So are buddhas that are released from samsara get to keep their personalities?

zsc

I was thinking about anatta and got confused. If someone reaches buddhahood and is released from samsara, will it be "them"? Will "we" reach nirvana or will are our consciousness die leaving only our buddha nature to "experience" it? In another way, is the Sakyamuni who first sat under the bodhi tree the same was the Buddha in nirvana?

RebeccaS

I don't know, but Maharaj certainly had a "personality" in my view. He was really funny and he shouted sometimes. He also smoked, he'd smoked all his life, and when someone asked him about it he said "the body kept some habits".

Zero

If someone reaches buddhahood and is released from samsara, will it be "them"? Will "we" reach nirvana or will are our consciousness die leaving only our buddha nature to "experience" it?

Maybe the key is in considering other insights and things we learn - if you learnt something new and it changed your entire outlook would you still be the same person? Where is the 'end' (such as a death of consciousness) in any process you have encountered thus far?

taiyaki

The funny thing is that the assumption is that there is something or someone to begin with.

Ironically there isn't. Well the negation is of the assertion we give. Thus no affirmation or assertion is made.

So nirvana isn't much of an end goal or accomplishment. Rather it is already in play.

We just persistently believe in our thought habits.

But who believes in the thoughts? Can't find that essence.

A Buddha neither abides in nirvana nor samsara. All is ungraspable and coreless. Thus both nirvana and samsara are ornaments. Throughly enjoyed and throughly used for the sake of all sentient beings.

Its because everything is completely coreless that expression is possible. In other words because everything is empty we can have a "personality". The relative world stands in its great illusion. Play! Play! Play!

zsc

Maybe I should be more clear. I mean after a Buddha dies, does the personality he had when he reached enlightenment here remain, or will "we" not be able to experience our own buddhahood that we cultivate here. As someone who has taken Bodhisattva vows, this question is important to me.

taiyaki

Does the five year old you have any relationship to the person you are now?

Same or different? Neither or both?

Here is another approach.

Buddhahood is what you are at your core. What you really are. The path is designed to allow one to recognize this fact.

But maybe you're looking on a more experience and experiencer split level.

Well you are experience and its fleeting. There is no experiencer apart from experience. The experience is the whole thing of subjects and objects, yet there are no subjects and objects.

You are the bodhisattva on the bhumi paths. You are the sentient beings. You are the Buddha. You are the deluded.

This whole thing is your mandala, your play of energies. So the bodhisattva vow works in two ways. First its a commitment to work hard towards your own enlightenment so that you can benefit as many beings as possible. Second the job is already done both on the scale of self and other. Every single thing already is liberation. And every interaction a moment of compassion. Thats why the path fulfills both the goal and practice.

The duality of I am here experiencing x,y,z is an incorrect perception. In actuality there is only the experience. And even "you" are an experience. Look for the experiencer and you won't find any. And even look for the one whose looking and there is an absence. Yet here we all are. The mandala shines nakedly, yet it is void. No one to experience it and no one not to experience it. Just experience itself.

This is just an opinion. But the premise your question has assumptions. Such assumptions must be looked at. Hence the path. The endless path.

Cloud

What is your personality in the first place? Perhaps better to start off by defining what is considered part of the personality, and then looking at what the enlightenment process would do (if anything) to those constituent parts.

Samsara is the craving/clinging mind.
Nirvana is the non-craving Mind.

how

Ego is that force of our own innate conditioning that says each of us are a consistent entity, separate from the rest of existence.
A meditation practise is just a diet plan for the Ego.
Under the thrall of Ego, fear based confusion accompanies the study of Nirvana, enlightenment, anata or Buddhahood because for the ego it all represents it's (our)annihilation.
Beyond thralldom to our Ego, all that formally obscured these Buddhist truths, disappears. Anything you look at will illuminate them.

This preamble is just to say that while a studious examination of anata is good, nothing will reveal what we are and are not comprised of, better than a commited meditative diet plan for the Ego.

We all get what we pay for. Study can be pretty inexpensive compared to the demanding costs associated with letting go of our ego but this also usually represents the value differences between a conceptual and the experiential understanding.

Songhill

ZSC:

According to the Lankavatara Sutra when, 

“the waves of consciousness [vijñâna] are no more stirred in the Mind-ocean [cittodadhi] and the Vijñâna functions are quieted, the bliss of which is enjoyed by him; and when he thus recognised the non-existence of the external world, which is not more than his own mind, he is said to have the will-body [manomaya-kaya]” (trans. Suzuki). (Bold is mine.)

Here is more about the manomaya-kaya from the Pali canon:

"And again, Udayin, a course has been pointed out by me for disciples, practising which disciples of mine from this body (mentally) produce (another) body (kaya), having material shape, mind-made (manomaya), having all its major and minor parts, not deficient in any sense-organ" (M.ii.17).

Secular Buddhists are uncomfortable with the idea of a manomayakaya, i.e., a spiritual body. Yet the term is in the Pali and Mahayana canon. .

In other places we learn that the Buddha went to the Brahma world by spiritual power with a mind-made body (manomayakaya) (cp. S.v.282).

Sabre

There is no 'in nirvana'.

I have heard that on one occasion Ven. Sariputta was staying near Rajagaha in the Bamboo Grove, the Squirrels' Feeding Sanctuary. There he said to the monks, "This Unbinding is pleasant, friends. This Unbinding is pleasant."

When this was said, Ven. Udayin said to Ven. Sariputta, "But what is the pleasure here, my friend, where there is nothing felt?"

"Just that is the pleasure here, my friend: where there is nothing felt.

zsc

ZSC:

According to the Lankavatara Sutra when, 

“the waves of consciousness [vijñâna] are no more stirred in the Mind-ocean [cittodadhi] and the Vijñâna functions are quieted, the bliss of which is enjoyed by him; and when he thus recognised the non-existence of the external world, which is not more than his own mind, he is said to have the will-body [manomaya-kaya]” (trans. Suzuki). (Bold is mine.)

Here is more about the manomaya-kaya from the Pali canon:

"And again, Udayin, a course has been pointed out by me for disciples, practising which disciples of mine from this body (mentally) produce (another) body (kaya), having material shape, mind-made (manomaya), having all its major and minor parts, not deficient in any sense-organ" (M.ii.17).

Secular Buddhists are uncomfortable with the idea of a manomayakaya, i.e., a spiritual body. Yet the term is in the Pali and Mahayana canon. .

In other places we learn that the Buddha went to the Brahma world by spiritual power with a mind-made body (manomayakaya) (cp. S.v.282).

Thanks for this answer. I haven't read a lot of sutras so I never came across this.

son_of_dhamma

zsc said:

I was thinking about anatta and got confused. If someone reaches buddhahood and is released from samsara, will it be "them"? Will "we" reach nirvana or will are our consciousness die leaving only our buddha nature to "experience" it? In another way, is the Sakyamuni who first sat under the bodhi tree the same was the Buddha in nirvana?

Buddhanature isn't a "self," it just refers to the potential to become buddha (awakened). It's a potential that is met, not a "thing" that goes into nirvana. Just to be helpful.

However, the Buddha spoke of a consciousness that remains in nirvana but it is not really existential consciousness. It is "pure, endless, without feature, and luminous all around." It is nonetheless consciousness or awareness.