The Two Questions Are Really One
Today I want to address two questions that came in through the comments. One asks what the four-line verse at the end of the Diamond Sutra—“All conditioned dharmas are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows; like dew and also like lightning; one should see them in this way”—actually means. The other asks what is the same and what is different between the awakening spoken of by Rupert Spira and Eckhart Tolle and Buddhist awakening. They may look like completely different questions, but once we understand the four-line verse properly, the answer to the second question naturally becomes clear.
When people speak about Buddhist awakening, a slight turn in the wrong direction can easily lead them to conclusions such as eternal consciousness, eternal awareness, or a true self beyond body and thought. This can happen whether one practices Seon Buddhism, studies Yogācāra, or reads Theravāda scriptures. The texts and schools gathered under the name Buddhism do not all contain one consistent opinion. Older texts and later doctrinal systems were transmitted together, and different positions and standards became mixed along the way. If we fail to see those changes and treat later claims as Buddhism’s starting point, we can easily fall into a Hindu-style eternal self, a Gnostic worldview, or the identification of an experience of absorption with awakening.
The point today, therefore, is not to rule on who deserves to be called a famous spiritual teacher. It is to examine our habit of calling whatever we see the truth, and our habit of explaining an experience by inventing yet another eternal substance.
The Diamond Sutra Is Not the Buddha’s Recorded Voice but a Sutra That Smashes Delusion
First, we should not receive the Diamond Sutra as a historical record of words spoken directly by the Buddha. It should be seen as a text formed roughly four or five centuries after the Buddha’s death, and it was not completed all at once. Material was added and revised, and it is doubtful whether even the four-line verse discussed today was present in the earliest form. That does not make the verse unimportant. It matters because in a very short passage it touches the central direction of Buddhism.
People commonly imagine that the “diamond” in the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sutra means a scripture containing a truth as hard as a diamond. I read it in the opposite direction. It is a sutra that strikes like a vajra, a thunderbolt, and smashes the thoughts of a person hardened by delusion. When we imagine the Buddha through thirty-two physical marks or eighty characteristics and say, “This must be what a Buddha looks like,” it breaks that image. When we cling to “There must be this merit” or “That dharma must be absolute truth,” it breaks that shell.
This direction connects with the Heart Sutra’s phrase about going far beyond inverted dreams and delusions. That is the direction of prajñā. As I always say, Buddhism is a teaching of getting free, a teaching of liberation. Liberation is not transcending birth, aging, sickness, and death to become another kind of being. It is getting free of the images, inverted dreams, and delusions I have made. The old Aṭṭhakavagga and Pārāyanavagga of the Sutta Nipāta and the Prajñāpāramitā texts use different expressions, but they point in the same direction: get free of the desire and attachment that insist there is a fixed dharma or fixed merit.
All Conditioned Dharmas Means Every Dharma Human Beings Make
一切有爲法 All conditioned dharmas · 如夢幻泡影 Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows · 如露亦如電 Like dew and also like lightning · 應作如是觀 One should see them in this way
In “conditioned,” the character wi (爲) means to do, make, or fabricate. I therefore read “all conditioned dharmas” as every dharma that human beings make, imagine, and distinguish. Dharma here does not mean only state law. Right and wrong, good and bad, what may and may not be done, and every name, image, standard, and view attached to people and things are included. Human beings, who possess language and social agreements, classify the world and make rules according to those classifications.
Are those rules the absolute truth of the universe? They were made by human beings who are not omniscient, based on limited observation and convenience. If a human being knew all truth and reality, we would have to call that being God. But human beings cannot observe everything in the world. Human-made laws are therefore bound to change with time and place, and they can only be partial and arbitrary.
In Confucian society, the rule that boys and girls over seven should not sit together was once treated as right. It was a law made by that time and society, not an absolute truth valid everywhere and always. Buddhism’s Five Precepts must face the same question. Are “Do not kill,” “Do not drink,” and “Do not lie” absolute laws of the universe, with merit automatically accumulating when we keep them? If that is all we learn, we miss Buddhism’s core. We must first see that every human-made standard and view is itself a conditioned dharma.
See Them as Dreams, Illusions, Foam, Shadows, Dew, and Lightning
“Like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows” means like a dream, like an illusion, like foam that forms when waves break and quickly disappears, and like a shadow that looks substantial but changes with conditions. “Like dew and also like lightning” means like dew that forms in the morning and dries when the sun rises, and like lightning that flashes into sight and vanishes in an instant. These images point to the fact that all conditioned dharmas are not permanent. They appear before us as solid realities, yet change together with time, space, and conditions.
The final line means, “One should see them in this way.” I read the verse as saying, “See in this way that every dharma made by human beings is impermanent.” In the language of the Heart Sutra, every image is empty and lacks self-nature. The Diamond Sutra’s statements that every possessed image is false and that all images are not the actual image point to the same place. Do not mistake the image you hold for reality itself.
Impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising are not separate doctrines. To say that something is not permanent means that there is nothing eternally unchanging that can be called “this,” and that nothing exists alone but arises according to relations and conditions. They are names for different sides of the same phenomenon: impermanence from one side, non-self from another, and dependent arising from yet another.
Names and Distinctions Are Necessary, but They Are Not Substances
Human beings cannot perceive without making distinctions. We distinguish eyes, noses, and ears; people, apples, and trees; cats, dogs, octopuses, and squid. Naming and accumulating knowledge are essential and useful to us. Science, too, advances through careful classification and distinction. Yet we must not forget that these divisions are provisional and made for human convenience.
We call something a tree or an egg, and we call the flow of body and memory “I.” To give precise instructions, we distinguish dry wood from wood suitable for firewood. But the name “tree” or “I” does not capture a fixed essence in reality. There is an individual cicada and there is an individual human being. A cicada may live underground for years, emerge for a short summer, sing, mate, and die. We can conveniently name the individual and the species, but when we go deeply into the concept, we discover that the name has seized a constantly changing relation as though it were a substance.
The division between you and me, mine and yours, is also human-made. These distinctions are necessary in language, but reality is not completely divided along those borders. Even what I think of as “I” is closer to a whisper produced by body and brain. Understanding all conditioned dharmas does not mean abolishing every name. It means not clinging to names and concepts as absolute truth.
Concluding That the World Is Māyā Is Not the Meaning of the Diamond Sutra
A very common misunderstanding appears here. Because the verse says things are like dreams and illusions, people conclude that matter and reality themselves do not exist and the entire world is māyā. That can lead to nihilism in which killing someone or my own death has no meaning. Or it can shift into a Hindu position: the world is an illusion, but the observer who watches the illusion—the aware true self—is eternal. It then creates another fantasy in which only bodies are exchanged through rebirth while my substance and original face never disappear.
That merely rebuilds, under another name, the image the Diamond Sutra is trying to break. “What appears to your eyes is not the whole of reality” and “Reality is an empty illusion” are completely different claims. Imagine an ostrich chased by a lion burying its head in the sand and believing, “The lion is an illusion made by my eyes, so it will disappear if I do not look.” Does the lion vanish, or does it eat the ostrich? We must not become reality-deniers.
If Buddhism simply declared the world an illusion, why would it repeatedly tell us to observe? Why would it ask us to doubt, reflect, and think scientifically and philosophically? If everything were māyā, there would be no reason to observe reality, debate with others, or study Buddhism and science. Buddhism does not say reality is nonexistent. It tells us to see, just as it is, that self and world change within relationships.
The Moment Awareness Becomes an Eternal Self
The statement quoted in the second question begins, “I am not my body, my thoughts, or my feelings.” Up to that point it may help us reconsider what we cling to. But it soon leaps to, “I am the awareness that is aware of all these things, and because I was never born, I do not die.” After denying that body, thought, and feeling are the self, it designates the awareness that knows them as the real self.
It has merely replaced “I think, therefore I am” with awareness. Whether Yogācāra clings to consciousness, establishes storehouse consciousness, or someone establishes ātman or pudgala, human beings find it difficult to stop imagining, “There must still be something,” and “I must not disappear.” The mind that imagines, when a parent dies, that the parent did not disappear but went to heaven or another world is the same ground from which rebirth and soul are constructed.
In ancient Christian creationism, human beings also imagine themselves as the rulers of nature and the center of the universe. They make a law in which God watches me, punishes me for sin, and sends me to heaven if I obey. God, karma, heaven, hell, and soul can all be made through human imagination. The existence of a word and the fact that many people use it do not prove that its object exists. The Diamond Sutra asks us to see that this imagination is imagination and that it is a conditioned dharma made by human beings.
The Buddhist term “neither arising nor ceasing” and the phrase “awareness is neither born nor dies” do not have the same meaning merely because the words sound similar. The latter asserts that some eternal thing exists. Non-self says that no eternal and independent self can exist. Buddhism does not speak only of “not two”; it also says “not one.” It is neither one nor two. A nondualism in which everything is one and that one is my eternal consciousness does not travel far from the already ancient imagination of the union of ātman and Brahman.
A Critique of Rupert Spira’s Eternal Consciousness
I am not claiming today to have read every book by Rupert Spira and judged his entire thought. I am conducting a thought experiment with a few claims I briefly found. A person’s earlier and later words can differ, and my own explanations may also change over years of broadcasting. Yet when a sentence is introduced as arriving at the same conclusion as Buddhist non-self, we can examine what that sentence itself presupposes.
Spira is said to claim that everything, including our consciousness, is part of one infinite and eternal consciousness, and that what we regard as ourselves is originally a viewpoint of divided consciousness. That must not be explained as the same principle as Buddhist non-self. “There is infinite and eternal consciousness” already establishes an eternal substance. The Diamond Sutra tells us to abandon the images of self, person, sentient being, and life span precisely in order to break every renewed fantasy that says, “That is me,” whether it is called self, ātman, pudgala, sentient being, consciousness, or awareness.
