In speaking of illusion, my starting point is Shakyamuni Buddha's repeated statement, as recorded in the Diamond Cutter Sutra, that the treatise of the Law, or ultimate reality, "is incomprehensible and incomparable" and its nature "cannot be understood, nor can it be made to be understood."

These statements, repeated or paraphrased in many other Sutras, are not only things for philosophers to deal with, but are, if anything, still more important in terms of science.

For all our efforts, we can never escape our fundamental subjectivity, can never get truly outside of ourselves.

Since we, who are made up of atoms, can only use atoms themselves to probe their own products and the constituent parts which also appear to make up the structure of the universe at large, any search for an 'ultimate reality' is doomed, in the end, to fail.

Whatever the form of logic that is used, it is, by definition, a human or, to see it in its proper context, an animal construct, with all the limitations which that implies.

Sooner or later, for all the seeming miracles of creativity and understanding which pour forth with exponentially increasing range and precision with every passing day, science will, by its very nature, eventually hit a brick wall.

Beyond it lies an endless multiplicity of theories or mental constructs which can neither be proved nor disproved, and are consequently, whether in terms of language or of mathematics, the realm of the purest forms of illusion and paradox.

A linguistic example is the simple-seeming assertion that "this statement is false" which, if it is true, is false, and if it is false, true, and there are other, similar paradoxes in pure mathematics.

Already in 1931 and the immediately following years, Kurt Gödel showed, together with others, that no set of fundamental mathematical axioms can ever be used to prove itself to be true.

Furthermore, no scientist and no philosopher can by the use of logic, mathematical or otherwise, or by the creation of models or the use of ever more complex equations, tell us why the universe or the matter out of which it evolved came into being in the first place.

In this the ancient Buddhists and modern scientists are at one; it is indeed a world in which Nāgãrjuna, the first Patriarch of Jōdo Shinshū, is, as we shall see, completely at home.

I am, of course, starting to repeat things that I have said or implied before in various ways, but this is not simply forgetfulness or yet another symptom of the onset of extreme old age.

I have often spoken in passing on the subject of illusion when dealing, as best I could, with the four other aspects of what I see as basic Buddhism, but I think that, as with Emptiness and Interdependent Origination, Impermanence and The Unity of All That Is and Is Not, it is revealing to allow it, if only for a moment, to take centre stage, despite the element of repetition that is necessarily involved.

Because of our inherent tendency to compartmentalise and separate things in our minds, illusion usually falls squarely into the category of the negative and the undesirable.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, the successive definitions of the word are that it is firstly 'an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience', secondly 'a deceptive appearance or impression' or finally 'a false idea or belief'.

Yet strangely enough, if we get down to cases, and consider one of the most common of all false beliefs in everyday life, that of seeing a part as being the whole, whether in terms of objects or of ideas, it soon becomes apparent that illusion is by no means a one-sided matter.

If we forget, or have failed to realise, that the things which we perceive are never in their totality quite what they seem to us to be, and only see what is commonly called reality in terms of the solid table-top of which I have so often spoken, that is, in a strict sense, an illusion in that we are indeed mistaking the part for the whole.

As animals, the perceptual mechanisms that our evolutionary history has endowed us with are not designed to make us consciously aware of the molecules and atoms of which the table-top is actually composed, since in terms of the life or death struggle for survival, it was never a factor in a system which is not purposive, but has depended on some three and half billion years of chance mutations.

Nevertheless, it remains a fact that such everyday illusions are absolutely essential for our survival in the world which our evolutionary history has equipped us to inhabit.

How much and in what ways that evolutionary history will in future be transformed by our relatively newly developed and rapidly increasing ability to move beyond the reach of our unaided senses, it is quite impossible to say.

But whether in that future our built-in sensory equipment attenuates or is intentionally made instead to grow in range and acuity, it pays to be very humble as things now stand.

Our evolution as bipedal, fair-sized, more or less omnivorous mammals, and our feeding habits, whether as hunter-gatherers or farmers, have meant that although we have become a thoroughly eye-dominated species, we have never needed to develop the extreme acuity of vision that is characteristic of high-flying scavengers or birds of prey, which constantly see things which, for us, are far out of sight.

