One time in Sāvatthi the bhikkhunī Vajirā went on her alms round, and then having eaten her meal she went to meditate in the Blind Man's Grove. Māra appeared to her and tried to frighten her and disrupt her meditation. He planted questions in her mind: who created this being? Where is the creator? Where does this being arise, where cease? Vajirā however knew these thoughts to be the product of Māra. She replied:
Kiṃ nu sattoti paccesi, māra diṭṭhigataṃ nu te;
Suddhasaṅkhārapuñjoyaṃ, nayidha sattupalabbhati.
Yathā hi aṅgasambhārā, hoti saddo ratho iti;
Evaṃ khandhesu santesu, hoti sattoti sammuti.
Dukkhameva hi sambhoti, dukkhaṃ tiṭṭhati veti ca;
Nāññatra dukkhā sambhoti, nāññaṃ dukkhā nirujjhatī’’ti
Māra was disappointed at not frightening Vajirā, and he disappeared. This is the famous simile of the chariot from the Vajirā Sutta, in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (5:10; PTS S i.136). It is used to illustrate the idea that we are only an assemblage of parts, that nothing really exists in the absolute sense - as the sutta says when the parts come together we conventionally say 'a being'. This collection of parts is also called a mere heap of fabrication (suddha-saṅkhāra-puñjoyaṃ). But what are these parts? They are the khandhas. Traditionally these are defined as that which conventionally makes up a being. The definition is circular: a being is made up of the things that make up a being. There's not much information in that interpretation. However Sue Hamilton has given us a better way of thinking about the khandhas: they are the apparatus of experience. That is, instead of thinking of the khandhas as what makes up a being, we can think of the khandhas as the minimal requirements for having an experience. Briefly we have the locus of experience (form/rūpa), then "having met with sensory data (vedanā) [via the physical sense organs] we process it: we become aware of and identify the sensation (saññā), we categorise it and name it (viññāṇā), and we respond affectively to it (saṅhkāra)." [The Apparatus of Experience]
What makes you resort to belief in 'a being' Māra?
A heap of mere fabrication, a being is not found here.
Just as the combination of parts is called 'a chariot';
Thus while there are the apparatus of experience, conventionally there is 'a being'
Thus suffering is produced; suffering persists, and ceases.
Only suffering is produced, only suffering ceases.
To my mind the focus on experience explains why no being is found. What might be found is the experience of a being, but there is no being apart from experience. However note the third verse spoken by Vajirā. It says that it is only suffering that arises, persists and ceases. Only suffering. Without this part of the verse the received explanation works alright. But the third verse tells us something extra. Here is a confirmation that what arises in dependence on causes are experiences. In my essay on the first verse of the Dhammapada I said: "... if we fail to see and understand the nature of experience (yathābhūta-ñāṇadassana), then suffering follows, just as the wheel follows the ox which draws the cart". Dukkha in this view is all unenlightened experience. This sounds a bit miserable, but as I recently pointed out [proliferation] it's not that pleasure is bad, but that we mistake the pursuit of pleasant sensations as leading to happiness, which they do not.
This kind of sutta where Māra visits someone and tries to put doubts in their mind is quite common. Māra here seems to be a psychological metaphor, i.e. Māra represents our own doubts coming to the surface. The tactic of getting into dialogue with that doubting voice is something that is used by some psychologists. It also resembles the approach of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy - identifying thoughts and deciding whether to take them seriously or ignore them.
So where the apparatus of experience come together we conventionally say there is a being. But this is to mistake the experience of being, for something more substantial. We need to focus on experience and on the processes by which we have experiences, because it is experience - especially suffering - that arises in dependence on conditions. It is our failure to recognise experiences in general and suffering in particular as dependent, that causes us to suffer.
While the idea of a 'being' as made up of parts and therefore insubstantial and impermanent is far from wrong, I think the use to which the verse is put shows the weakness of taking verses out of context. Because the real import, the central point of the simile, occurs in the third verse - only suffering arises - and this is routinely left out of presentations of the Dharma. Here the context reveals once again that whatever the truth of ontology and the reality of beings, the Buddha was focussed on the problem of suffering.
The chariot simile is from the Vajirā Sutta (S 5:10; S i.136) Pāli text from CSCD Pāli Tipiṭaka; pg 230 in Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation which is also available on Access to Insight; translated by Bikkhu Thanissaro on Access to Insight.
image: from Achaemenid Persia by Mark Drury. The picture is of a chariot from Afghanistan but would have been very similar to Indian war chariots.
