..續本文上一頁l or anything of the sort. In point of fact, the motivation is the anticipation of pleasurable feeling. Each side sees itself making all sorts of gains, scooping up benefits for itself. The doctrine is just camouflage, or at best a purely secondary motive. The most deep- seated cause of all strife is really subservience to pleasurable feeling. To know feeling is, then, to know an important root cause responsible for our falling slaves to the mental defilements, to evil, to suffering. If this is how things are in the case of human beings, the celestial beings are no better off. They are subservient to pleasurable feeling just as are humans, and more so, though they may suppose it to be something better and finer, more subject to free will than is the human variety. But even they are not free from craving and attachment, from the fascination of delectable sensations received by way of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. Still higher up at the level of the gods, sensual delights necessarily have been discarded completely; but even this does not bring liberation from another kind of delight, the pleasure associated with deep concentration practice. When the mind is deeply concentrated, it experiences pleasure, a delightful sensation to which it then becomes attached. Although this has nothing to do with sensuality, it is pleasurable feeling nevertheless. Animals lower down the scale than human beings are bound to fall under the power of pleasurable feeling in much cruder ways than we do. To know the nature of feeling, in particular to know that feeling is not a self at all and not something to be clung to, is, then, of very great use in life.

　　Perception, too, can easily be seized on as being a self or "one”s self." The average villager likes to say that when we fall asleep, something, which he calls the "soul," departs from the body. The body is then like a log of wood, receiving no sensation by way of eye, ear, nose, tongue or body. As soon as that something has returned to the body, awareness and wakefulness are restored. A great many people have this naive belief that perception is "the self." But, as the Buddha taught, perception is not a self. Perception is simply sensation and memory, that is, knowing, and is bound to be present as long as the body continues to function normally. As soon as the bodily functions become disrupted, that thing we call perception changes or ceases to function. For this reason true Buddhists refuse to accept perception as a self, though the average person does choose to accept it as such, clinging to it as "myself." Close examination along Buddhist lines reveals that quite the opposite is the case. Perception is nobody”s self at all; it is simply a result of natural processes and nothing more.

　　The next possible point of attachment is active thinking, intending to do this or that, intending to get this or that, mental action good or bad. This is once again a manifestation of the arising of strong ideas of selfhood. Everyone feels that if any thing at all is to be identified as his self, then it is more likely to be this thinking element than any other. For instance, one philosopher in recent centuries had a naive philosophy on the basis of which he proclaimed: "I think, therefore I am." Even philosophers in this scientific age have the same ideas about "the self" as people have had for thousands of years, maintaining that the thinking element is the self. They regard as the self that which they understand to be "the thinker." We have said that the Buddha denied that either feeling or perception might be a self. He also rejected thinking, the thinking aspect of the mind as a self, because the activity which manifests as thought is a purely natural event. Thought arises as a result of the interactio…

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