compiled by Evelyn Ruut

The doctrine of anātman — no-self — is the most contested and most misunderstood of all Buddhist teachings. Talk.religion.buddhism, during its peak years in the early 2000s, became one of the most sophisticated online forums for working through what the doctrine actually means. Evelyn Ruut, a longtime presence on the newsgroup, assembled this compilation in June 2007, drawing on years of accumulated discussion.

The contributors represented here are not casual commenters. Richard Hayes (posting as Mubul R.P. Hayes) is a scholar of Buddhist philosophy at the University of New Mexico; his contributions on memory's instability and the Potthapada Sutta are precise, sustained philosophical arguments. Tang Huyen is the most cited voice in this archive — a Vietnamese-Canadian Buddhist thinker whose comparative essays on the Āgamas and Western philosophy are the archive's crown jewels. Mark Epstein is the psychiatrist and author of "Thoughts Without a Thinker" (1995), the defining work on Buddhism and psychoanalysis.

Evelyn herself contributes an observation that is the practical heart of the anthology: that self can be recognized not by introspection but by watching how it behaves — how it rages, protects its turf, nurses slights, and reinforces itself. Hatred, she notes, always rots the vessel that carries it.

From the Diamond Sutra

"...Because, Subhuti, these fearless bodhisattvas do not create the perception of a self. Nor do they create the perception of a being, a life, or a soul. Nor, Subhuti, do these fearless bodhisattvas create the perception of a dharma, much less the perception of no dharma. Subhuti, they do not create a perception nor no perception.

And why not? Because, Subhuti, if these fearless bodhisattvas created the perception of a dharma, they would be attached to a self, a being, a life and a soul. Likewise, if they created the perception of no dharma, they would be attached to a self, a being, a life, and a soul."

On No-Self and the Problem of Memory

by Mubul R.P. Hayes (Richard Hayes)

When the doctrine of No-self is correctly understood, no questions concerning memory pose a problem. The Buddhist doctrine does not say that there is no self at all; it says only that what we call the self is a complex of constantly changing conditions that therefore has no fixed nature. The "self" is a continuum of casually conditioned events rather than a static entity that remains constant as all other things around it change.

Let's now think a little bit about memory. If you think carefully about memory, and observe it happening, you'll probably notice that memory itself is very unstable. If you don't believe this, write down your memories about some event that happened last month. Then one year from now, write down your memories about that event again. Then do the same ten years from now. Chances are, the accounts will have changed in significant ways, not merely in the choice of wording. Not merely the telling will have changed, but so will the way the event is remembered. Memory is a dynamic process, one that is itself heavily influenced by one's current beliefs and system of values. As our perceptions and world-view changes, so does our memory. The past is not fixed; it keeps changing with the psychological demands of the present. The past is no longer the same as when you first lived there. You can't go back there.

All of this is to say that nothing is permanent, and there is nothing over which anyone has ultimate control. Memory, like all other things, is impermanent and constantly changing because of changing conditions. Memory has no permanent self. It is not part of anyone's permanent self. That is what Buddhists mean by the doctrine of no-self. It just means that you cannot control all the factors that influence your body and mind, your personality, all the things that you consider to be part of your identity. If you could control them, you would not experience dukkha.

As for memory of past lives, that is a very tricky matter, indeed. We know from ordinary experience that memory is a very creative process. It is not at all a matter of simply looking into the archives and seeing what is there. Memory is a process in which the mind creates an image of the past. It has been demonstrated in numerous experiments that people routinely create events that never even took place, usually for the sake of making some sense of what is going on in the present.

I once had a friend who was haunted by a very vivid memory of having murdered someone in a hotel lobby about a year earlier in a small town in western Canada. He had a very clear memory of the victim's name, description and place of work. He finally was so consumed with guilt that he turned himself in to the police. When they investigated, they were unable to turn up any record of a crime being committed. They discovered that the person whom my friend vividly "remembered" murdering was still very much alive and had no recollection at all of even meeting my friend. That was a particularly dramatic example of something that happens to all of us much less dramatically every hour of the day. Specialists in memory research sometimes call it false memory syndrome.

Memory is much more to do with creating explanatory mythology than with retrieving objectively recorded history. We do this all the time, even in the context of a single lifetime. This makes memory a very unreliable source of information about the past. As a source of information about so-called past lives, it is almost completely useless, especially since there is no way at all to verify when an apparent memory is really a memory. Quite a few interesting studies have been done of people who purport to have memories of events that seem to have occurred in past lives; in most of these cases, the remembered event turns out to be a distorted recollection of an event in very early childhood, when the functions of memory are not yet fully developed.