My name is Jayarava 
8 comments:
Cool - this appears to be directly relevant to case #5 in the koan collection called Mumonkan, which is about carts, not chariots, but the question that is posed, more or less, is "when you take the cart apart, what is revealed?" Part of my very limited understanding of that story is that when you take the cart apart, you are, at least potentially, also learning how to put the cart back together, or even how to create a new cart. This only applies if one is meticulous in taking things apart, as opposed to just smashing them apart. It also applies only if you appreciate the utility of the thing you are taking apart. I think this is why the Dalai Lama famously enjoys taking watches apart and putting them back together again.
Apuleius: There is no cart. You seem to have taken the metaphor literally.
I can't see how putting things together is relevant - we're talking about the arising of suffering in the first place, and the *apparatus of experience* in the second place. You are trying to understand how your responses to sensations fuel becoming - a process is being sustained, a mistake of perception is being made about it. Nothing is being built.
To repeat: there is no cart. Only suffering arises.
Oh, there's a cart. And you can take it apart and put it back together. The problem is that some people think the point of taking it apart is so that they can say, "ha! toldja! no cart." Those people will just have to walk, I guess. Which is excellent exercise, and if they get tired someone will probably give them a lift.
To repeat: there is a cart.
Apuleius:
The sutta is saying that 'cart' is a "convention". Sammuti means a common choice, or general opinion. As Vajirā says in relation to the notion being (satta; Sanskrit sattva): "A heap of mere fabrication, a being is not found here". A BEING IS NOT FOUND HERE! Get it? The experience of 'being' cannot logically be reified into an ontological entity 'a being' - to do so is to be illogical and inconsistent.
If you insist that what we know to be a mere convention actually exists, then you have mistaken the whole of the Buddha's Dharma.
I have no idea why you insist on the notion of taking things apart - it has nothing to do with this story or with the kind of practice it is associated with - ie watching the play of experience with the goal of understanding that experience is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and insubstantial. What are you taking apart and why?
There is no point arguing about what is real - as you would know if you had read the rest of my blog I think that is all bullshit. You cannot know what is real, you only have experience to go by. You may label your experience in all sorts of ways, and while it is true that many objects are stable enough to warrant labels, the same cannot be said of *experiences*. We focus on the experience because there is nothing else as far as we are concerned - and this has been a theme of my blog for some time now. The text itself explicitly draws attention away from any misguided notion of reality towards experience when it says "Nāññatra dukkhā sambhoti" literally "nothing other than suffering arises". Whether we take this literally or as a rhetorical/pedagogical strategy the point remains that neither the notion of a cart, nor the notion of a being are relevant. What is relevant is the experience of suffering.
You seem to have missed the point of the sutta entirely - projecting onto it your own notions of 'taking apart and putting back together'; and you seem to have missed the point of what I am saying about it, and my response to you.
The amusing thing is that you are, whether consciously or unconsciously I don't know, playing the role of Māra in the Vajirā Sutta - if we take your comments seriously they can only lead to exactly the same kinds of questions that Māra was putting into the mind of Vajirā. Our refutation of you, is Vajirā's refutation of Māra. Why do you harp on about this notion of 'a being'? I can only suggest that you read the quoted text very carefully and reflect on it - follow the links and read the whole sutta as well.
Excellent post. I think you have nailed it on the head on what the idea of being (which is an idea) is.
I think it is good you emphasize that the five khandhas are the various strands of the human experience -- our world or loka as it were. It is also important to view the khandhas as processes as well.
The thing that I can not understand is that Buddhism talks about rebirth and so on.
If you follow clearly the implications of what you are saying, and I understand you correctly, there can be no being or no one ever reborn.
Hi Dark Dream
We need to be careful not to take an extreme position. Apuleius wanted to say that there definitely is a being - a natural position for us since we experience being. Your position would mean that no one is ever born, let alone reborn. There is no one reading these words. No one writing them. And this is clearly nihilistic.
So we need to find a middle ground. When the khandhas are present the possibility of experience via contact exist. But we are aware of ourselves as experiencing beings - we are self-aware. Something is happening, as opposed to nothing. We can through our own efforts makes changes, we can understand the nature of experience and not suffer.
