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2. Enlightenment implies
an Insight into the Nature of Self.
We cannot pass over,
however, this weighty problem without saying a word. We shall try in this
chapter to present Enlightenment before the reader in a roundabout way, just as
the painter gives the fragmentary sketches of a beautiful city, being unable to
give even a bird's-eye view of it. Enlightenment, first of all, implies an
insight into the nature of Self. It is an emancipation of mind from illusion
concerning Self. All kinds of sin take root deep in the misconception of Self,
and putting forth the branches of lust, anger, and folly, throw dark shadows on
life. To extirpate this misconception Buddhism1 strongly denies the
existence of the individual soul as conceived by common sense-that is, that
unchanging spiritual entity provided with sight, hearing, touch, smell,
feeling, thought, imagination, aspiration, etc., which survives the
body. It teaches us that
there is no such thing as soul, and that the notion of soul is a gross
illusion. It treats of body as a temporal material form of life doomed to be
destroyed by death and reduced to its elements again. It maintains that mind is
also a temporal spiritual form of life, behind which there is no immutable
soul.
An illusory mind tends
either to regard body as Self and to yearn after its material interests, or to
believe mind dependent on soul as Ego. Those who are given to sensual
pleasures, consciously or unconsciously, bold body to be the Self, and remain
the life-long slave to the objects of sense. Those who regard mind as dependent
on soul as the Self, on the other hand, undervalue body as a mere tool with
which the soul works, and are inclined to denounce life as if unworthy of
living. We must not undervalue body, nor must we overestimate mind. There is no
mind isolated from body, nor is there any body separated from mind. Every
activity of mind produces chemical and physiological changes in the
nerve-centres, in the organs, and eventually in the whole body; while every
activity of body is sure to bring out the corresponding change in the mental
function, and eventually in the whole personality. We have the inward
experience of sorrow when we have simultaneously the outward appearance of
tears and of pallor; when we have the outward appearance of the fiery eyes and
short breath, we have simultaneously the inward feeling of anger. Thus body is
mind observed outwardly in its relation to the senses; mind is body inwardly
experienced in its relation to introspection. Who can draw a strict line of
demarcation between mind and body? We should admit, so far as our present
knowledge is concerned, that mind, the intangible, has been formed to don a
garment of matter in order to become an intelligible existence at all; matter,
the solid, has faded under examination into formlessness, as that of mind. Zen
believes in the identification of mind and body, as Do-gen1 says:
"Body is identical with mind; appearance and reality are one and the same
thing."
Bergson denies the
identification of mind and body, saying2: "It (experience) shows
us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a
certain cerebral substratum for the psychical state-nothing more. From the fact
that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are
equivalent. Because a certain screw is necessary for a certain machine, because
the machine works when the screw is there and stops when the screw is taken
away, we do not say that the screw is equivalent of the machine."
Bergson's simile of a screw and a machine is quite inadequate to show the
interdependence of mind and body, because the screw does cause the machine to
work, but the machine does not cause the screw to work; so that their relation
is not interdependence. On the contrary, body causes mind to work, and at the
same time mind causes body to work; so that their relation is perfectly
interdependent, and the relation is not that of an addition of mind to body, or
of body to mind, as the screw is added to the machine. Bergson must have
compared the working of the machine with mind, and the machine itself with
body, if be wanted to show the real fact. Moreover, he is not right in
asserting that "from the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it
does not follow that they are equivalent," because there are several kinds
of interdependence, in some of which two things can be equivalent. For
instance, bricks, mutually dependent in their forming an arch, cannot be
equivalent one with another; but water and waves, being mutually dependent, can
be identified. In like manner fire
and heat, air and wind, a
machine and its working, mind and body.1
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