Living Wisely: Further Advice from Nagarjuna's Precious Garland

by Sangharakshita

consciousness-altering drugs

In meditation we have the opportunity to enter into further levels or dimensions of mind in a more integrated and sustained way.

the depths of your mind as revealed in meditation.

As we realize the other dimensions that are accessible to us, we should be able to see that the ego, with all its petty anxieties and resentments, is not as important as it thinks it is.

All my possessions act as a kind of tent protecting the conception of ‘I’, creating the little cocoon that is my world and that fills out the ‘I’, giving it a sense of solidity and permanence.

‘I’ and ‘mine’ are therefore very closely intertwined.

The envelope protects, but it also limits. It is as though the ‘I’, the sense of self, sets an inner limit, while the sense of ‘mine’ sets an outer one.

yes!

Perhaps it is better simply to see ourselves as limited. Instead of challenging ourselves to explode our deluded conception of the self directly, it may be more helpful to think of breaking out of the closed circle of self-interest that is the emotional expression of our delusion.

Overcoming ego is not just an idea; it is an experience, a way of life.

‘The “I” exists, the “mine” exists.’ These are wrong as ultimates,

‘I’ and ‘mine’ are real experiences, but they have only a provisional validity.

Growth is not just up; it is not just a two-dimensional development. It is in all directions. It is therefore not always very obvious. Sometimes you may feel as though you are not growing spiritually, but it may be that you are developing in ways, in directions, that you have not been able to envisage.

The language we use can be less than helpful when it comes to the ego. Expressions like ‘transcending the ego’ create a lot of confusion by apparently fixing something non-existent in the form of an apparent object of knowledge. The result is nonsensical: we talk of getting rid of something that never existed or even denying this object of intense interest and concern any reality at all. ‘The ego’, we say, ‘is not real.’ If we’re not careful, we can spend a lot of time talking about something that does not exist in such a way that it becomes more real to us than it was before we started making so much of it.

We have habits of selfishness, and our task is to transform these habits.

You are functioning as an ‘ego’ when you are closed in on yourself, when you shut yourself off from other people. When you are more outward-going and expansive, on the other hand, when you are engaging with the concerns of others, you are functioning from ‘non-ego’.

In a reactive state you feel cold and hard, as though there’s a tight little ball inside you, or as if you are constantly circling back on yourself. But in a creative state you feel free and open, expansive and flowing; instead of the little ball there is warmth, radiation, a spiralling outwards and upwards.

CI

The ego is a way of behaving, a kind of revolving upon your own axis.

It is a particular kind of limitation placed upon experience, a non-expansion or blockage of energy.

Instead of saying to yourself ‘Just drop the ego’, you can say, ‘Let yourself open up a little’ or even ‘Let yourself go.’

Paraphrasing Nāgārjuna’s verse, we can say: ‘Having seen that the egocentric way of behaving is not the best way in which one can behave, one abandons that way of behaving and embarks on a more expansive and other-regarding way of behaving.’

you become so expansive, so engaged with and interested in the needs of others, that the possibility of going back to that old constrained and self-regarding behaviour no longer exists.

Stream entry

To see the reflection of your face, you need to look into a mirror. Without the mirror, there is no reflection. In this image Nāgārjuna is saying that it is the same with the skandhas.

if they did not exist, the idea of a self could not arise.

The aggregates do not include the ‘I’, just as the mirror, as an object, does not include the reflection of the face.

Nāgārjuna is not suggesting that the aggregates are non-existent, any more than the mirror is non-existent. They represent a particular view of one’s existence. The ‘I’ is an extreme version, a sort of concretization of that view.

The skandhas, like the elements, only exist, or possess an identity, due to their relationship with things other than themselves. The idea of ‘form’ only has meaning inasmuch as we are able to make a distinction between form and, say, feeling, or consciousness, and the same goes for the other aggregates. In each case, it is the activity of consciousness that enables us to make the distinction. Just as ‘short’ has no existence without ‘tall’, or cause without effect, the individual skandhas are no more substantial than is the illusory ‘self’ they appear to support.

The point to stress here is that the reflection of your face that you can see in the mirror is by no means the whole of you.

the skandhas do not exist as separate objects apart from the intelligence that is trying to understand its own processes by means of them.

it must be emphasized that analogies between consciousness and an object of consciousness, however elusive – such as a reflection – are potentially very misleading. The ego does not exist as a thing, so it is not an object of consciousness, but a way of being conscious of things, a way of being, of behaving. Nor is it really even that. It is not an it, not an anything. The ego is like a reflection only in a very limited, specific sense.

The question is not ‘Do I have an ego or not?’ but ‘Am I looking out beyond what I already know, exploring new avenues, or am I simply going round the same old treadmill of my habits, my established views, my likes and dislikes? Am I stuck with a fixed idea of who and what I am?’

Just as the same mirror can either reflect the face of the watcher or a world without fixed and permanent objects, so consciousness can either contract around a clearly defined ‘self’ in the limited sense or break out of that self-referential view of things.

The empty mirror is an image for a consciousness that is not constrained by always referring to some static image of what you think you are.

According to the available records, after the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa, Ānanda gained full Enlightenment and had a large following, becoming revered almost as a second Buddha within his lifetime.

It is when you start to experience what is essentially a process as something static that the ‘I’ comes into existence.

How can the ego get rid of itself?

However, these are the sorts of question into which the Buddha did not think it useful to enquire.

when you try to make what is dynamic into something static, you cannot prevent that dynamic process from going on, but you set up a patterning that gives an appearance of stasis. The continuing repetition of that pattern is what we call rebirth.

In simple terms rebirth means repeating old patterns and putting off being truly creative.

The three pathways are presumably (though this is not completely clear) the misconception of the true nature of the skandhas, the misconception of an ‘I’ based on them, and the action of the ‘I’, which eventually results in rebirth.

When he opens his hand, what has happened to the fist? Does it still exist, or has it ceased to exist?

The conception of an ‘I’ ceases when you see the whole wheel as being no more than a self-contained process.

When he opens his hand, what has happened to the fist? Does it still exist, or has it ceased to exist?

we can reflect upon it, engage with it and consider how to apply it, or we can forget it or ignore it. According to Nāgārjuna we adopt this second course out of fear.

We necessarily fear this ‘demise’ of our delusion.

We are comfortable with our fear and misery, and we would feel very unsure of our ground without them.

If the Hīnayānist is inspired by the consideration that ‘all these’ aggregates will not exist in nirvāṇa, why should he be so alarmed by their non-existence now?

St Augustine’s famous prayer, ‘Oh Lord, make me chaste, but not yet’,

We may think we are meditating in order to gain insight here and now, but is this really what we want? Do we not rather want to have a few more good rebirths? Enlightenment is after all a kind of death – the end of everything we rely on and identify with. And how ready are

If we really wanted Enlightenment in the future, we would really want it now.

Nāgārjuna’s whole argument here is that the ego is non-existent at this very moment.