Buddhist Audio Books

From chapter 8: Climbing the Spiral Path - Wisdom

'Look,' said my friend, 'Oysters are living beings; oyster sauce isn't vegetarian.'

'Oh yes it is,' the waiter said.

I am not quite sure what my friends were about to do at this point. Maybe they thought of leaving, and finding a restaurant with a less stubborn and ill-informed waiter. Maybe they were about to launch into a zoological discourse on the nature and habits of bivalve molluscs. Maybe they were just going to pass over the soup question, and try their luck with the noodles. Whatever they planned, they were stopped in their tracks when the waiter added, triumphantly:'There are no oysters in oyster sauce.'

It transpired that the Chinese had managed to produce something which looked like oyster sauce, tasted like oyster sauce, was called oyster sauce, but which was nonetheless quite innocent of oysters. This revelation, of course, changed the whole picture. Arguments about whether oysters can be consumed by vegetarians are irrelevant when there isn't an oyster in sight.

Similarly (though I must admit on a rather more profound level) the picture totally changes with insight into reality. I may look like Vessantara, may sound like Vessantara, may be called Vessantara, but from the point of view of Reality, there is no Vessantara to be found.

Thus insight produces a qualitative difference in how one sees the world. With ethics and meditation one was, as it were, trying to fish around in the soup to find and remove the bits of oyster. Seeing oneself as an 'I' – limited and not free, one performs the practices which one thinks will free oneself. With insight one sees that there are no oysters to be removed – there is no separate self to be freed. This is the teaching of anatman or 'no self' which is one of Buddhism's central insights and greatest treasures.

Whilst the understanding of anatman can be freeing, we need to understand it correctly, otherwise we may just come to the conclusion that we absolutely don't exist, and stray off the Middle Way (and the Spiral Path) into nihilism. The Buddhist vision, what we see directly when we pass through the gateless gate into the world of direct insight into the nature of things, is of things arising, changing and disappearing in dependence upon conditions. Nothing is fixed; all is process. So Buddhism does not deny that there is a body, bodily feelings, emotions, thoughts, etc., all of which have effects (and something which absolutely does not exist could not produce any effects). But it denies that there is a fixed self, standing behind or above this flow of physical and mental processes.