ABSTRACT:
The Buddha's teaching on accomplishment (idhipada) entails will or aspiration (chanda), energy or effort (viriya), awareness or thoughtfulness (citta), and vimamsa investigation / examination or reasoning / testing (vimamsa) representing the controlling faculty of fulfillment. These factors are criteria to apply in each of the paths of cultivation / training or development / growth (Bhavana) that is to be discerned into physical development (Kaya Bhavana), moral development (Sila Bhavana), cultivation of the heart / emotions (Citta Bhavana), and cultivation of wisdom / intelligence (Panna Bhavana ) which will lead to strenth / power or health / energy (Bala). Embedded on the way we find the Buddha's three empirical marks of existence: emptiness which is the primordial state of being or universal energy (sunnata) wherein all conditioned things are impermanent (anicca) and from which is constituted conflict (dukkha) as long as one has not yet realized the key that there is no-self (anatta) to be involved in such conflict. The conflict itself is, therefore, a delusion that is very actual and which we cannot get rid of by mere reasoning. The basic message is that there is conflict because there is a complex in which desire for permanent existence of SELF that is necessarily a rationalistic abstraction and clashes with the impermanent nature of all conditions leading to death. When there is not a self, there is no conflict either. Apart from the Noble 8-fold Path, there is the Buddha's causality hypothesis of dependent origination (paticca samuppada), which is actually an expansion of the observation of the origin of conflict (dhukkha samudaya). As long as the delusion of a permanent self is maintained by craving for more, by clinging to existence that is impermanent through the passions of love and hate, there will be a continuing 'rebirth' or re-becoming of that deluded self. But when in the process of action and reaction it is understood that the desire for permanence has created this illusory self, which is a mirage of a soul - due to be everlasting in an impermanent world - then the dream will be seen as a dream and vanish eventually. When the false is seen as false, there is 'truth'. And that is, as the Buddha said, to see things as they are: yatha-bhuta-nana-dassana. Since human beings tend to enjoy delusions of I-me-mine/self when satisfying greed through and in the six sense fields (Ajjhattikayatana): the eye (cakku), the ear (sota), the nose (ghana), the tongue (jivha), the body's skin (kaya) and the mind's eye (mano) - the message is to create the relatively good kind of delusion for worldly conditions meeting major humanistic desires / needs for health, happiness, and prosperity. Such Buddhist teaching (Dhamma) that is this-wordly, non-theistic, and non-metaphysical has the potential to regulate the human conditions for contentment and peace in the East as well as in the West.
