Post # 4 - Concepts and  Reality Part 1; to be read preferably after reading Post 3

Concepts and Reality- as seen by a Lay Buddhist-

Part 1 – Life experiences and how they act as a Frame of Reference.

We have collected many experiences in life as we came along. This process was discussed in Post #3. Let’s call these- ‘life experiences’. These are in a repository in our mind. Buddha-Dhamma teaches us that these deposits are not limited to those from this life alone but include as well the carryover from our previous lives in Samsara. 

This is a very vast collection. This is a knowledge base that we use when responding to matters that arise before us.  Matters that arise in the present moment or those that will arise in the future will be subject to this process.  Let me call this knowledge base a frame-of-reference. 

Whenever an issue arises in our life we refer it to this frame-of-reference and based on its prompting we deal with it appropriately.  In other words we rely on this frame-of-reference to relate to the world we live in. We construct this frame-of-reference from the life experiences we have gone through. It is therefore easy to see why two people would deal with the same matter in two different ways as their life experiences are essentially different. This frame-of-reference can be quite extensive and necessarily personal to the individual.

Buddha-Dhamma (Buddhism) also teaches us how we accumulate Dhamma wisdom. It is in three ways. They are respectively the Suthamaya way, Manomaya or Chinthamaya way, and Bahavanamaya way.  In the Suthamaya way we listen to learned monks and learn the Dhamma from them.  In the Manaomaya way we subject some of the Suthamaya knowledge to a mental analysis or a contemplative evaluation on “how, why, what else? etc. and consolidate this as inferential knowledge.  In the Bahavanamaya way, one would use the abilities of the mind developed to a very high level of pointed focus and concentration through meditative skills, to clearly comprehend the subject matter and accumulate them as experiential dhamma wisdom. In other words to ‘see’ things as they really are and not the way they ‘appear’ to be. Human mind is often defiled with many accumulations which tend to inhibit clarity of vision. Meditation helps to overcome this weakness.     

Our own frame-of- reference mentioned earlier has been constructed in a similar way. We have the part accumulated the Suthamaya way as above. We listen to others and learn from them.  They are our parents, elders, teachers at school or university and speakers at seminars etc.  In the modern day there are also other means such as reading books, watching TV, reading newspapers, journals and magazines, and accessing internet etc. as means to learn from others.  In other words we trust the source and borrow the knowledge from them. This is the largest part of our frame-of-reference. Most of our cultural and family traditions are also included here which come into play when we deal with matters in daily life.  

The next part will be where the knowledge from the Suthamaya base is subject to a contemplative analysis and consolidated as inferential knowledge similar to the Manomaya base in dhamma wisdom.

In the third way we accumulate all experiences from our sensory perceptions as practical experiences. These practical experiences come from what we see from our eyes, what we hear from our ears, smell from our noses, taste from our tongues and feel from the sense of touch. What we see, what we hear and what we experience, we believe are  true. 

Let me illustrate this process by a simple example. One may look at a simple life experience such as when you were small and your mother said pointing to fire .., that “fire burns - so don't go near”, you normally accept what your mother says at that age and do as you are told. As you grow up and are able to rationalize things, you notice that when you come near a fire, warmth begins to increase and you infer that - 'so fire must burn, as I have come to hear. That is with inferential analysis you consolidate what your mother taught you before. Then one day you accidentally come into contact with fire and you experience burning. Then you conclude that fire indeed burns as an experiential knowledge. Once you go through an experience in these three stages, that knowledge is un-waveringly established, as in this case that fire burns. 

This frame-of-reference thus constructed is what gives us our personality and what has determined our present accomplishments and what has helped us with our successes in life. So we should feel quite comfortable with it, given the circumstances. -----end Part 1. 

See how this process creates the concepts that determine our personality in the next posting in Part 2