For example, I have a very vivid memory of lying in my crib as my father changed my diaper. He was standing in his underwear, and his skin was purple, and his purple skin terrified me. As I looked up at him, the ceiling fan suddenly began to spin wildly, and it began to fly all around the room until it finally went out the door. I was filled with panic and began to cry. No one who remembers the room in which my crib was located recalls there ever being a ceiling fan there. We had no ceiling fans in that house.

Where does that "memory" of mine come from? Was it a dream that I later remembered as a waking experience? Was it an hallucination? Did someone slip some peyote into my pabulum? Did this whole event actually occur in a previous life, on a planet with purple-skinned humanoids and crazy ceiling fans? Was I abducted by aliens? Such issues are deeply mysterious. To attribute such experiences, which we all have, to past lives is a facile and dogmatic solution, one that we are likely to accept only if we are already predisposed to want to believe in past lives. We often latch onto "solutions" to these problems out of a deep fear of being puzzled.

So I think there are really two issues at stake here. The first is a muddled understanding of what Buddhists mean by non-self. The second is the very problematic issue of the epistemology of memory. Taken together, they spell disaster to the simplistic claim that memories of past lives refute the Buddhist doctrine of anātman.

Have a pleasant past life,
Mubul

On Anātman and the Potthapada Sutta

by Mubul R.P. Hayes (Richard Hayes)

The "you" who has no self is the conventionally accepted self, the name that is given for convenience to the continuum of causally related mental and physical events. So the expression "I have no self" means "this continuum of causally related mental and physical events has no capacity to exist without conditions that make these events arise from one moment to the next. If all the conditions were taken away — indeed, if ANY of the conditions were taken away, this continuum would cease to exist." That's a mouthful. Instead of having to put forth such a long phrase, which still fails to capture the reality of the situation, it is easier to say "I have no self."

In the Potthapada Sutta the Buddha explains this very well. In that sutta he says that he uses the same language as everyone else, but he is not deceived by it. What this means is that he also used such pronouns as "I" and "you" and "self" ("sva" and "ātman" are pronouns in Sanskrit), but he knew they did not refer to any one thing. The meaning of a pronoun changes each time it is used; its meaning is purely contextual.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

— Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1819–1892), American bodhisattva

On Dependent Origination and the Absence of Soul

by Marty

There is no soul as such — there is a stream of consciousness but there is no innate independently arising element of us that is independent of cause. Therefore we come from a cause which means that we cannot have an independent self. For this reason there is no soul as this is an Abrahamic construct.

We are normally deluded by our latent mind stream (which is supported by our society norms) that the self/ego is to be protected, respected, is primary, and is to be encouraged. By realising the absence of self then we can proceed to the elimination of wrong views and extreme views and go on to practice love, compassion and equanimity. For this reason the body (or action) is dependent on the mind. The body cannot realise anything but the mind or consciousness can realise the absence of self directly which can then lead to the realisation of bodhicitta.

On the Layers of the Ego

from Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

I like the way Perls conceived the neurotic structure as a thick edifice built up of four layers. The first two layers are the everyday layers, the tactics that the child learns to get along in society by the facile use of words to win ready approval and to placate others and move them along with him: these are the glib, empty talk, "cliche," and role-playing layers. Many people live out their lives never getting underneath them. The third layer is a stiff one to penetrate: it is the "impasse" that covers our feeling of being empty and lost, the very feeling that we try to banish in building up our character defenses. Underneath this layer is the fourth and most baffling one: the "death" or fear-of-death layer; and this, as we have seen, is the layer of our true and basic animal anxieties, the terror that we carry around in our secret heart. Only when we explode this fourth layer, says Perls, do we get to the layer of what we might call our "authentic self": what we really are without sham, without disguise, without defenses against fear.

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973)

On Meditation and the Discovery of No-Self

from Mark Epstein, MD, Thoughts Without a Thinker (1995)

[From the chapter on insight meditation and the investigation of self; Mark Epstein's teacher was Jack Kornfield; the book is foreworded by H.H. the Dalai Lama.]

Despite all of its sophistication — or, perhaps, because of it — "self" has remained a thorny issue in Western psychoanalytic psychology. But it is addressed head-on in Buddhism in critical analytic or insight (vipassanā) meditation, in which the practices are distinct from both concentration and mindfulness exercises. Defined explicitly by the types of questions — such as "Who am I? What is the true nature of self? What was your face before you were born?" — this form of meditation requires the preliminary cultivation of both concentration and mindfulness as the foundation or structure that permits successful self inquiry.

Buddhist "insight" proposes to clear up this confusion. Jacques Lacan emphasized the manner in which the developing infant "assumes an image" of himself from the mirror, allowing that image to come to symbolize the "mental permanence of the I." This image becomes established as an ideal that is inevitably compared with actual experience, but it is an illusory image that is unconsciously mistaken for something real. Having seen ourselves in the mirror, we think that is who we have to be.

