Who Am I? The Search for Buddha Nature

 

Who Am I?

The Search for Buddha Nature

by

Chris Thinker

(English language improved with DeepL Write)

Who am I?

“The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.”

from « Vegetable Roots Discourse » by Hong Zicheng

The Koan

Every human being may have wondered who he or she is. On my way to answering the question "Who am I?" a Zen teacher once gave me a koan:

A monk came to Joshu, asking “Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?“

Joshu answered “Mu!”

Unfortunately, sitting and meditating on the koan for several days did not bring me any closer to answering the original question. 

My understanding of koan work is that it requires a mindset that is unbiased by knowledge and thought - a way of processing information that I haven't been trained in and am still struggling to acquire. I am a scientist and as such have been trained in analytical approaches. This is at odds with the requirement for an unbiased way of thinking that is needed - according to theory - to approach a koan. Because of my overthinking nature, it seems I need to add koan work to the ever-growing list of unresolved challenges in my life, but perhaps the way I have learned to approach problems could be helpful. So instead of trying to solve (for me) unsolvable koans, I'll take an analytical approach and try to find an answer to the original question. Maybe this will even bring me closer to solving the koan.

So let's try to answer the question "Who am I?" using a scientific approach.

Part I

What Am I?

Let's start by looking at the physical components of a being, so let's first try to answer the question "What am I?

Physics

Every piece of matter on planet Earth, whether it's living or dead, is made up of molecules that consist of atoms. The atoms themselves are made up of elementary particles. 

According to the widely accepted "Big Bang Theory", these elementary particles were created along with the creation of the universe, some 13.8 billion years ago. I'm not going to speculate about anything "before" the Big Bang: our current laws of physics, including the flow of time, only came into existence at that point, anything "before" is beyond what we can measure or observe, so it's pure speculation. But even the statement "atoms were created" is not quite correct, in fact matter first consisted of an extremely high energy "quark gluon plasma" from which protons and neutrons (hadrons) were created. The neutrons decayed into protons and electrons (leptons). After about 3 minutes, the prehistoric nuclear fusion stopped due to the loss of temperature, but 75% of the matter still existed in the form of protons, which later became the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. In addition, the first very light nuclei had been produced by nuclear fusion: various isotopes of helium (remaining about 25%) and some traces of deuterium, lithium and beryllium. For the next 400,000 years or so, matter still existed in the form of a high-energy plasma, consisting mainly of protons and other low-mass nuclei, free electrons and photons (light), and probably also some dark (non-interchanging) matter.

From all this detail, the reader with a limited scientific background should only remember that all the matter and energy (which are both equal) that you experience around you at this moment, including every single constituent of your body, was already created in the Big Bang, but the particles were later transformed many times into each other and into more complex structures.

As in a very hot soup that has not been stirred, there were statistical fluctuations in temperature and density ("hot spots" and "lumps"). From these small deviations in homogeneity during the so-called "Dark Ages", the next big step in the young Universe emerged after about 100 million years: the formation of structures of matter. Under the influence of gravity, matter began to condense, eventually leading to the formation of the first hot and heavy stars: in some places, matter became dense and hot enough to initiate a new type of nuclear fusion. After the initial hydrogen in these stars had been fused into helium, the newly created helium began to fuse into carbon. Note that until several hundred million years after the Big Bang, the heavier atoms did not exist, there was no oxygen, no carbon and none of the other elements. All the heavy atoms were created by nuclear fusion in the first generations of stars. 

As mentioned above, the first stars were much heavier than our Sun, which led to subsequent "burning" processes, and the end of the life of these stars is usually a supernova. This means that all the heavy elements that had been created in the stars by various fusion processes were finally distributed as stardust in this gigantic explosion. Under the influence of gravity, the stardust was again concentrated, and the next generation of stars began to produce even heavier elements. Our Sun and planetary system are nothing more than concentrated matter ejected from a previous supernova; in fact, our Sun has been in the fourth or fifth generation of stars for about 13 billion years. 

