Anātman: An Anthology of Buddhist Concerns
Anātman: An Anthology of Buddhist Concerns
Tan Jie Ming Jesper
Tan Jie Ming Jesper
A Noble Truth
What comes is nothing. What arrives is everything. What goes is nothing. What leaves is everything. Recognise that already it is slipping away, the idea of yourself, falling through the gaps of existence. Like hunger. Like sorrow. Like the baby. Like the dead. We want pleasure, and so we live in pain.
Many words mean but one. Many paths have but one exit. Suppose that there is a wrong way to live, and that is to live and to live wrongly. Wrong view, wrong thought, wrong speech, wrong action, wrong livelihood, wrong effort, wrong mindfulness, and wrong immersion. Where do we end up but a wrong space and wrong time? Is the argument circular, or is it simply desiring to continue existing, or cease existing altogether?
Is there a right way to suffer—let the Buddha think so, descending the palace steps, jumping over walls. Birth is suffering. There is no remainder. Old age is suffering. Let us not cling to it. Death is suffering. It is only right we let it go. And yet the question remains. How takes up space and how takes up every bit of truth we seek, what with how never showing never showing anyhow. Suppose existence is nothing and suffering is everything. What sort of plan can be put together by nothing? Perhaps there are, in fact, truths out there, this much is certain. But when will we arrive to greet a truth, to leave a truth behind? A truth made noble is a truth condemned to explaining everything.
Suffering
“—is suffering”, says the sufferer. Insufferable ego, who fires an arrow only to see where the second falls from the third. If suffering is suffering is suffering is suffering is suffering then it is always a suffering with no qualification but itself.
A suffering insufferable sufferer ought then to suffer silently, sans pleasure, sans neutral, sans pain.
Aggregates
What is a person but accumulation? A stacking on a heap of an object upon an object, a feeling upon a feeling, a thought upon a thought, put together conditions that condition themselves into an idea of an object being perceived.
To take shape is to always be taking place never not moving, undulating mass that are always grasping but never within reach. So then a formlessness of a form becomes a form of formlessness, the stuff that makes stuff manifest or unmanifest.
I feel, therefore I already am not myself. I have become angry at the person before me and puzzled by the person hereafter. To arise is to acknowledge that which was arisen has previously been rewritten. Keep me apart from the me over here and I shall never suffer.
Do not fear the indefinite, nor the definite, nor infinitude, for these are apprehended. Instead fear approaching a finitude so large that can see the horizon collapsing at the edge of a pondering.
Not I, nor the thought of I, but something in its image. Movement in contact with itself propels itself forward like a thought being attended non-concurrently, forming an attaining without actually attending.
In storing a moment another is created, storing the seeds of that action without ever being possessed, emerging and yet absent as soon as emergence emerges. The moment, like consciousness, grabs itself and ceases to be.
Dharma
Convention states that the pot is not a pot when it exhausts itself even as the droplets of water are no longer wet, which is to say parts are never or always in parts itself but excluded from a mind. A mind says split and divides into indivisibles—how can this be so?
Ultimately states that—
Atoms
Do we come together in parts, wholes, or partless entities, absolutely, conceptually, or through an analysis of the analysands, or do we slip into each other and traverse the universe in a single bound, or do we never come together but say we do, like there are no intervals within a void, the opposite of occupying space is the denial of ever coming together but a vibrating speck of dust presumably points somewhere toward the light.
Appearances
Can you see the letter I, or is your vision faulty? There is no seeing without being seen as hair standing up for itself, if unreal becomes a metaphysic then we have fallen asleep or so says the dreamer, having woken up by itself to see presumably—what?
Emptiness
If nothing is not nothing and everything is nothing but nothing, there ought to be something. Not nots, a place and a place to push off from. Not knots, where a cause finds finding itself difficult to find. Think things, like a mind and no cause, a mind that is not a thing that thinks, a thing thinks thunking all the way down into nothing that has become something.
Nothing is as such. Such is nothing.
I have drawn on our readings for this course, primarily on our discussions on Vasubandhu’s Abhidharma-kośa-bhāsya, Pañca-skandhaka-prakaraṇa, and the Viṃśatikā-vijñapti-mātratā-siddhi, advancing a poetic rendering of the ways in which key concepts of Buddhism both appeal and challenge my worldviews as I have understood them. By this I mean I do not claim that what is written is necessarily an accurate nor even correct representation of a given concept or view. In fact, the work is better understood if it is not taken as such. While Buddhism is largely a philosophy of praxis, I have always encountered it as a language philosophy—a constructed, meandering, reformulating, rambling, and repeating of syntactical structures, words, and sounds.
It is with this in mind that I have endeavoured to reproduce the beguiling and at-times-mind-numbing effects of interpreting Buddhist literature, adopting a style heavily inspired by the surrealists and modernists in literature. While I am reticent about explaining creative decisions, it should be noted that a large part of this ostensibly incoherent work was quite carefully constructed—from line and passage lengths, to seemingly random word and grammatical choices, right down to the sounds and rhythms, all designed to capture the consciousness of the reader.
I am by no means a Buddhist practitioner, and this ‘anthology’ that I have curated simply seeks to reveal my extent of understanding toward Buddhist thought, which is nothing more than a jumbled mess of maxims and concerns that arise when pontificating on said maxims. The goal then is to enlighten as much as it is to confuse, as within the ramblings of language therein lies something substantive and potent to be gained, even if it is unable to be articulated and ineffable—residing in the realm of the Buddha.
While economy and my own anxieties have prevented me from covering more concepts and concerns that I have with Buddhism, I should consider this brief work successful if it at least gives the reader reason to pause, to feel, to learn, and to experience existential anxiety with me. I hope to have captured each concept’s unique ‘flavour’ and collectively, layer one understanding atop one concern atop one understanding and so on so forth—constructing my own take on what entails a heap of considerations on a heap of existences on a heap of suffering modalities.