Some modern Buddhists I have come across in recent years seem almost exuberant with the prospect that nothing fundamentally exists including even a dynamic substance such as the One Mind. I guess, according to their view, only an ever changing (anitya) illusion ultimately exists.
But then this is really crazy.
If all of existence amounts to one grand illusion where lies an escape from it? If there is absent the non-illusory, such as nirvana, I can only conclude that escape is impossible. One is forever doomed to exist in a world of illusion. Adding to this, death is no escape either. It just marks the change from one illusion to another.
Against such a view, I found this passage, posted below, from the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra. It can be read to mean that while there seems to be innumerable illusions, there is something non-illusory, namely, the true self.
“Kashyapa, this is the true-self , such a self exists, since the very beginning but hidden under innumerable illusions. This is why foolish men cannot see it.”
The above passage also suggests to me that illusion is its own limit—it’s not unlimited in the sense that it cannot go beyond itself. Transcending the limits of the illusory is the non-illusory, that is, the true-self.
The same illusion-limit is further illustrated in this passage from the Samyutta-Nikaya:
“Form is like a lump of foam, feeling like a water bubble; perception is like a mirage; volitions like a plantain trunk, and consciousness like an illusion, so explained the Kinsman of the Sun” (S .iii. 142).
Form, feeling, perception, volitions and consciousness, which make up the Five Aggregates of our corporeal individuality, is the instrument by which our true self becomes lost, unable to behold itself, directly. Try as we might to look into these illusory aggregates, we can never find true reality (sâro) or our self (attâ). We will only find an infinite variety of illusions.
According to the Buddha, facing this illusion-making machine that we were born into we can only escape it by making a refuge of the self (kareyya saranattano)—the self which alone is really real, which rejects each illusory aggregate saying,
“This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self (na me so atta).”
Yes, this is what the Buddha actually taught. On the other hand, the Buddha surely did not teach there is illusion-only and enlightenment merely consists in knowing this. [source]
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