Take a moment to think about the implications: You know that your body is made up of about 80% water - hydrogen and oxygen - and a few other molecules. Hydrogen and oxygen are quite light, they can be produced in first and perhaps second generation stars. But some of the other components of our bodies are quite complex molecules made up of heavy atoms. Take haemoglobin, the substance that makes our blood look red. Besides the relatively light elements hydrogen (atomic mass u=1), oxygen (u=16), carbon (u=12) and nitrogen (u=15), it also contains iron (u=55). Iron is only produced in stars 2.3 - 3 times heavier than our Sun by a nuclear fusion process called "carbon burning" or "carbon fusion". The carbon itself was produced by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to helium and the subsequent fusion of helium nuclei (which produces all the elements up to oxygen, as described above).

This means that a significant part of our human bodies has been produced in a repeated cycle of star formation, burning (by nuclear fusion) and explosion. Most of the atoms in our bodies have already been part of several generations of stars, were ejected into space as stardust when the stars exploded (e.g. as a supernova), the dust contracted again under the influence of gravity, formed a new, heavier star, where heavier atoms were produced by similar fusion processes. In other words, as a German pop song sang a few years ago, "wir sind alle Sternenstaub" (we are all stardust).

Biochemistry

Now let's look at the next big thing, the emergence of life. This is a bit more complicated because we are leaving the safe haven of inanimate matter, which is governed by the laws of (astro)physics, and sailing onto the continent of life. So we also have to follow the rules of chemistry and biology. 

As has been done repeatedly in the laboratory since the first experiment in 1953, it is possible to produce the basic building blocks of life, the amino acids, from the chemical substances water vapour, methane, ammonia and hydrogen (substances present in the Earth's atmosphere in the early stages of its transformation) under the influence of high-voltage electrical energy (as in a lightning strike). It is only a similarly small step from amino acids to the basis of self-reproducing life, DNA, although this step has not yet been reproduced in the laboratory. I'll come back to this "missing link" in a later section of this essay.

Once the process of self-replication of DNA had begun, the first archaebacteria appeared, the oldest forms of life on Earth known to science today. These archaebacteria can still be found in geysers or in the deep sea near hot springs. Other theories place the origin of the first living things in swamps on the Earth's surface or in geologically active regions of the Earth's crust. 

As an aside, I would like to mention that it is not necessary that the processes described above had to have taken place on Earth. It is just as possible that all life forms originated somewhere else in the Universe. Astrophysicists are currently investigating the role of comets in the distribution of life forms over vast distances, such as between star systems and even galaxies. It doesn't really matter where the first forms of life appeared, or whether they appeared in different places at (almost) the same time. For the purposes of this article, the only thing that matters is that it happened somewhere, sometime.

The following steps are simply driven by the power of evolution, the well-known law of "survival of the fittest" (although I prefer the phrase "survival of the life form best adapted to external conditions"). Evolution was the driving force behind the development of many forms of bacteria in the oceans until the appearance of cyanobacteria.

With the first cyanobacteria in the oceans, the transformation of the Earth into a habitable world began. 2.5 billion years ago, these bacteria began to use a process called "photosynthesis", using sunlight as an energy source and producing oxygen as a by-product. Now that oxygen was available in the young Earth's atmosphere, evolution pushed even more life forms to occupy more ecological niches such as the land surface. 

I would like to emphasise that we are still talking about the same oxygen that was produced by the myriads of burning stars described in the previous chapter. In the early stages of the Earth it was bound in molecules such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides or various other types of molecules and was therefore inaccessible to any form of life. The cyanobacteria used these molecules for their physiology and made the oxygen available to life forms with oxygen physiology. I mention this to avoid a common misconception: no species on Earth will ever be able to create new substances or destroy existing ones (except humans, who have recently experimented with nuclear fission and fusion and other machines that convert matter into energy and vice versa). However, all matter and energy was created in the early stages of our universe - what has happened since then is just a gigantic process of transformation.

I will skip the following steps after the emergence of life, the well-known development of multiple species in the oceans and on land, the temporary victory of reptiles, various ecological catastrophes leading to the mass extinction of certain species and the rise of others. The most recent culmination of this evolution is the origin of mammals and, ultimately, homo sapiens and his ancestors.

