Into this immense extravaganza of thought and ritual, was the Buddha Sakyamuni born. He was involved, like every intelligent Indian, with the dialectics of whether the world is real or unreal, or whether the lotus blooms in the mind or not, if you did this trick of breath or that. He tried every one of these trickeries of mind and body—and found every path lead to a dead end. The Buddha was concerned, and desperately so, with how to eliminate suffering. Attaining nirvana under the Bodhi tree, he discovered what made all suffering was the law of causality. From ignorance, as cause, arise old age, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair. (Asmin sati idam bhavati, etc.) Indeed, the Buddha is said to have remarked: ‘To him who perceives through proper insight the arising of the things of the world, the belief in non-existence (annihilation) does not occur. To him who perceives through insight the ceasing of things of the world, the belief in existence (immutability) does not arise.’ So, he starts with the first assumption, the Buddha does: everything is real. He was an ‘empiricist’. You don’t have to pull out hairs to see the perfection there is behind and beyond yourself, nor do you have to control your breath for lotus petals, a thousand of them, to open under your cranium. ‘Monks,’ he once said, ‘I will teach you everything: Sabba. Listen to it. That, monks, is everything. Eye and material form, ear and sound, nose and odour, tongue and taste, body and tangible objects, mind and mental objects. These are called everything.’ He said again: ‘Monks, I will reject everything and proclaim another everything.’ He now has a theory of his own. But when questioned he would not answer, for the answer might be ‘subject to vexation. Why, because it would not be within the range of experience.’ Thus everything is real means the perceptions are real. What I envision is, for the human being, nothing but perceptions. There are but the six gateways of perception, that is those of the five senses and the mind. It is through them that we realize what we call the world appears to us. The so-called self (atta) is nothing but this, a bundle of perceptions (sankharapunja) of cause and effect, cause and effect. And what cannot be perceived through these doors of perception is unreal. Man is just a group of aggregates (that is samskaras born of karmas).

So, just as when the parts are rightly set

The word chariot arises (in our mind)

So does our usage, covenant, to say:

‘A being’ when the aggregates are there.