Rupa, Karma and Dharma

Did you ever watch a habit form in your life? Try it, it’s fascinating. If you like computer games try it with the latest one that has just come out. First you enter into the habit voluntarily, it’s fun, recreative, maybe even resourceful. Then after some time you find you can’t stop doing it, it becomes a compulsion, it owns you. You’ll notice you do this when you’re bored. We do something, anything to distract ourselves. Now this is just an example, (you can watch habits form in your own life, it’s a good way to become mindful.)

However, the concept of rupa goes much deeper than the formation of daily rituals, it goes right to the heart of who we are. The reason you’re in a body is because you hold a great inner desire for something, you entered into that desire voluntarily, then it took you over, and you formed a body around it to experience it fully. Now the Buddha isn’t saying it’s wrong to do this, simply this is how things are. In a sense everything is rupa; everything is habit.

However, from the moment you do this, (create your body) you desire escape (another paradox) so now you create death. And since death is the nadir, the lowest point of consciousness, you have no choice but to return again to a body. Thus you set in train a vicious circle. Buddhists would argue that it is only when you are in a body that you can awaken and by doing so escape the wheel of life altogether.

Meditation is the method the Buddha advocated for this, as well as following the eight fold path. A particular type of meditation is called Tonglen meditation,(from the Tibetan line) where one draws the suffering of others into his/her heart (without become affected by it) and then breathes it out as love. Only very experienced meditators should attempt this as you may unwittingly take on the other’s illness.

The karma

The idea of karma as we understand it is drawn more from the Indian tradition. The Buddha’s teachings on this represented a very significant break from the past. His teaching is that karma is also something we create, it’s connected with habit formation, and ultimately with rupa, and the concept of the self. From our desires we create our patterns, then we begin to identify with them; ‘I am an honest person,’ ‘I am afraid of heights,’ ‘I am a people person,’ and so forth. This builds layers and layers of self, it swells us, until it completes the story of who we are.

So rupa, or habit, become tiny ‘seeds’ planted in the mind. The more we engage in a particular practice the more we ‘grow’ that practice in ourselves. This causes it to show up regularly in our lives, until it appears to be an intrinsic part of us. It becomes part of our identity of self. And so we carry these ‘seeds’ with us across lifetimes, because they represent a need, they serve us in some way. These seeds exert a gravitational pull until we let whatever it was we planted go. It’s not about something we did wrong in a ‘past’ life and now it’s come to ‘get us.’

The seed resides in the mind as a kind of first imprinting, then every time it gets activated (by something that reminds the person of the original imprint, usually at an unconscious level) it becomes a little bit stronger, bit by bit, until it becomes a weight on the psyche. This is not totally dissimilar to the idea of the personal lie discussed here which gets reinforced throughout the individual’s life until it becomes the script they live by. I’m sure Buddhist purists will disagree with me here, but I think the analogy is reasonably accurate. The events that activate our birth trauma and personal lie won’t just happen willy-nilly, something in us, bitten by the original trauma, will surreptitiously seek them out. It’s an ongoing interplay between us and that great ‘something’ out there that moves when we move to complete our experience of ourselves. In the case of the personal lie, it moves in response to our hurt, which we seek to have re-enacted, revenged, or brought into the open, (in truth what we seek is to heal). So too with karma, or the ‘seed’, from life to life it seeks out the response it requires from the kernel of its own need.


The self is a form of rupa

So, we see that we can never pin down or define ‘self’, it’s really a label we give to some vague, nebulous idea of who we think we are. What the self really amounts to is a concept, an idea you have about yourself. It’s not real. Therefore, to get to the ‘real you’ it may be helpful if we can bypass, or put aside this concept altogether. This may not be an easy thing to do, after all we created and live with this concept every day. We falsely believe it’s who we are.

It’s especially not easy for the western mind, brought up on a diet of sin and sacrifice to grasp. Believing the self to be sinful or bad is really adding to it, rather than bypassing it. And to believe in sacrifice is to introduce the complexity of desiring that which we have now forbidden ourselves.

Often we think by giving up stuff that we’re somehow becoming enlightened. Not so, we’re only exchanging one form of rupa for another. This is a mistake that self development teachers, as well as religious leaders, and others have made for centuries. They say, ‘it’s better not to drink alcohol than to drink alcohol’, or ‘it’s better to drink decaf than to drink normal coffee’. But this is simply to replace one habit with another. We then put a higher value on the new habit and delude ourselves into thinking we’ve ‘developed’. We may be healthier, yes, but we won’t be enlightened.

Let’s use chocolate as an illustration. To think ‘I want to eat that bar of chocolate’, is rupa, it is a craving. However, to think, ‘I want not to eat that bar of chocolate’ is the same thing. That too is rupa, that too is a craving. It was never about the chocolate, it was always about the wanting. To want to give up some desire is the same as wanting that desire in the first place.


The Dharma

Beyond this limited sense of the self is Oneness, union with the Origin. Words really fail to describe this adequately, however, the mind alone cannot attain this truth, a ‘higher power’ needs to intervene. This could also be called our ‘higher self’ (see how words always struggle to entangle us, I needed to use part of the concept ‘self’ there!) but this higher power is not just way beyond any concepts, labels or words we might have, it’s beyond being conceptionalized. The Buddha never spoke of ‘God’, when we do we somehow attempt to put form on that which is formless, timeless, limitless. A Course in Miracles, which is very Buddhist in its thinking, follows a similar path. It speaks that the mind cannot fix the mind, only a higher power can do this (it calls this the Holy Spirit), and refuses to define God other than saying ‘God is’. The Course refers to what the Buddha called the self, as the ego.

The Buddha was not talking about nihilism, that you may as well die and be done with it, because nothing exists anyway. Unfortunately that’s the way many people in the west view Buddhism. They see the rejection of the self as a doctrine of abandonment, and Buddhism as a kind of a non-religion, without a rudder. Beyond all illusions there is a real truth (dharma). The Buddha is not saying beyond all illusions there is a real truth and this truth is that there is no truth! This is existentialism (at its worst) it’s nothing to do with Buddhism.

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