What is more, unlike many insects such as bees, we have never fed to any extent on nectar or on pollen, and have therefore never had to extend our visual range into the ultraviolet to respond to the colours and patterns in that particular spectral range which have been evolved by flowering plants in order to attract their pollinators.

As a result, we only see a part of the display and have the illusion of seeing and admiring many petals that seem to us to be purely white or red and uniform in their coloration.

Nor, at the other end of the scale, have we become sensitive to the infrared as have certain beetles with special organs for detecting the residual heat of forest fires from vast distances in order to lay their eggs, nor, above all, like the many snakes that have developed highly efficient heat sensors to detect the presence and precise location of their prey, even in total darkness.

Our hairs, what are left of them, are for the most part quite insensitive, unlike those on the legs of spiders, such as tarantulas, which can discern the slight disturbances in the surrounding air that are caused by the smallest movements of their prey, or those that have recently been discovered on the wings of bats, which enable them to react to the slightest change in wind speed or direction and turn with such amazing suddenness without the slightest danger of stalling and losing control.

The only exceptions are the auditory hairs within our inner ears, but these again are feeble indeed in comparison with those in the ears of many bats, which are hundreds, if not thousands of times more sensitive in order to deal with the systems of echolocation used in flying and feeding in the dark, and are so highly developed that they are even able to detect the echoes from the silken threads of a spider's web.

As hominids which are not, and have never been, aquatic at any time in our evolutionary history, we have also never needed to evolve the comparable sonar systems which mammals such as whales and dolphins eventually developed when they took to the water.

Nor, by the same token, are we sensitive to the electrical fields by which we are surrounded, as are fish such as rays, and the sharks in the open ocean, or the bottom-feeding catfish, large and small, which inhabit the impenetrably muddy waters of many of the world's great rivers.

As for our sense of smell; it ranges from being between a thousand and a hundred thousand times less sensitive than a dog's, and one only has to take one for a walk to realise what that means. Not to mention sniffer dogs and bloodhounds, every household pooch lives in a world that is unknown to us.

Although, in one way or another, all the things that we can perceive with our own limited sensory equipment are indeed illusions in the sense that I have attempted to outline, the resulting illusory world which we inhabit not only seems beautiful to us in so many ways, but is perfectly adapted to the needs of our particular sort of animal.

We are in fact generalists in sensory terms, and if any one sense or pair of senses such as, for example, those of smell and of hearing, were as highly developed in us as they are in many other mammals from the very large to the very small, it would simply result in a damaging overload with which even our unusually large and energy guzzling brains in relation to overall body mass would be quite unable to cope.

The resulting illusions across the whole sensory range are the price that we pay for our survival.

A dog's extraordinary sense of smell is only achieved, for example, by devoting some forty times more of its brain to that sole purpose than is the case in a human being.

In short, what modern science is increasingly demonstrating is that while the innumerable harmful effects of illusion are very clear and take their extreme form as the delusions which occur in many kinds of mental illness, leaving the sufferers with a greater or lesser inability to deal with the world in which they live, it is by no means a one-sided coin.

It is no coincidence that the one area in which we do appear to excel all other living organisms is the evolution of a highly developed general intelligence that far outweighs the various limitations of our sensory equipment.

It is in part those very limitations which have allowed such a great proportion of the available resources in terms of energy to be poured into those aspects of the brain, dealing with development of language, reasoning, abstract thought and so on, that have so far enabled us not merely to survive, but although astronomically outnumbered by insects and by single celled bacteria, to become, as far as we can see, the dominant multicellular species not only on the earth, but therefore in this particular solar system.

Unfortunately, this has led for centuries, particularly in the West, to the illusion that we are completely different or separate from all other animals, which do not possess such intellectual powers and were therefore believed to act solely on the basis of hard-wired instincts in direct response to stimuli of one sort or another.

This idea was greatly reinforced for the last two thousand years or so by the Christian belief in the possession of an immortal soul, the counterpart of Hinduism's eternal self, but in this case shared with no other living organisms.

It is only relatively recently that scientists have begun to be aware that, within the age-old Buddhist concept of The Unity of All That Is, all life exists in a continuum and not in a series of separate compartments. Nevertheless, it still continued to be thought that toolmaking was an exclusively human characteristic.

