jakebe | Consider A Refutation (Reply)

In the interest of getting a more solid footing on the specifics of it, I'm reading A Concise History of Buddhism by Andrew Skilton at the moment (and it's *only* 800,000 pages long! *nyuk-nyuk*). In the end, I kind of had to put down Lord Foul's Bane just because, well, I feel like reading something else. :)

It's a pretty good book, and there are already things that I'm picking up from it; stuff that I knew but had either forgotten about or never fully understood the implications of. One of these is what I would like to talk about.

One of the basic Buddhist ideas (this pops up a lot more in Zen, from what I know) is that of impermanence (intransience?), that everyone and everything is constantly changing at every moment. While this might sound like a chaotic model of the Universe (it might be), it actually serves to demonstrate the 'butterflies in China' ripple effect; that one small movement by someone might have major ramifications that are impossible to foretell. The idea of karma is linked to this in that everything you do changes the situation around you (often in subtle ways) and these changes are yours to deal with later on, but that's a story for another campfire.

One of the consequences of this intransience is the formlessness of people themselves. In the book, Skilton uses a leaf as an example: a leaf cannot be described by anything other than descriptors. It's red, or green, an oak or maple leaf, so forth and so on. Once you take away these words that describe the properties of the leaf -- but not the leaf itself -- what are you left with?

People, while being significantly more complex than leaves, suffer the same kind of problem. What am I? I can describe myself by giving a list of properties (I'm black, I'm male, I like peanuts, I'm so-and-so-many-percent carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and trace materials), but these properties can change at any moment. I might develop Michael Jackson's disease, or have a sex change, and the specific ratio of carbon to nitrogen changes in minute amounts at every waking moment.

If I can only describe myself by words that might not fit for me before or after this moment, what does that mean? Do I exist in the way I think I do? When you break it down, our model for individuals is based around a specific question: Am I a fixed entity in the Universe, with some basic set of qualities that will not ever change (the soul?), or am I simply an amalgamation of uncountable components, changing, receding and building in ways that are futile to try and comprehend?

The Buddhist view is that the 'individual' is not solid, but a fluid entity that changes from moment to moment. As such, the individual is irrevocably linked to his environment, changing and being changed by it constantly. We're not seperate drops of water, we're ripples along an endless wave. The thing called 'ego' or 'I', that seperates us from the things around us, doesn't really exist.

I like this idea, but I know there are problems with it. I could go on about counter-arguments that I've thought of, but I'm at work and should be...well, you know, working. What do people think of this? I know