In a short passage from the sutra titled “The Perfection of Wisdom,” from Buddhist Scriptures, translated by Gregory Schopen, the Buddha engages in an instructional dialogue with the wise arhat Subhuti. The teaching, estimated to have been written in the eleventh or twelfth century, is clearly meant to illustrate the method by which wisdom is gained through the elimination of a conception of the self. Its audience would have been Mahayana monks, or even arhats, who like Subhuti himself have already achieved nirvana. Since there is some inquiry about the role of the bodhisattva, and since it is a Mahayana sutra, one can see many distinctly Mahayana characteristics of the passage, but pages 435-6 seem to focus predominantly on the doctrine of No-Self, or in a larger context, “emptiness” or “suchness.”

To summarize the passage: In the beginning, on page 452, the Buddha is asking Subhuti about various physical analogies for the nature of “emptiness” described in the dharma. Upon hearing the teaching from the present-day buddha, the wise Subhuti “burst[s] into tears” (453), finding himself with a grasp of the Tathagata‘s teaching and also “possessed by the greatest astonishment” (453). Having reached an understanding, Subhuti restates the doctrine to the Buddha so that the reader or audience might better comprehend them. The most important idea within the teaching, he explains, is that for those who master it, “a conception of a self will not occur to them, nor a conception of a living being, nor a conception of a personal soul, nor a conception of a person” (453). In other words, one who has honed and perfected one’s wisdom will no longer be limited in thinking only of conceptions; rather, one will perceive and apprehend the true suchness, or emptiness, of reality. The passage ends, for the purposes of this analysis, where “folio 6 is missing” (454).

One important distinction in the text is the denotation of Gautama Buddha by the title “Blessed One,” while the Buddha himself repeatedly mentions the teachings of one he calls Tathagata, which means “title for all Buddhas in Mahayana” (407), according to Mitchells. Early in the passage, the Buddha mentioned “a tathagata” (453), which would denote anyone elevated to point of Awakening in the sense that one could be called a buddha. Later, the Buddha clearly speaks of Tathagata as someone separate from himself when he explains that “This, Subhuti, has been declared by the Tathagata to be the greatest perfection” (454). So part of the teaching is indicative of even the Buddha’s lack of a self-conception; because the tathagata is a cosmic entity, neither bound to a human soul or final mortality, the Buddha can be at once many beings throughout spacetime, or the various “world-systems” he describes.

A key image in the text, however cryptic, is that of the River Ganges. The Buddha explains that “if a woman or man were to give away their person as many times as there are sands in the River Ganges, [it] would [...] produce great merit, immeasurable and incalculable” (453). The act of “[giving] away their person” is especially vague, whether intentionally so or not. The sentence conjures images of intentional self-drowning, of self-sacrifice, and even of merely meditating to the point that the notion of a self is fully extinguished. After all, the syntax of the statement is little more than a clever simile, as well as perhaps a hyperbole to drive home the Buddha’s point; this makes the image of purging the self through concentration and wisdom the dominant one, and that seems to reinforce the greater purpose of the passage’s teaching.

Another important piece of imagery is the Buddha’s memory, from a past existence, of when

“an evil king hacked the flesh from all my limbs, [...] there was for me on that occasion no conception of a self, no conception of a living being, no conception of a personal soul, no conception of a person.” (454)

This situation, above all else, illustrates the literal extreme of truly achieving perfect wisdom as the Buddha sees it. For one to endure such visceral agony, one must become fully detached from the sensations, cravings, illusions, and most importantly, conceptions of the human form. One who sees independently of self, of one’s physical being, can see past the pains of this world, however great, and view the true emptiness of reality.

Mitchell describes this understanding of “suchness” as having a “liberating effect” (108). By “experiencing the emptiness of all things,” he explains, “one’s attachements to the things of the world are loosened, defilements are brought to an end, and delusion is dispersed” (108); this is recognizable as the very path to Nirvana. But since the Mahayana sutras prescribe followers to seek the “Middle Way,” rather than achieving the total emptiness of pure Nirvana, it is interesting to consider the implications these ideas might have for modern life, and what such adherence would mean in the context of possible futures.

For instance, today we have access to pharmaceutical drugs which largely numb bodily sensation at the expense of mental side-effects, while those that affect the body without hampering the mind often induce some degree of paralysis. It is not too far a stretch, however, to assume that some sort of nerve-deadening therapy in the near future might have the potential to alleviate pain in the physical sense while leaving the mind more or less intact — undamaged, if not unchanged. This would bring us nearer to achieving a kind of distance from our conceptions of physical being, but it would be imperfect, because the body’s relationship to the mind would still limit us to an understanding of the self, due to the constraints of a human body in relationship to the greater universe, the dukkha posed by the body’s needs, and our existence within the human form — glancing downward and seeing the heap of our flesh, our legs in stride, our hands at work.

There is theoretical technology believed to be just beyond the horizon at present — the seed behind much of today’s science-fictional extrapolation: the idea of the Singularity. Whereas the predicted Machine Singularity is the belief that artificial intelligences will achieve a kind of consciousness equal to that of a human’s, the Human Singularity is the idea that one day soon, a human mind will conceivably be uploaded by one of several plausible methods of cerebral “recording,” and achieve a kind of immortality free of the limitations of the human body. Self-described “transhumanists” believe this is the logical next step for civilization; the visionary mind of Arthur C. Clarke predicted it over half a century ago, not long after he proposed the idea of a global satellite array to enable instantaneous communication throughout the world. If such a being ever does exist — and there are countless scientists who have no doubt on the matter — then it seems that an “infomorph,” or computerized human consciousness, without need for physical sensation, without limitation of sight, and with boundless mental capacity through the aid of computers, would have the best chance of achieving the Buddha’s notion of Perfect Wisdom.