As for the human species being the sole possessors of intelligence, this is one illusion that is starting to lose its grip, and not surprisingly it was at fellow primates that scientists first looked, only to find that they used stones as tools to break open nuts, and in the case of those with double shells, learnt how to grade successive blows in order not to crush the kernels, and also used sticks to spear grubs in their holes in the trunks of trees.

Later, it was seen that crows in the South-West Pacific Island of New Caledonia not only cut down suitable twigs to the right size for making hooks for the same purpose, but sometimes carried off an especially good one for future use and even, on occasion, used a succession of two or three different tools to get at what they wanted, while a number of other birds around the world, some of them quite small, made similar use of simpler, straight twigs for getting at grubs.

Even more surprisingly, a captive crow in Oxford, with no model or recourse to trial and error, made a hook from a straight piece of wire to retrieve some food from the bottom of a vertical glass tube.

A final example out of many, is the octopus, which has quickly gained an almost legendary status for its problem solving abilities.

If two of them were placed in separate compartments with a glass screen in between and one was given a large glass jar containing food, but with two or three variously placed latches or other closing devices, it would immediately set to work until, eventually, by a process of trial and error, it had solved the problem and gained its reward.

Meanwhile, the other octopus carefully watched and remembered its every move and then, when given a similar jar, repeated the very same process and got in with almost no trouble at all to reach the food.

How far down the tree of life intelligence goes, and how far developed it is, depends in part on how the term is defined, but it is already clear that we are by no means unique in possessing it.

The scientists' new-found ability to read the three billion or so 'letters' or base pairs of the genetic code, that makes us what we are, has now proved conclusively that all life is indeed one; is part of a continuum stretching unbroken from ourselves through the whole realm of mammals on to insects and bacteria and also to plants, which were previously ignored because they could not move about.

Indeed, we share some 99% of our genetic code with chimpanzees and 60% or so with chickens and, believe or not, fruit flies; all living things at every level, subject, as each one is, to Interdependent Origination, are part of one great family.

It is not just that we, as I have said in an earlier talk, are none of us unitary, individual entities, but ecosystems which depend for our very existence on the fact that we have ten times as many bacteria living in us and on us as we have cells in our bodies, and that but for the myriad coexistent species that inhabit our guts and break down otherwise indigestible material and convert it into usable food, we should not long continue to survive as the omnivores that we are.

The multiplicity of sensory pathways which, after processing in the various subconscious levels of the brain, emerge at the conscious level to create a sense of 'self' is an immediate indication that the latter is the outcome of a complex web of ongoing Interdependent Origination and therefore both Impermanent in the long run and subject to perpetual change in the short term.

Like all the other phenomena resulting from Interdependent Origination, it is not, and it cannot be, a separate, permanent entity.

As I have previously emphasised, the existence of such a 'self', or any idea of a separate being, is attacked in vehement terms by Shakyamuni Buddha as reported in the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

In the vast reaches of the Avatamsaka Sutra there are also endless passages relating to the fact that the "body has no self', and remarking in passing, in the course of hundreds of pages on enlightening beings, that "In as much as the very concept of self is gone, there is no self-love, much less any love for material things;" (p.704) and stating quite firmly in the opening lines of one particular gatha that

“The bodies of Buddha and the world's beings
Are all without self:" (p.527.)

Such themes, together with the falsity of any idea of 'mine' or of 'I-Making' are also a constant refrain throughout the nearly 1,200 pages of the first four Sections of the Samyutta Nikāya or Collection of Connected Discourses in the Pali Canon, which recounts the often misinterpreted meeting with the wanderer Vacchagotta after which Shakyamuni Buddha confirmed to Ânanda, his companion, his continued commitment to the newly arisen "knowledge that 'all phenomena are non-self'."

We read, for example, in treating of the undesirability of clinging, the passage which says

"And what Bikkhu is clinging? There are these four kinds of clinging: clinging to sensual pleasures, clinging to views, clinging to rules and vows, clinging to doctrines of self. This is called clinging." (p.382.)

and are told elsewhere that

"Just as, with an assemblage of parts,
The word chariot is used,
So when the aggregates are present,
There's the convention 'a being'." (p.137.)

