Mary is with her boyfriend Tom. They’re at a restaurant. Mary is telling Tom about some curtains that she has seen in a shop that she wants to buy. Tom is trying to listen to Mary but he finds that his mind keeps wandering to the next-door table. At the next-door table there is a group of lads discussing the football game that was played last night, in which one of Tom’s favourite players scored a goal. Tom’s mind keeps filling up with images of the football game that he watched on TV.
Mary, after a bit, realizes that Tom isn’t concentrating on the conversation about curtains. Really, she wants Tom’s attention. This is more important to her than curtains. So, she changes to topic of conversation. She says: “Tom, that sports car that you are thinking of buying, why is it better than the red one that we saw the other day?” Immediately, Tom’s mind is back with Mary, or at least its back with sports cars; and he animatedly tells her all the virtues of the green sports car that he is enthusiastic about.
Now, from this little vignette you can see: different people’s minds are turned in different ways. For Tom, football and sports cars are high priority – much higher priority than curtains. Everybody’s mind is turned in a certain way; and if you want to get somebody’s attention, well, you talk about the things that their mind turns naturally towards.
This turn in the mind, in Buddhism is called vijñana. Everybody’s mind is turned in one way or another - quite a number of ways; and there is a certain prioritisation, as we have just seen. One thing is more powerful than another.
The thing that the mind is turned towards is called rūpa. Rupa are the things that have power over us: the things that have power over our mind. They have a kind of gravitational pull, you might say. So, they pull the mind towards them. In this case, Tom’s mind was pulled toward football images, and then towards sports cars.
We all have these rūpas: objects, that hold our attention and that have power over us. Many of the rūpas that are significant and important to us are other people: Mary is really more interested in Tom than she is in curtains.
So, our lives are shaped by the constellation of rūpas that we are amongst. One rūpa is more important than another rūpa. So, our whole life is organized around a hierarchy of rūpa images.
If you’re doing therapy with somebody, one of the important things to notice is this prioritization of rūpas: what is it that is dominating a person’s life? And how has it come about? Is it possible to change it? And so on.
The practice of Buddhism is essentially to establish the highest rupa. The highest rūpa is the Buddha, the Dharma. If the Buddha and the Dharma become the most important rūpa in a person’s life, then their life revolves around that rūpa; and then that rūpa has a big influence upon that person’s life.
So, it’s like: what is the sun at the centre of our solar system? We’re rotating, orbiting, around various powerful rūpas. But what do we make an important rūpa? If the most important rupa is money, or status, or power or something like that, it will have a corresponding influence on our life. Our vijñana, the turn of our mind will be in this direction and that’s all we’ll be focussed on. Equally, if the rūpa that is most important in our life, is something sublime like love, truth or beauty, which are all embodied in the Buddha and the Dharma, then we will have a spiritual life. Turning towards the Buddha is what we call nembutsu: having the mind on Buddha.
So, this is vijñana and rūpa, two fundamental concepts in this psychology.
Thank you very much.
Namo Amida Bu
Dharmavidya
David
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