Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s1.29

c8.s1.29

There is no more substance in his other contentions; to watch over the senses conveys the reality and danger of sense impressions, not their non-existence. The man who perceives forms does not pay attention to their specific peculiarities (nimitta);² that is a very different thing from not recognizing the existence of objects of sense, regarded as the cause of our sensations, a meaning unknown to nimitta in the Canon.³ The enlightened man is not so unwise as to disbelieve in Nirvāṇa, the final truth; but he is not to engage in idle thought regarding it, and, if one learns to disregard the earth, it is only because one realizes how little of a permanent all embracing entity it is, not that it is void of earth character. It is perfectly in keeping with Buddhist views to deny that the predicate self can apply to pain or misery, which is the true sense of the phrase dukkhe anattasaññā. The third Jhāna gives no aid to the theory; it is not an expression of the truth of reality, but merely a phase of meditation in which the spirit attains a condition of nothingness, preparatory to entering into a further state which is neither conscious nor unconscious. Nothing can contradict more effectively the idea of the mention of meditation on the void, as meaning the unreality of existence, than the Cūlasuññata Sutta of the Majjhima;⁴ the process consists of meditation, first on the conceptions man and village, thence to the more abstract idea of the wild, then to the more abstract earth as such, then to the boundlessness of space, then to the infinity of consciousness, thence to the sphere of nothingness, then to that of neither consciousness nor unconsciousness, then to a concentration which is without specific characteristic (animitto), and thence to liberation; in this state there is voidness of the defilements (āsava) of desire, becoming and ignorance, but non-voidness regarding the corporeal body, whose reality thus stands out in the clearest way.