A good example in relation to the concepts of 'mine' and 'I-making', is given as

“--- having seen all consciousness as it really is with correct wisdom thus: 'this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self,' one is liberated by non-clinging.
When one knows and sees this Rāhula, then in regard to this body with consciousness and in regard to all external signs, the mind is rid of I-making, mine-making and conceit, has transcended discrimination, and is peaceful and well liberated." (p.521.)

Discrimination or distinctions were, as we are reminded in the Diamond Cutter Sutra, reportedly anathema to Shakyamuni Buddha.

These observations are emphatically reinforced by Nagarjuna in his seminal philosophical treatise on Interdependent Origination, the Emptiness of all phenomena and the non-existence of self, and therefore of course of non-self, in the Mūlamadhyamakakārika or Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way.

Nagarjuna’s verses are so succinct, the ideas so complex, and the logical sequences so difficult, that there has always been, as with so many other Indian treatises in this poetic form, a need to elucidate them at much greater length in the form of Commentaries.

As regards the self, Nagarjuna sums up his conclusions in a nutshell,

"The self not existing, how will there be 'what belongs to the self?
There is no 'mine' and no 'I' because of the cessation of self
and that which pertains to the self." (§18. 2)

Closely allied to the illusion that there is an enduring, separate self, is the realisation that there is no such thing as 'now'.

It is often said, and I myself, in common with Chimyo sama, have said it many times, that since the past is by definition irretrievably gone, for if it existed it would no longer be in the past, while the future is unknowable, since it does not as yet exist, we must concentrate on the one thing that is real; the present, the now.

Yet, as Nagarjuna shows in a number of ways, it too is an illusion, and it is Candrakirti, one of his most important commentators, who states most simply that the present, like past and future, does not exist as a self-standing separate entity.

In philosophical terms, 'now' is simply the non-dimensional, non-durational transition between past and future and is non-existent, since nothing that is not possessed of even the briefest possible duration, can be said to exist; indeed, both for Nagarjuna himself and for Candrakirti, time as a whole is simply, like the self, an illusory concept, however incredibly useful in practical, everyday terms.

More than that, it is also an illusion in terms of our perceptual apparatus, and it is quite amazing how our brain manages to convince our conscious minds that 'now' is real.

Our sense of it seems in fact to be no more than a psychological illusion based on the past and a prediction of the near future measured in thousandths of a second, and it is this which enables us to do everyday things like driving a car or running and jumping or playing games.

To take just one example, when a baseball is thrown at a hundred miles an hour on a curving trajectory, it will have travelled several feet while the brain is processing what is seen, and, what is quite amazing, works out, in a matter of milliseconds, where the ball should actually be.

In short, it is making a forecast based on what the eye has reported, and since the ball is only in the air for just over four-tenths of a second, it is no surprise it’s so hard to hit cleanly for even the best of Major League, professional players.

Even so, in creating an illusory 'now', it does show how important in every aspect of our lives the existence of the concept is for our survival, and how humbling to think that so many kinds of animals and insects can do similar things far better than we can.

It is also interesting to remember that time, as embodied in Einstein's concept of space-time, is no longer seen as an absolute, but as a purely relative quantity depending on the position and motion of both the observer and the observed.

For us, what underlies all of this is consciousness, 'the ability to be aware of and responsive to one's surroundings', or perhaps more explicitly 'the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and of the world'.

In both of these quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary, the word refers implicitly, in the first place, and explicitly in the second, to its being an exclusively, or to stretch the definition slightly to take account of recent research, a predominantly human attribute carrying with it the idea of 'self'.

In both cases it is underpinned by 'awareness', which lies at a deeper level and is something that can be seen, in one way or another, to be shared by other organic life at least as far down as the world of bacteria and other single-celled organisms, and does not need to carry with it a concept of self.

Even in us, the idea of self in any form is not a thing we are born with, and only begins to develop during our second year of life.

But with that development has come a seemingly insatiable need or desire on the part of our particular species to pile illusion on top of illusion and to decorate or even tattoo itself so as to make itself something more than merely a not-so-simple biological entity and, in order to explain what is inexplicable and come to terms with life and death, has created religion after religion.

