Continuing from When You Greet Me I Bow . . .
In Buddhist analysis, then, there is not a body. What there is, is form (rupa) – some kind of illusory arising that appears to be solid and that forms a basis of experience we call physical. But in actual fact it’s just a continuous flow of momentary conscious events.
Still, our idea that we have a body is powerful. Beyond our misinterpretation of our personal experiences, the idea of the body is reinforced by the social discourse we have all grown up with, which takes as an obvious fact that we “have” bodies. Our whole system of language is based on the metaphor of the body (which is more than anything else a metaphor). Most of our feelings and common-place ideas about our lives are based on the metaphor of the body, a thought so foundational to us that we can’t even begin to know how to question it.
Norman Fischer