As the great Tibetan philosopher Tsong Khapa (1357–1419) taught, meditative accomplishments (samādhi) do not, by themselves, successfully address the problem of self. He quoted the King of Samādhi Scripture to this effect:

"Those mundane persons who cultivate samādhi
Yet do not rid themselves of the notion of self
Get very agitated when their afflictions return....
Yet if they discern precisely the selflessness of things
And if they meditate on that exact discernment,
That causes the attainment of Nirvāṇa;
No other cause whatever will bring peace."

When the self is investigated on the path of insight, the experiences of delight always give way to the experiences of terror. When the powers of concentration and mindfulness are directed onto the actual experience of "I," a peculiar thing starts to happen: what had once seemed very stable suddenly becomes very unstable. The most basic self-feelings become the primary focus at this stage of practice, and the closer one looks at them, the more absurd they start to seem. These self-feelings are suddenly revealed to be nothing but images: the reflection that had assumed an independent existence in the psyche is seen for what it always was — a metaphor or mirage. There is no attainment of a higher self in Buddhist theory; instead, only an exposure of what has always been true but unacknowledged: that self is a fiction.

According to Buddhist psychology, this understanding is liberating in specific, identifiable ways. The difficult emotions such as anger, fear, and selfish desire are all predicated on this misperception of self. When the representational nature of self is fully appreciated, therefore, those emotions lose their source of inspiration. This is the common goal of all forms of Buddhist meditation: to expose the metaphorical nature of self and so to remove the underpinnings of the forces that circle in the center of the Wheel of Life.

In stripping away people's cravings to have to be something, the insight practices actually allow meditators to function in the everyday world unencumbered by the need to protect the false sense of "I." When the privacy of the self is fully explored, using the tools of concentration, mindfulness, and insight, neither annihilation (nothingness) nor a permanent isolate can be found. Rather, the meditators have a liberating sense of understanding about just how distorted their perceptions have been.

Self, it turns out, is a metaphor for a process that we do not understand, a metaphor for that which knows. The insight practices reveal that such a metaphor is unnecessary, even disruptive. It is enough, these practices reveal, to open to the ongoing process of knowing without imputing someone behind it all. When this possibility emerges, the whole question of attachment to meditative accomplishments or to psychological "growth" is muted. As the ninth-century Chinese Zen recluse and poet Huang Po was fond of pointing out:

"Why this talk of attaining and not attaining? The matter is thus — by thinking of something you create an entity and by thinking of nothing you create another. Let such erroneous thinking perish utterly, and then nothing will remain for you to go seeking!"

— Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker (Basic Books, 1995)

On Mental Culture, Kundalini, and the Danger of Not Being Ready

by Tang Huyen

I have often cautioned against engaging in mental culture when one is not ready. If one has not grown up, mental culture can be deadly, especially if engaged in seriously, in heavy duty and with industrial strength. If one engages in mental culture, it is best to develop the overarching mindset to handle anything at all, which is just balance and perspective, measure and proportion, detachment and equanimity, as a prerequisite to anything else. If one engages in mental culture and gets enamored to results, like kundalini or supernatural powers, one can easily get carried away by them and lose balance and perspective.

On top of all the meretricious attractions that can sidetrack growth and lead one astray, a strong herd instinct can skew things up and channel one into gratifying it — by developing kundalini, charm, charisma, not for the sake of growth but merely to pull in a herd to gratify one's herd instinct. It can be deadly. One would rather not engage in mental culture than get caught (catching oneself) in such a self-inflicted trap. The kundalini and whatever else that one has developed will turn around to bite one, from the inside. One can burn oneself up in spontaneous self-combustion with one's own kundalini, in closed circle.

One of the deadliest traps that one can set up for oneself is when one hates one's guts and uses mental culture to help one block oneself from oneself and hide oneself from oneself. One will be able to develop kundalini, charm, charisma, and supernatural powers, and attract a herd to stroke one's ego, which is huge and bleeding, but underneath it all one has never faced up to one's hatred of oneself, rejection of oneself and condemnation of oneself. One lives in bad faith to oneself, one lives in self-falsification to oneself. One voluntarily lives at the margin of oneself, largely a stranger to oneself. One maintains such a precarious balance so long as one is together enough to do it (though of course such a strategy has split one into at least two warring parts), but when one no longer commands the forces to maintain such a precarious balance, like during and after a crash, the whole thing will come crashing down of its own weight. One will be gone in a flash.