From the time when, tens of thousands of years ago, our species began to paint incredibly lifelike images of the beasts that it hunted and coexisted with, on the walls of the furthest, dark recesses of deep caves in order to understand and control and embellish the world in which it lived, it has been expanding the world of illusion.

In the ever-growing proliferation of every kind of painting or sculpture, whether representational or abstract, together with all the other visual arts, right up to the present day, the element of illusion has, to a greater or lesser extent, had a part to play.

In the last century or so the other arts were joined by the cinema which, for a time, greatly outdid the popular appeal and availability of the living theatre with its history of continuous development measured in terms, not of hundreds, but of thousands of years, and its total dependence on one kind of illusion or another.

Then, not in a theatre, but in the home, came television in which, as in cinema, illusion is heaped on illusion on top of illusion, to create an intensely unreal and ever more seemingly real, reality, in which, not only living, but long dead people and actors, never need to be replaced like the endless succession of actors on the stage, and will continue to be 'alive' for as long as the celluloid or digital storage systems, in which they alone exist, continue to be preserved.

The concomitant migration from the cinema to the living room is only the beginning of the move into street and countryside alike, which is fuelled by ever-increasing computer power and new industrial materials and techniques.

A multiplicity of hand-held electronic devices already enable us to gain access to the whole of the internet and carry in our pockets more information than all the world's libraries contain, let alone watch every film or TV program there is, no matter where we happen to be at the time.

While science, aided by ever more powerful computers, is making great inroads into the realm of illusion in many areas, it is at the same time expanding it in others, and this includes the endlessly proliferating theories that Nagarjuna would have known as 'views', which are advanced by many modern cosmologists and are, in reality, wholly non-scientific in the sense that they are, in principle, open neither to proof or to disproof.

It is therefore hard to say whether diminution or expansion is currently winning the day.

In many countries, computer games of increasing complexity are not only taking over large parts of children's lives, but also of those of many adults, and among the most dramatic of all the recent developments in this particular field of simulated reality is that of the wholly illusory world of Virtual Reality.

How long this will last as an all-absorbing leisure-time pursuit is uncertain, since it may lose some of its present popularity by becoming so perfect in its realism that it will carry into this hitherto undreamt of world of illusion all the baffling problems and uncertainties of the life from which the players are distancing themselves in the search for relaxation and escape.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that the medical, scientific and industrial usage of simulated reality will increase by leaps and bounds; to give just a single example, it has already been employed for some time in the training of pilots and other aircrew in all the major airlines of the world.

But returning to the more fundamental aspects of illusion, if one does indeed take the view that all that is available to us through our senses is, in one way or another, illusory, it is important to remember that if all is illusion, illusion itself must also be an illusion; and as for an ultimate reality, if any such thing exists, we do not, and cannot ever, have any idea of what it is.

This is fully consonant with Nagarjuna's final position on the question of Emptiness and the Interdependent Origination of all phenomena, which is that it too is itself empty, and must not be allowed to take on a new life as yet another 'view' or metaphysical concept or dogma.

What lies beyond, for Nagarjuna, as for Shakyamuni Buddha, who was careful never to express an opinion on such matters, is unknowable, which brings us back, full circle to The Diamond Cutter Sutra and the opening sentence of this evening's Talk.

However, since Chimyo sama recently said that he felt that a talk that did not end with a poem, would be a disappointment, I will almost end with one, which I have entitled Paradox Waka and more or less sums up my personal feelings on the matter of illusion.

It goes like this:-

In love
non-attached,

illusion
lived to the full

is the dream
I dream.

There is
no awakening,

only nirvana,

an end.

Nevertheless, I think it would be more sensible, in this particular case, to leave it to Nagarjuna, a true poet, and Shakyamuni Buddha's great philosophical follower, to have the final word.

In the very last verse of his Treatise on the Middle Way, in the Chapter entitled An Analysis of Views, dealing with the non-existence of an enduring self for one final time, he sums it all up with his usual, all-encompassing brevity and precision,

"I salute Gautama, who, based on compassion, taught
the true Dharma for the abandonment of all views."