-called personality made of component parts, structures that have no self
either. No thing can be found that has a self-existing nature.  Neither the mistaken human
identity called ego nor any other quality or characteristic can be designated as a real self, a
permanent and unchanging self-nature. This is exactly what Avalokitesvara comprehended
when he saw that all five skandhas were empty of inherent existence.

 The contemplative practitioner must penetrate into a thorough comprehension of anatman
and understand that there is only a continuous process of arising and falling away in the
phenomena considered mistakenly to be a separate ego, self, soul, or a permanently existing
essentialness. There must be understanding that there is no self-existent individual or person
who is behind the action of being, or at the center guiding this process, even though the
common presumption is that this is generally the case.  Because of the ongoing interdependent
origination process functioning from a basic permeation of the seed of ignorance within the
storehouse consciousness, the resulting mind-creations build and strengthen the memory until
it takes on the role of the experiencing “I”, and thereafter assumes its predominant role as a
“self” experiencing all “others”.  This habitual assumption builds on and strengthens the
individual idea of “self”,  and it might be fair to say that very few individual humans existing in
the normal delusional state of awareness have some sort of feeling that “they” are not an
eternal personality viewing “other” from behind their eyes and through their other sensory
receptors.  Very few will give any thought to the actuality of the matter or to the process that
creates such an illusion.

 The very concept of “eternal” requires there be an unchanging state of existence.   It requires
that whatever it is that is the complete whole-being exhibiting eternal qualities be so without
change.  The very idea of a separate and eternal soul-personality residing within a body,
observing that body’s thoughts, acts, etc., seems to be part and parcel of the taught
assumptions of most religions.  The dogma structure of religions also stresses in various ways
the changing potentials for the individual person, stressing as part of the religious teachings the
fact that change for the better is the way according to the teachings of their particular deity.  
The saving grace involved in this change process, after the “death” of the body, can then only be
enjoyed if that eternal soul is able to exhibit those changes for the better of the personality
involved in a state of being other than that which made the body possible.  Such expectation-
thinking is flawed, because an eternal soul, or anything whatsoever that is created, is incapable
of being “eternal” since there is constant change taking place in all shape, form, and qualities.  
In our ignorance we usually do not consider such things, and if we do then the partial and
errant expressions which language uses creates a jumble of mental formations that tend to
finally end up in contradictory ideas.  These ideas in their turn then create doubt and confusion
which, when expressed, can quickly be put to rest under the comfort-blanket of “there are some
things we can never understand and so must put our faith and trust in (place here your
appropriate deity, cleric, guru, religious text, or whatever else gives solace).

 So having now expressed what a “person” cannot be, let us explore what a “person” is. A
“person” is a continuity of changing events, process itself, a complex flux of conditions that,
when investigated, is all that a person really is. A collective set of conditions is not a self; it is
not an isolated collectivity since all is related and interdependent, each with all, and all with
each.  A collective set of conditions is usually conceived of as a self, but there are only
conditions, no real self-being or “eternal” entity of any sort.  Albeit, this pseudo-entity, as a
collectivity, does have the capability of altering the conditions of its collective conditionality,
changing dysfunctional or unskillful characteristics into better ones, or vice versa.   Since there
is no definitive boundary anywhere in the totality of the flux of conditionality, there is nowhere
that an isolated self can be found.  All is process; all is functionality.

 Without the recognition of this truth, one is left presupposing it is his ego personality that does
good or ill, experiences suffering, gets enlightened or not, controls the doings of the body,
oversees and does the doing; but it is not the ego personality, nor is it any kind of individual self
that enters into the ultimate nirvana of the Heart Sutra discourse.  In the Visuddhimagga, the
great encyclopedic compendium of Theravada Buddhism, it is written:

 There is suffering, but no sufferer is found;

 Deeds are, but there is no doer;

 Nirvana is, but no one who enters it;

 The path exists, but there is no traveler of it.

 The idea of an ego is another collective set of mental factors, and although there is some
relative value in such conceptions, ideas are only ideas, always partial and in some degree
faulty.  The mind is faulty when it splits the phenomenal world into a perceiver and an object
perceived.  This is dichotomy, a presumption of a real duality between “me” as perceiver and
the “other” as the perceived object.  This initial dichotomy makes...

Back