sufferings of hunger and thirst arise when the “I” lacks food and drink. Therefore, if after death the mind were born in a Formless Realm, then because the mind would be one with the “I,” it would still have to make use of gross forms such as food and clothing.
If those absurd permutations of oneness do not clinch the matter, reflecting on a few more reasonings may allow you to reach a conclusion. First, the selves would have to be as many as mind and body, that is to say, two; or, put another way, the selves would have to be as many as the five aggregates (forms, feelings, discriminations, compositional factors, and consciousnesses), five.
The above modes of reasoning are suitable and easy for beginners to develop. However, if you have been disciplined through discriminating wisdom, a little more elaboration will decide the matter. Therefore, consider the fallacy of the selves becoming many. Chandrak ī rti’s Supplement to (N ā g ā rjuna’s) “Treatise on the Middle” says: a
If the self were the aggregates, then
Because they are many, there would be many selves.
Just as the aggregates are five, so the “I” would also become five, or just as the “I” is no more than one, so the aggregates could not be five.
This reasoning may seem extraordinarily simple-minded, but the requirements of such pointoutable, analytically findable existence—not the requirements of mere existence—are the anvil. The meditator is attempting through this analysis, not to describe how she or he ordinarily conceives such an inherently existent “I,” but to subject it to the hammering of reasoning based on consequences
a VI.127ab.
28 Tantric Techniques
of such inherent existence. Because the ordinary sense of concrete selfhood is the object on which the analysis is working, the experience is fraught with emotion.
The second additional reasoning revolves around entailment that the “I” would have inherently existent production and disintegration, in which case it would be discontinuous. The Fifth Dalai Lama’s very brief description of this reasoning comes to life when teamed with the fourth reasoning below: a
Similarly, N ā g ā rjuna’s Treatise on the Middle says, b “If the self were the aggregates, it would have production and disintegration.” Because the five aggregates would be inherently produced and would inherently disintegrate, you would have to assert that the “I” also is produced and disintegrates in that way.
The third additional reasoning also depends upon a belief in rebirth; for me, it reflects the type of reasoning in reverse that many use against rebirth. Its concern is not explicitly with the “I” and the mental and physical aggregates that are its bases of designation but the relationship between the “I” of this life and the “I” of the last life. It is: If they were one, then the sufferings of the former life would absurdly have to be present in this life.
The “I” of the former birth and the “I” of this life can be on-ly either one or different. If one, through the force of their being inherently one, the sufferings of the “I” in the former life as an animal—such as stupidity and enslavement for others’ use—would also be experienced on the occasion of the “I” being a human in this birth. Also the human pleasures of this life would have been experienced as an animal in the former life. Contemplate such consequences.
The last additional reasoning expands on the fault of discontinuity between lives, suggested earlier in the second reasoning but not pursued. If they were different, which by the rules of inherent existence would make them totally, unrelatedly different, remem-brance of former lives would become impossible. Moral retribution would be impossible. Undeserved suffering would be experienced.
a A longer explanation of this reasoning is given in Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness, 183-185.
b XVIII.1.
S ū tra Mode of Meditation 29
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