We have to be very careful of misunderstanding here, for the Buddha is not saying that the physical world is a figment of imagination. That would imply a “real” world to compare with, and this is the real world. We are not “making it up,” but neither are we misperceiving a reality “out there” where things are solid and individuals are separate. What the Buddha is telling us is precisely parallel to what the quantum physicists say: When we examine the universe closely, it dissolves into discontinuity and a flux of fields of energy. But in the Buddha’s universe the mind-matter duality is gone; these are fields in consciousness.

When Einstein talked about clocks slowing down in a powerful gravitational field, or when Heisenberg said we can determine either the momentum or the position of an electron but not both, most physicists felt a natural tendency to treat these as apparent aberrations, like the illusion that a stick bends when placed in a glass of water. It took decades for physicists to accept that there is no “real” universe, like the real stick, to refer to without an observer. Clocks really do slow down and electrons really are indeterminable; that is the way the universe actually is. Similarly, the Buddha would say, this universe we talk of is made of mind. There is no “real” world-in-itself apart from our perceiving it. This doesn’t make physical reality any less physical; it only reminds us that what we see in the world is shaped by the structure of consciousness.

It is this stream of consciousness that we identify with a self, because its experiences seem to have happened to a particular individual. But according to the Buddha, this self is only imagined, superimposed on momentary, unconnected mental events. If the mind is compared to a movie, vijnana is like the series of clicks of the camera shutter: “This frame (and nothing outside it) is I, this is I, this is I.” The Buddha would ask, “What is I?” What we see is simply not there. We see the images flash by and think we are watching Clark Gable; but in reality, of course, we are watching no one, only a series of stills.

Even in such abstract thinking, the Buddha remains in touch with his audience. Everyone would have been familiar with the village marketplace, where vendors spread their wares on mats for passersby to see. When someone wants spices for that night’s dinner, the spice-seller takes a banana leaf, doles out little heaps of coriander, ginger, and the like, wraps them up in the leaf, and ties the bundle with a banana string. That is how the Buddha describes personality: a blend of five skandhas or “heaps” of ingredients like these piles of spices in their banana-leaf wrapper. These ingredients are rupa, form; vedana, sensation or feeling; samjna, perception; samskara, the forces or impulses of the mind; and vijnana, consciousness. Without reference to an individual self or soul, the Buddha says that birth is the coming together of these aggregates; death is their breaking apart.

“Form” is the body, with which most of us identify ourselves and others. It is the sameness of body from day to day that provides the continuity of who we are. When the body dies, what is left? Even in an afterlife, we can’t really imagine ourselves without form.

For the Buddha, however, this physical identification is as ridiculous as mistaking the dinner spices for the leaf in which they are wrapped. The body is only a wrapper.

In physics, the realization that light is not continuous led to a new view of the world. Much in the Buddha’s worldview stems from a similar discovery about thought. Like light, we can say, thought consists of quanta, discrete bursts of energy.

The Buddha referred to these thought-quanta as dharmas – not dharma in the sense of the underlying law of life, but in another sense meaning something like “a state of being.” When the thinking process slows considerably, it is seen to be a series of such dharmas, each unconnected with those before or after. One dharma arises and subsides in a moment; then another arises to replace it, and it too dies away. Each moment is now, and it is the succession of such moments that creates the sense of time.

The Buddha would say these dharmas come from nowhere and they return to nowhere. Mind is a series of thought-moments as unconnected as the successive images of a movie. A movie screen does not really connect one moment’s image to the next, and similarly there is no substrate beneath the mind to connect thoughts. The mind is the thoughts, and only the speed of thinking creates the illusion that there is something continuous and substantial.

In the Vinaya Pitaka (111.4) the Buddha left a concise map of his journey to nirvana – a description of the course of his meditation that night, couched in the kind of language a brilliant clinician might use in the lecture hall. …

I roused unflinching determination, focused my attention, made my body calm and motionless and my mind concentrated and one-pointed.

Standing apart from all selfish urges and all states of mind harmful to spiritual progress, I entered the first meditative state, where the mind, though not quite free from divided and diffuse thought, experiences lasting joy.

By putting an end to divided and diffuse thought, with my mind stilled in one-pointed absorption, I entered the second meditative state quite free from any wave of thought, and experienced the lasting joy of the unitive state.

As that joy became more intense and pure, I entered the third meditative state, becoming conscious in the very depths of the unconscious. Even my body was flooded with that joy of which the noble ones say, “They live in abiding joy who have stilled the mind and are fully awake.”

Then, going beyond the duality of pleasure and pain and the whole field of memory-making forces in the mind, I dwelt at last in the fourth meditative state, utterly beyond the reach of thought, in that realm of complete purity which can be reached only through detachment and contemplation.

This was my first successful breaking forth, like a chick breaking out of its shell…

This last quiet phrase is deadly. Our everyday life, the Buddha is suggesting, is lived within an eggshell. We have no more idea of what life is really like than a chicken has before it hatches. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm which we take to be the whole of existence.

Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world. For a moment the Buddha draws aside the curtain of space and time and tells us what it is like to see into another dimension.

In this sense, the separate personality we identify ourselves with is something artificial. Einstein, speaking as a scientist, drew a similar conclusion in replying to a stranger who had asked for consolation on the death of his son:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

This law is called dharma in Sanskrit, and the Buddha would make it the focus of his way of life. The word comes from dhri, which means to bear or to hold, and its root sense is the essence of a thing, the defining quality that “holds it together” as what it is. In its broadest application, dharma expresses the central law of life, that all things and events are part of an indivisible whole.

Probably no word is richer in connotations. In the sphere of human activity, dharma is behavior that is in harmony with this unity. Sometimes it is justice, righteousness, or fairness; sometimes simply duty, the obligations of religion or society. It also means being true to what is essential in the human being: nobility, honor, forgiveness, truthfulness, loyalty, compassion. An ancient saying declares that ahimsa paramo dharma: the essence of dharma, the highest law of life, is to do no harm to any living creature.

If all of the New Testament had been lost, it has been said, and only the Sermon on the Mount had managed to survive these two thousand years of history, we would still have all that is necessary for following the teachings of Jesus the Christ. The body of Buddhist scripture is much more voluminous than the Bible, but I would not hesitate to make a similar claim: if everything else were lost, we would need nothing more than the Dhammapada to follow the way of the Buddha.