Buddhist Romanticism

not to create them. They are free to understand experience simply as actions
leading to suffering or away from it, and free to decide which direction they
want their actions to go. The purpose of this analysis was that once his
students saw (1) the connection between the actions and intentions leading
to concepts of “self” and “world,” (2) the suffering that resulted, and (3) the
fact that they didn’t have to keep producing those actions and intentions,
they would naturally want to develop acts leading in the other direction,
away from suffering.
Acts of this sort begin with the practices designed to develop dispassion
for the clinging and craving that ideas of “self” and “world” entailed.
Because clinging to notions of self is one of the most fundamental forms of
clinging, the Buddha focused particular attention on showing how any
possible assumption about self—that it possesses form or is formless, that it
is finite or infinite—is ultimately not worth holding to (§§18–19). In
particular, he singled out the idea that the self is identical with the cosmos
as especially foolish, perhaps because it totally distracted attention from
focusing on the sense of self as a mere fabrication or action (§§21–22). It
also distracted attention from seeing this act of “selfing” on the
phenomenological level, which is the level where the suffering entailed in
selfing can most directly be seen. The purpose of all this analysis was not to
come to the conclusion that there is no self, but simply to develop
dispassion for any attempt to identify anything as oneself, because
dispassion is what leads the mind to release.
In this way, both the content of the Buddha’s teachings—what he taught
—and their tactical approach—how he taught—keep pointing to what he
called the “unprovoked release of awareness.” This release is total and final
in that it frees the mind from every possible burden or limitation (§39). It is
unprovoked in two senses of the term: (1) It is not caused by the provocation
of any causal factor. (2) It cannot be provoked to cause anything else. Once
it is attained, there is no more kamma, no more hunger, and so no need for
desire. This leaves no means by which the mind could ever return to
becoming.
Because this release is neither cause nor result, it lies beyond all
conditioned or fabricated nature (§§48–49). Because it is not a state of
becoming, it does not belong to the realm of “world” or “cosmos” or any
place in physical or mental space at all. This is why those who attain this
release are “everywhere released” (§§42–44). Outside of time as well, it is
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