It would be best to grow up, and do whatever helps in growing up — by the development of balance and perspective, measure and proportion, detachment and equanimity, as a prerequisite to anything else. But if one has them, one doesn't need anything else, and if one fails them, nothing else helps. Mental culture and its results don't help if one hasn't the overarching mindset to handle them. And if one has the overarching mindset to handle them, one doesn't need mental culture. It's all fluff.

On Recognizing Self by Its Behavior

by Evelyn Ruut

I cannot find any fault with what Tang stated above. But I do think there are some other angles to this situation which reveal the state of one's mind — particularly here on newsgroups, which is the medium we are discussing — that could extrapolate on the thought Tang expressed.

If one shows great anger, hostility, explosive rage, suspicion, and so on — all of those would indicate a very strong sense of self, and as Tang states, a self which is not okay with itself, if not actual self-loathing.

A self needs a herd to prop itself up. A self gets offended, gets its back up at this or that. A self protects its turf, its herd, its self-ness. A self remembers slights, real or imagined. A self uses its own view as criteria for the behavior or views of others, invalidating all other experiences as not-itself.

It rages at anything not of itself and glories in others' common experiences with itself. A self needs a reputation. A self wants the record straight. A self feeds itself, reinforces itself. Ultimately it all comes down to discrimination between self and other. Right and wrong, black and white... me and them — all of it is about self and other.

In developing selflessness, in a spiritual sense, which all Buddhist study and practice seems to aim towards, there is nothing to be angry towards and nothing left to be angry either. It is merely mildly interesting to note, and let go, like thoughts that arise in meditation. Such displays may be seen as a sad evidence about the person doing such things, but not taken personally, since one realizes (through understanding no-self) that there is no self to protect, or to hold safe, or to guard.

Someone who drags out old slights, old injuries, old arguments, to power-trip on another person, doesn't realize that it is a spiritual violence of the worst kind to assert power over others to reinforce self. But the violence is not done to the other party it is aimed at — it is instead self-destructive in the ordinary sense, though self-reinforcing in the spiritual sense, if you get my drift.

Hatred always rots the vessel that carries it. "As the cart follows the horse."

On Hindu Big-Self and Buddhist No-Self

exchange between Lee Frank and Tang Huyen

Lee Frank: You just don't get it. There is no big self-identification role going on in those who are awakened in Hinduism. It's all a play of words. This Hindu big-self concept and non-identification are simply pointers to something that really cannot be pointed out but some type of direction does need to be invoked.

It's like the self-enquiry taught by Ramana Maharshi. By asking one's self who one is, no concrete or tangible answer will ever surface, but this is the lesson of self-enquiry in that one must come to the conclusion one's self that identity and personality are simply moment-to-moment morphing conveniences, by which egoic addictions are satisfied, and this is one method by which relinquishment of identification can take place.

It's the same in Hinduism in that one relinquishes their individual identity for a "cosmic" identity, as such, and then with further practice, even this notion of a quantum identity is relinquished. Everyone is different in their perspective, their outgoing paths and certainly their return paths, so that sometimes the notion of a big self is the perfect stepping-stone for one to realize one's no-self.

Tang Huyen: Very interesting.

This topic involves two issues. One is how far one wants to drop. Is one willing to drop God in theistic religions, like the Religions of the Book? Here a derived issue is whether followers of, say, Catholic Zen, are willing to drop the Catholic God. And if they are not, are they still practicing Zen?

The other is whether one actually engages in a search for the self or the "I." In Buddhism one doesn't actually search for the self or the "I." One either contemplates the absence of self in one's experience (divided into the five aggregates or whatever other dividing schemes), or strives to arrive at the state of the absence of thought, where thought is not around to create a self for one to carry around. Either way, one doesn't actually seek to answer the question "Who am I?" in content, at the first level, but goes one level up, to the second level, and from there negates the self in contemplation (whilst thought still goes on) or quiesces all thought so that the self is not given rise to (by thought, of course). Dropping the self or "I" also gets rid of the question "Who am I?" in content and makes it irrelevant and inoperative. Thus the question "Who am I?" is not addressed as such, in its own terms. It's only a roundabout meandering for the sake of dropping the self.

Colophon

Compiled by Evelyn Ruut and posted to talk.religion.buddhism in June 2007. Evelyn wrote: "Compilation of thoughts on the Buddhist concept of No-Self."

Contributors: Richard Hayes (Mubul R.P. Hayes), professor of Buddhist philosophy, University of New Mexico; Tang Huyen; Marty; Robert Epstein; Lee Frank. Evelyn Ruut contributed the reflection on self as observable through its defensive behaviors.

Quoted works: Diamond Sutra; Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973); Mark Epstein, MD, Thoughts Without a Thinker (Basic Books, 1995); Tsong Khapa, King of Samādhi Scripture; Huang Po; Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself."

Original Message-ID: [email protected]

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

🌲