How Can We Free Ourselves from Attachment to Views?
In the previous two episodes, I discussed the four idols in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum: the idols of the tribe, the cave, the theater, and the marketplace. When I gather that discussion again in Buddhist language, the conclusion is simple. My knowledge, common sense, logic, and views are all laws made by human beings. They cannot reveal one hundred percent of the truth of the world, and they can always be wrong. We must therefore begin by accepting, “I may be wrong.” As Socrates said, I neither know nor think that I know. Escaping the illusion that I know, and refusing to clutch my own correctness, is an essential starting point in Buddhism.
Before becoming the Buddha, Siddhartha learned the attainment of nothingness and the attainment of neither perception nor non-perception from two teachers. Beyond recognizing that there is nothing that is mine, this means holding on to no image and not even insisting on the idea that there is no image. Image, view, knowledge, and common sense may look like different words, but they are alike in that they are images human beings have observed, imagined, and concluded. We cannot know whether reality itself must be that way. Yet we use our knowledge and logic to insist with certainty that we are right. Unless we release this attachment, we cannot awaken.
The Last Image the Buddha Abandoned
Siddhartha practiced severe austerities in search of atman, but he could not find it. Only after giving up austerity did he see that the atman he had sought was itself a humanly created image and view. “There is no such thing. This too was my imagination.” At that moment he cast off attachment to views and became the Buddha. Buddhism is not concerned only with craving and anger. We must also doubt the ignorance that absolutizes conclusions reached through human logic, common sense, knowledge, and reason. While clutching them, we cannot be free.
When attachment to views is released, we can also step out of ideologies and systems, customs and cultures, good and evil, justice, heaven and hell, and every imagination about an afterlife. We see that they are all conditioned laws made by human beings. A conditioned law is something people intend and construct. An unconditioned law refers to what human beings did not make, but we cannot confidently claim complete knowledge of it either. Instead of claiming that we know the unconditioned, we must first abandon the illusion that we know every truth of the world.
The Diamond Sutra Smashes Images
The final verse of the Diamond Sutra says that all conditioned phenomena are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, dew, and lightning, and should be viewed as such. Conditioned laws are our views and common sense. This is why the core of the Diamond Sutra is the instruction not to form an image. “If one sees that all images are not true images, one sees the Tathagata” conveys the same point.
Here, image is not limited to a picture in the mind. Knowledge, customs, laws, rules, common sense, and views are all images. When we understand that they are humanly made conditioned laws, we can put down the burden that says things absolutely must be a certain way. We can stand confidently before authority without claiming that we ourselves are unconditionally right. Humility and freedom arise together when we understand that we are frogs in a well. The Diamond Sutra is a scripture that strikes like a thunderbolt and smashes this shell of views.
The Heart Sutra Deconstructs Even Buddhist Laws
The Heart Sutra does the same work. “Neither arising nor ceasing, neither defiled nor pure, neither increasing nor decreasing” reveals that distinctions such as birth and extinction, dirtiness and purity, increase and decrease are also humanly made laws. My property or the water in my cup may increase or decrease, but the world itself does not come with a human ledger attached. The Heart Sutra goes further and says there is no suffering, origin, cessation, or path. Even the Four Noble Truths are conditioned laws created to explain, so they must not be held as absolute entities.
The categories of dependent origination, organized from ten links into twelve, and the eighteen realms described as the six faculties and six objects are also frameworks devised to explain the world. Explanation is necessary, but attachment to an explanation as complete truth becomes delusion again. This is why the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures speak both of the emptiness of the person and the emptiness of dharmas. The former means there is no independent entity called “I.” The latter means that all laws—including the aggregates used to explain me and Buddhist teachings and methods—lack fixed self-nature. Each element of matter and mind does not exist alone; through relationships it temporarily takes a form.
What the Four Images Mean
The four images in the Diamond Sutra—the self, person, sentient being, and life—are not merely four vague personality traits. The image of self is the image of atman sought in ancient India. It was imagined as an eternal entity that transmigrated and, once discovered, would make a person godlike and free that person from rebirth. Siddhartha could not find it. Eventually, he realized not simply that he had failed to find it, but that it had been human imagination from the beginning. He released attachment to an unseen transmigrating soul, afterworld, and hell.
The image of person is connected to the concept of pudgala. After the Buddha’s death, schools divided and once again tried to explain karma and rebirth. A contradiction appeared: if there is no atman, what transmigrates? To fill this gap, one school posited an individual entity called pudgala. The Diamond Sutra says that this too is a humanly made image. The image of life is connected to the Jain concept of jiva, a supposed living substance that transmigrates; it too is an image. The image of sentient being concerns sattva, the notion of an animate being possessing the capacity to transmigrate. Atman, pudgala, jiva, and sattva differ in name, but all imagine that some invisible thing transmigrates. The Diamond Sutra tells us not to form any of these images.
Look at Observable Reality
Buddhism is an intensely realistic religion. It tells us to see that people are born, grow old, die, and that their bodies decay and disappear. Contemplating bones and bodily impurity means refusing to turn away from observable reality. By contrast, when we speak as if unseen heavenly beings, six realms of rebirth, karma, heaven, and hell were confirmed facts, we cling again to human imagination. “Where could I go after death? Go where?” We must first look at how we come from the earth and return to the earth.
The word skepticism may sound negative, but the emptiness of dharmas taught in the Heart Sutra and Diamond Sutra is the attitude that no humanly made law is one hundred percent right. This does not tell us to discard every courtesy and agreement. We can live together with courtesy in this time and place. We simply must not turn those conventions into eternal and universal truths. Human agreements may be observed when needed and changed when they become wrong.
From Inner Revolution to Social Revolution
Consider the reality of Iran, where a woman was taken away and died because she did not wear a hijab, while those who protested were suppressed and publicly executed. In some societies, religious rules and authority force women to wear a hijab. Seen from Korea, however, the question arises: why must it necessarily be so? Are that law, system, and ideology true for every time and every person? No. They too are conditioned laws made by people, like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows. If such a law oppresses people, it must be broken.
The inner revolution of escaping attachment to views leads to a new way of seeing society. When we step away from the ideas that mine and yours must be divided in one fixed way or that custom and authority have always been so, we see that social law and common sense are human agreements. The power that conservatively protects the current system and ruling ideas is always strong. Yet a person who has broken through the shell of personal views does not submit to authority or remain bound by common sense. Such a person can say that what is wrong can be changed.
We cannot claim complete knowledge of truth. Nor can we fight as though our own view were one hundred percent right. But precisely for that reason, we can change mistaken agreements. Constantly questioning, correcting, and changing is both science and Buddhism. “All conditioned laws are empty” and “see that all images are not true images” are not spells telling us to ignore reality. They are the starting point of a Buddhist revolution: do not mistake the images I make or the authority society makes for truth, and change both the individual and society.
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