Just read and understand this especially last three
paragraphs:
Reification is the process by which the mind makes a thing
(res), or a material object, out of a concept or an abstraction. By
extension, it is making a thing out of a form, a shape, a
configuration, a Gestalt, a perception, or an image. It is to
“thing” an event or a phenomenon, to transform an ongoing, fluid
process, into a frozen and static spatial or temporal cross-section
of the same, endowing such construction with the qualities of
reality and separateness. Vasubandhu understood that every single
object differentiated by the mind out of its global and holistic
experience is created by this process, including the concept of the
individual self, the “I” or “me.” Reifications are little more than
delusions, and refer to momentary states remembered from the past
experience of the person (whose concept of himself or herself as a
separate individual is itself a reification). People constantly
act, behave, and live out their lives as if reifications were
actually real, separate entities, rather than the delusory
constructions of the mind.
Language has developed as a system of communication for myriads
of reified concepts, and consequently consists primarily of reified
labels. These labels tend to perpetuate the illusion that reified
concepts are actually real, existing objects, for their reality
seems to be attested to by the very fact that labels exists for
each of them. Language automatically fosters further reifications,
in a vicious cycle which prevents the individual from effectively
communicating in a non-reifying, nondualistic manner. This is one
of the reasons why “ultimate reality” is essentially “ineffable.”
As Lao Tze put it, “the tao that can be told is not the real
Tao.”
Buddhist training consists largely of short-circuiting the
reification process, by using non-verbal, non labeling experiential
practice (such as meditation) to become “awakened” to the
“as-it-is-ness” of inexpressible reality. Because of the delusory
nature of any labeling process, with its consequent reifications,
any attempt to offer a name for the unnamable Reality must always
fall short, although sages have offered terms such as Thusness,
Tathagatagarba, Buddha Nature, Dharmakaya, Suchness, the Big Self,
the Absolute, or the Tao.
According to Walpola Rahula (1974), “Buddhism stands unique in
the history of human thought in denying the existence of a
[separate] soul, self, or atman. According to the teaching of the
Buddha, the idea of a [personal] self is an imaginary, false belief
which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful
thoughts of “me” and “mine,” selfish desire, craving, attachment,
hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements,
impurities and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in
the world, from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In
short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the
world.”
It is important to realize what is meant by the “self” rejected
by the Buddha as illusory. Not only are human beings declared to
lack a soul or self, but so is everything else: rivers, mountains,
this paper, and your pencil, all lack a separate self. What this
means is that they cannot have any existence except in terms of the
interconnected net of causal conditions that made their existence
possible. All things (including human beings) are composites, in
other words, they are composed of parts, and have no real existence
other than as temporary (impermanent) collections of parts. They
are essentially patterns, configurations, or Gestalten rather than
objectively existing separate entities. They possess no separate
essence, self, or soul that could exist by itself, apart from the
component parts and conditions.
Consider, for example, an automobile. Does it have an essence or
a “soul” when separated from its component parts? Does it have any
real existence apart from its parts? One could try the following
mental exercise. Removing one of the tires of the car, one could
ask oneself, is this the car? Successively taking away the
windshield, a door, a piston, a bolt, the radiator cap, and
continuing until the last piece of metal, plastic, glass, or rubber
has been removed, one would never find the part which, if removed,
transforms what remains into a non-car. Such part, if found, would
have represented the essence or the “soul” of the car, and yet it
was nowhere to be found. Now all we have is a pile of parts—where
is the car? At which point did the car disappear? If we reflect
carefully we are left with the realization that there never was a
car there—all that was there was a conglomerate of parts
temporarily connected in a certain way, so as to result in a
particular mode of functioning, and “car” was just a convenient
label to designate this working arrangement. The word “car” is
nothing but a label for the gestalt formed by the constituent
parts, and although it is true (as realized by Wertheimer and the
other Gestaltists) that the whole is more than the sum of the parts
(one cannot drive sitting on any of the separate parts, or on a
random heap of them, but driving is possible when one puts them
together in a certain way), it is equally true that a gestalt
cannot continue to exist when separated from its parts. The
gestalt, the “whole,” cannot exist by itself; it does not have a
separate self or “soul.”
But what about a person? According to Buddhist psychology, what
we call a “person” is the composite of five groups of elements or
skandhas. The skandhas are form, feelings, perceptions, impulses,
and consciousness. Just as an automobile is a temporary collection
of car parts, a person is a temporary arrangement of these five
aggregates or skandhas. There is no separate, independent self or
soul that would be left if we removed form (which includes the
body), feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. While
these aggregates are together, the functioning gestalt we call a
person exists; if they are removed, the gestalt ceases to be. For
this reason, the self can be said to be “empty” of reality when
separated from its component aggregates— a view of the self
radically different from Western perspectives. But it is not only
the self that is empty, and cannot exist by itself; the skandhas
themselves are also empty.
The five skandhas, like everything else, are dependently arisen,
and cannot exist by themselves. Take the form of one’s body, for
example. What would remain of it, if one removed one’s perception
of it, one’s feelings about it, one’s impulses to act on it or with
it, and one’s conscious awareness of it? Form is empty of reality
when separated from perceptions, feelings, impulses, and
consciousness. And what about feelings? They also cannot exist by
themselves. Feelings are feelings about something, about one’s
body, one’s perceptions, one’s impulses, one’s state of
consciousness. The same is true of the remaining skandhas—each one
is composed of the other four. They are in a state of
interdependent co-origination, they inter-are (Hanh, 198
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I saw a book by Dalai Lama in english bookshop abt knowing who you
really are. I did not look through It but the cover caught my
attention.