Neurophysiology

In this section I would like to take a look at the development of the neural system and the seat of our thoughts, the brain. 

Under the driving force of evolution, the intellectual capacity of species has evolved from simple "attraction and avoidance reactions", which can even be observed in bacteria, to highly complex neural processes. As the mammalian brain evolved, new components were added while the older ones remained intact:

- limbic system

- neocortex

- prefrontal cortex (the development of the prefrontal cortex marks the transition from animal to human).

The development of new brain components made it possible to carry out more complex tasks. This enabled mankind to invent instruments for scientific research, such as the recent Hubble and Webb telescopes, which have increased our understanding of the early stages of the development of the universe. On the other hand, the new brain power was used to create weapons of mass destruction such as fission and fusion bombs, or such indispensable inventions as sliced bread.

For me, one of the most interesting effects stimulating the intellectual development of individuals is the so-called "neuroplasticy". This property of the brain (not just the human brain) allows it to reconfigure itself under the influence of various external influences and challenges. Depending on the stimuli, the brain can create new neuronal connections and move stored information to other parts of the brain. This process usually takes place during sleep. Some researchers believe that dreams are nothing more than side effects (or waste products) of this ongoing process. This flexibility allows the brain to adapt to the current challenges facing the individual.

This enormous adaptability immediately raises a question: Where is the individual's personality "stored" if the brain is constantly reconfiguring itself? What is the mind of the individual? Am I the same person who went to bed yesterday?

The answer to this is not simple and is the subject of ongoing research. We will look at our ongoing transformation in one of the next sections, but first we will take a very broad view and look at the life cycle of our universe. A view that will take us "beyond science".

Part II

How am I?

So far we have only looked at the components of us and our environment, the "What". Now we need to explore a little how this "What?" evolves. Is there something beyond matter, or even beyond science? That is the question of "How?

Time matters

All the processes described sound like miracles, and long ago, when science wasn't as developed as it is today, they were considered to be just that: miracles.

But let's take a closer look at all these processes: the evolution of stars, the creation of life on Earth (or any other planet anywhere in the universe, and the transport of life forms to Earth), the evolutionary biological processes from bacteria to mammals, and finally the development of intellect in the mammalian brain. Although all these processes are not quite straightforward, there may be dead ends, developments in the wrong direction, creation and decay of life forms based on strange chemistry, development was not directed at all. But the only thing that was needed to lead to the earth as we know it, including all the feelings and in feelings beings, was "time". And if there is one thing the universe has in abundance, it is time - or in other words: The universe can wait. 

If the time from the Big Bang to the present day was a clock of 24 hours, then the human race has only been alive for 5 seconds. Looking at our universe from this point of view, there was plenty of time for a lot of "mistakes" or "dead ends" before the human race appeared. And most likely, the human race is nothing but a temporary attempt that will not be able to survive the coming millions of years, and will rather destroy itself and become extinct, than be able to sustain this path of life's development.

Beyond Science

There are two areas where I see some potential for a "need" for an explanation beyond the sciences, i.e. steps that are not yet fully understood and explained by scientists (of course there are myriads of additional areas of research, but most of it deals with smaller details - I am focusing here only on the very big picture)

• What came before the "Big Bang" and how it was "initiated"?
• the step between the synthesis of amino acids and biomolecules - i.e. the creation of life, i.e. the possibility to reproduce from "dead matter".

From my point of view, there is no need to go into detail about the second point. I'm sure that within the next century scientists will be able to create some form of life from amino acids and DNA, similar to what they did a few years ago by creating amino acids from chemical substances with extra energy. 

The first point is more difficult because the question of "time before the big bang" is not valid within physical theory. Time only began at the moment of the Big Bang, together with the creation of all particles "from nothing", as explained above.  We can still "see" the echo of the Big Bang as cosmic background radiation - so it is obvious and can be regarded as a fact.

