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Killgore Trout2/25/2010 3:13:13 pm PST

re: #892 Guanxi88

Question for the room: It is my understanding that one of the goals of buddhism is the annihilation of the self, into the larger unity.

Question - if the self is an illusion, how does one eliminate it, and who is doing the elimination?

Here’s a decent explanation of the 10 ox herding pictures that might help.

The pictures, poems and short pieces of prose tell how the student ventures into the wilderness in his search for “the Bull” (or “Ox”; a common metaphor for enlightenment, or the true self, or simply a regular human being), and how his efforts prove fruitless at first. Undeterred, he keeps searching and eventually finds footprints on a riverbank. When he sees the bull for the first time he is amazed by the splendour of its features (‘empty and marvellous’ is a well known phrase used to describe the perception of Buddha nature). However, the student has not tamed the bull, and must work hard to bring it under control. Eventually he reaches the highest Enlightenment, returns to the world and ‘everyone I look upon becomes enlightened’.

It’s a metaphor for one’s relationship with their consciousness. It’s not really a matter of “eliminating the self” but rather the point is to understand the nature of the “self” and its relationship to other things.