Personally I think our epistemological situation is that we can neither confirm nor deny rebirth - denial is not a viable stand-point either. There is nothing to say that the collection of processes that make us up could not have a some form of causal continuity - though following my teacher I do not believe that the "personality" can survive: the being reborn is neither the same nor different, but arises in dependence on the actions of the previous being.
In any case as I think I have said to you before I don't think we are dealing with a true/false situation - the suttas are describing a useful/useless dichotomy instead. Buddhism, in my view, is not about establishing any Truth in an absolute sense, but about focusing one's attention in the right place for the ending of suffering. Clearly the idea of rebirth - which originates from primitive Indian culture (ie pre-āryan)- is useful. If I believe that I will reap whatever I sow, even beyond death then that will focus my attention. Your dilemma if you insist on not believing in rebirth is that you will not have to be responsible for your actions - you can act with impunity in some cases because we know (from experience) that consequences sometimes take a long time to manifest. In which case where to draw the line - and where there is moral ambiguity people will always exploit that ambiguity for their own benefit. So you create a moral vacuum.
So if you manage to convince anyone of the view that there are no beings and no rebirth then they are unlikely take sufficient notice of their sila. And that blocks the way to vipassana.
So again: it's not about true/false (which in the case of rebirth could never be verified or falsified anyway). It's about what's useful. Karma, rebirth etc have been and continue to be useful in guiding people to look at and modify their behaviour towards more wholesome modes, which opens the way to vipassana - literally seeing through.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Thanks for providing an indepth response.
On reflection I agree when I made the statement, "there can be no being or no one ever reborn" it can be seen as nihilistic; that is, there is no one right here that is typing this and so on.
I agree the Buddha did not teach no-self but not-self which is I think an important distinction. I do not think that there is no-thing that does actions, experiences and so on.
What I do think think he was saying is that that the appartus of our experience does not contain anything that is connected with the Self: a permanent, non-changing, independent entity.
In otherwords, what I label and conceive as DarkDream as an American who is a nice person and so on is a Self-like projection we posit over and above the five heaps of experience. This does not deny that there is something there, but the denial of a particular notion of what we erroneously conceive of being there.
I agree that the Buddha was interesting in epistemology and not ontology and most likely (some evidence in the suttas suggests this) he was not interested in whether in the ultimate sense that there really is a permanent self or not (and possibilty or non-possibility of its continuation) and so on because it did not lead towards the understanding of how our apparatus of experience works which is the means to ending suffering.
However, there does appear, as with the cart analogy that there is the denial of the cart in the sense of the denial of the personality complex or ego which seems to me can not continue as it does not exist and therefore cannot be reborn. To posit that this personality complex does exist and continue unchanged is eternalism.
Hi Dark Dream
OK, but you still seem to be aiming for a true/false dichotomy - you edge around it, but your last paragraph is a give away.
Note one of the questions with which Māra tried to confuse Vajirā: "Where does this being arise, where cease?" You are trying to answer this same questions, even though you frame them in negative terms. You want to say something definite - to justify your unbelief in rebirth. It's just a view; it's just metaphysical speculation.
You haven't addressed my main critique of your view - that it appears to relieve you of responsibility for your actions.
Take another angle on it. If the khandhas are always changing, and the personality is always mutable, then why be ethical at all? Who experiences the consequences of their actions if there is no continuity between one moment and the next. Ethics are only relevant if "I" experience the consequences of "my" actions. If you eliminate the continuity altogether then you eliminate the possibility of actions having moral consequences.
Tonight - with any luck - I will experience the oblivion of deep sleep. During which my personality is entirely absent. Who awakes in the morning? Should I be held accountable for what I did yesterday? You are answering no to this.
It's not clear to me that there is any difference between one moment and the next, one day and the next, or one life and the next. You appear to be making certain materialistic assumptions about what death represents that you cannot prove or disprove. So that is another view.
This is the problem of taking the cart metaphor literally as many people do - we either believe that there is a cart, or that there is no cart. But the point of the simile is something completely other - as I said to my other correspondent. The point is not to prove a view, but to examine one's own experience and understand why all views cause us to suffer - because a view attempts to settle things, to answer questions once and for all; views seek definitions and sense. And none of that sheds any real light on the nature of experience - because it is only thinking about experience in the abstract, not living it. The crucial verse says "only suffering arises".
Let's give the metaphysics a rest now shall we?
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