If, after saying body and thought are not the self, we say, “Awareness is me,” we erect another self on the very place the Diamond Sutra cleared. Only the name has become modern. How is that structurally different from the ātman theory already widespread in the Buddha’s time, in which one discovers ātman, becomes united with Brahman, and finds an eternal self? Buddhism moves toward stopping that imagination.
Eckhart Tolle: Confusing an Experience of Absorption with Awakening
There is something good in Eckhart Tolle’s phrase, “the pursuit of stopping pursuit.” As I often say, a person attached to becoming a Buddha will have difficulty becoming one, and relinquishing pursuit can be part of the final stage. But one correct statement does not make every statement correct. A person with an ambiguous awakening can mix right and wrong claims together.
I have not read all of Tolle’s books either. Consider only the sentence quoted today: “Being is not only beyond form but also deep within every form. Being is the invisible essence, something that never perishes.” It plainly establishes an invisible and eternally imperishable essence. That single sentence is already thirty thousand light-years away from Buddhist impermanence and non-self.
The experience of suffering subsiding when thought stops does not prove a special eternal being. When one enters absorption or becomes wholly immersed in an activity, anyone can experience something similar. Whether playing a game, reading a book, shooting billiards, washing dishes, or even masturbating, when we are completely absorbed in one thing, other thoughts temporarily stop. A person absorbed in striking a billiard ball cannot simultaneously think about an exam, money, family nagging, or the pain of a breakup. Human beings cannot do two things in that way at once. When thought stops, the emotions and suffering produced by thoughts and standards temporarily stop as well.
If a person living with depression and suicidal impulses asks, “Is the one thinking really me?” and at some moment feels peace as the thoughts in the head stop, that experience matters. The problem comes next. Moving from the observation “I felt peaceful when thought stopped” to the conclusion “Therefore an eternal being beyond thought exists, and that is the real me” creates another conditioned dharma. If we mistake an experience of absorption for awakening and arbitrarily define being, essence, and emotion to explain the feeling, we declare our own imagination to be truth.
Awakening Is Not the Place Where Questions Stop
The deepest strands of Buddhism often say “not this” rather than continually manufacturing new substances and concepts. Yet people hurry to build six, seven, eight, and nine consciousnesses, fifty-two stages, many dharmas and levels, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path as fixed substances. These too are human-made conditioned dharmas. There may be passages in Tolle and Spira that help people release an experience of absorption or loosen a thought. But once they move to eternal being and consciousness, they are no different from the many practitioners in the Buddha’s time who imagined being, soul, and ātman.
I am not claiming that there is a perfectly awakened person or that I am perfectly awakened. But to practice Buddhism at all, we must learn its most basic lesson: ask questions. When doubt has stopped and a person insists that the answer arising in his own mind is correct, he becomes another fascist. After one experience of absorption, if he freely invents an explanation for the feeling and proclaims it as truth, the longer he speaks, the more his limits and contradictions appear.
Absorption can help. It can temporarily settle a mind tossed about by worldly standards and images, rejoicing when it gets what it calls good and suffering when events do not follow its wishes. But Buddhism is centered not on absorption but on wisdom. It is difficult to see that the standards in my head are not absolute truth and that I live in an inverted dream while chasing what I desire. That is why questions and doubt must not stop.
Do Not Believe; Observe and Question
Translated into today’s language, the four-line verse says this: Do not be shaken by what your mind has made. Do not immediately follow what you heard or what a book records as truth. Do not simply believe a teacher, a supposedly wise person, rumor, or tradition—and do not simply believe even a conclusion you think you reached rationally and logically. Ask whether you are again manufacturing an image and uttering it as truth.
This meets the direction of the Kālāma Sutta: do not believe and follow anything just as it is handed to you. Buddhism is not a religion of belief but a religion that raises questions and doubts, and therefore a religion that should naturally foster discussion and debate. When debate vanishes and monastics and lay Buddhists stiffen their necks and say, “I am the greatest,” Buddhism becomes an office of rank. When people cannot release the image they hold and merely repeat that greed, anger, and delusion are poisons to be discarded, they miss what the Aṭṭhakavagga is saying. The point is not that one must never become angry. One must also see how the image “I am right” produces anger.
The conclusion is clear. The Diamond Sutra’s instruction to see things as dreams and illusions does not tell us to deny the world as an illusion. It tells us not to mistake what I see and the concepts I make for substance and truth themselves. Observe how self and world change within relations. See that emotions, fear, dread, joy, sorrow, and even rational judgment may be conclusions reached by a human brain through narrow observation. Do not cling to them and declare them absolutely right. Seeing what is just as it is is not easy. That is why Buddhism must remain an ongoing question, not a finished answer.
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