Just as God Jehovah created the land and sea in Genesis, the Big Bang created particles and antiparticles in exactly the same proportions. According to theory, matter and antimatter should have been equally distributed in the newly created space. A big question in current research is why we observe much more "matter" than "antimatter". This is not consistent with the expected isotropic distribution of matter and antimatter. Is the antimatter just "somewhere else" (perhaps in another region of the Universe?), or is it there but not detectable by our sensors? This question is still unanswered, but as I can now see, the answer doesn't go "beyond physics".

The second law of thermodynamics raises another question: if entropy is constantly increasing in the universe, how was it set to its initial value at the Big Bang? The answer is that the Big Bang also created physics, including the second law of thermodynamics. Even time didn't start until then - so the question "What was before the Big Bang?" doesn't make sense, because there was no time to define a "before - after". One explanation for the origin of the Big Bang is a fluctuation of the vacuum (the word "vacuum" is used here to mean "absolutely nothing"). In this fluctuation, matter and antimatter (which is nothing but energy according to E = m c^2) spontaneously separated, and our current physics, including all the laws and natural constants, was born. A slightly different kind of fluctuation could have produced a completely different physics, with different laws and different constants. 

This means that the laws of physics are not eternal, but were only created at the Big Bang, together with their objects (i.e. energy or matter and antimatter) and even together with time. The question "what was before the big bang?" doesn't make sense in physical theory because time was created with the big bang, there was no "before".

Part III

Who Am I?

Having explored the two major components of the universe, matter („What?“) and time („How?“), we can now look again at the initial question „Who am I?“. 

This is a very subjective question, so we are changing our perspective from the objective scientific observer to the subject of our investigation: ourselves.

The Ultimate Goal is Transformation

Every millisecond your body is regenerating, millions of cells are dying, millions more are being created using external materials such as nutrients and oxygen. The brain is constantly reconfiguring itself, making new neural connections, brain cells dying (and unfortunately not being replaced by new cells).

Experience and feel your body regenerating and transforming with every breath, notice the continuous digestion, the blood flowing through your body, the carbon dioxide flowing out with used breath. Feel your brain working, learning, adapting to new life situations.

Myriads of organisms in our intestines helping a single body to survive, a perfect symbiosis, constant exchange of matter and energy, continuous decay and creation, a so-called "open system" in constant exchange with the environment.

Sit down and feel your body changing! Experience the building of new structures, notice the dependence on the outside to maintain the flame of life in your body. Be aware that you are not a single organism, but a multitude of individuals forming a human body, yourself. 

Who is orchestrating, who is directing this complex organism? 

Without constant decay, creation, reconfiguration, there would be no life, and to be alive is to be in constant transformation. Even after the life of a human body, its components simply dissolve and become parts of other bodies somewhere else.

The death of an individual means the end of the orchestration, but there are billions of other individuals that continue to process, absorb the individual's components and continue to exist.

We are a symbiosis of many parts for a limited period of time. As a human individual we begin to exist when two parts, egg and sperm, from other individuals meet and unite. Our personal existence ends when our parts decay and we are completely absorbed by other life forms. In this sense, all life forms on our planet (and perhaps on other inhabited planets as well) are one perpetual organism made up of myriads of individual parts and forms, constantly being created and dying, but ultimately forming eternal life. Nothing else matters but continuous transformation to sustain life.

A Potential Answer

As we have seen in the previous sections, the underlying principle is "transformation". I would like to draw a (provisional) conclusion and give a possible answer to the question "Who am I? This could even be an answer to Joshu's koan "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?

My personal conclusion is: I am transformation - I'm not permanent, I'm constantly changing, I'm not even the same person I was yesterday or this morning. Every moment I am new, different. (The definition of "moment", the point where past and future meet, may require another essay). 

Like me, the dog in Joshu's koan had Buddha nature in the past, it will have Buddha nature in the future, it is transforming from Buddha nature to Buddha nature, but it is not the same dog it was in the past and it will not be the same dog in the future. The dog and I, we are, we exist and we transform, regardless of whether we have Buddha nature, yes or no. We belong to the one eternal organism that somehow came into existence with the big bang - we are the universe. 

I am the universe. You are the universe. Try to experience it!