Why śamatha divorced from the vipaśyanā cannot liberate
Kyle Dixon/Krodha wrote: ELI5 : What exactly is ego according to Buddhism and why is it considered an illusion? : r/Buddhism
It is far more fundamental than that. The
ego or self-entity is literally your visceral sense of self that seems to be in
the body, looking out through the eyes and so on.
Judging and so on, these are all secondary
conditions. Biases, viewpoints, these can all be stilled in dhyāna and samādhi
due to the cessation of imputation, but, even then that underlying sense of
self remains. That is why śamatha is incapable of being a cause for liberation
when divorced from the vipaśyanā which experientially realizes the nature of
mind and phenomena.
Cutting through the ego, or the self is not
about merely arresting our imputed ideas and views. It is about actually
severing the delusion which causes the internal, subjective feeling or notion
of being a knower of the known, feeler of feelings, thinker of thoughts, hearer
or sounds and so on.
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