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So are buddhas that are released from samsara get to keep their personalities?
zsc
Explorer
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?
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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!
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.
Samsara is the craving/clinging mind.
Nirvana is the non-craving Mind.
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.
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).
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.