Photo by Corrine Hinton.
Today is the Great Buddhist Blog Swap, created by our friend Nate DiMontigny over at Precious Metal. Later on today, I’ll be submitting something for Richard Harrold’s wonderful blog My Buddha is Pink. In addition, I’m very lucky to be able to host something from my dear pal Justin Whitaker at American Buddhist Perspective. (That’s us to the left, during Justin’s visit to UWest for a lecture this summer.) Justin writes about the idea of non-self (anātman in Sanskrit, anattā in Pāli), which is a timely issue here at this blog: recently, “Green Monk” at Night Caravan left a comment, saying, “This idea of no-self, I admit blows me away. I cannot comprehend it. If is frustrating to me as I want to understand what you mean when you write these things, but sadly I know there is no comprehension of it on my part. Perhaps you would be willing to explain it in a future post?” Well, Green Monk and other readers, I can do you one better: I can let my brilliant, wise, delightful friend Justin explain it to you.
* * *
First, my thanks to Danny for offering the space on his wonderful blog for this and to Nate over at Precious Metal for the whole article swap idea.
Today I’d like to write about the idea of non-self (anātman in Sanskrit, anattā in Pāli). It’s been a topic of interest to me for years and recently seems to be everywhere around me, beginning with a Tricycle blog posting of an interview with Mark Epstein in which he says “the self is real, just not really real.” I wrote a bit in response to that there and later in my blog from a Theravādin point of view. Then I had the fortune of looking over an upcoming paper by Loden Jinpa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk and philosopher, on the interpretation of no-self by the great Tsongkhapa. And just yesterday I received a triple-whammy of not self: I was notified that Anam Thubten Rinpoche, author of “No Self, No Problem” will be returning to my city for a retreat; a friend returned from Thailand bearing gifts including Mahasi Sayadaw’s translation of the Anattalakkhana Sutta, “The Great Discourse on Not Self,” and my girlfriend, who is reading H.H. the Dalai Lama’s book, “Many Ways to Nirvana” came across the no-self teaching there and sought explanation.
So, with that long-winded introduction, I’ll try to explain why this doctrine is so important, yet so misunderstood – and I’ll try to be a bit less long-winded about it. To begin, we need to separate out some of the dimensions of Not Self. We can talk about the philosophical or conceptual dimension, the experiential or meditative dimension, and the ethical or collective dimension. In a way, ethics are both the beginning and the end of the discussion: it is our first glimpses of deep interconnectedness that first move us to the path, and a deep understanding of Not Self naturally fosters spontaneous moral behavior. But my own predilection is to begin with philosophy, so we’ll start there.
Philosophically, Not Self grows out of the accompanying concept of impermanence. If there were a Self, the Buddha taught, it would be lasting and unchanging. That was also the prevailing idea at the time, that there was indeed a Self that carried on from life to life, seeking union with God, or Brahma. And this is similar to our Western Judeo-Christian idea of a Soul created by God and (hopefully) residing with Him in heaven eternally after death. In recent times an entire industry, including numerous schools of psychology, has arisen promising to help this Self in one way or another. And while all of this has been helpful to countless people, it still potentially falls short of the Buddhist ideal of complete freedom from suffering: awakening.
In his forward to the Anattalakkhana Sutta, Mahasi Sayada writes that “Within the personality of every worldling, or puthujjana, moral defilements (kilesa), such as greed and attachment, proliferate… While attachment occurs in respect of all things that are pleasant and agreeable, attachment to attā, (the concept of) a “living entity,” or “self,” is not only fundamental but also most difficult to dispel.”
The experiential dimension is where “the rubber hits the road,” so to speak. One of the Buddha’s arguments against the Self wasn’t an argument at all, but the radical notion that we just “look for it” and see what we find. When the Buddha and his awakened students did search for it, what was found was not Self, but instead just more basic components of experience known as khandhas in Pali. In his “Buddhist Dictionary,” Ven. Nyanatiloka tells us: “These are the five aspects in which the Buddha has summed up all the physical and mental phenomena of existence, and which appear to the ignorant man as his ego, or personality…”
To deeply experience Not Self requires some work for most of us. And that work might begin in a therapists chair or in reading self-help books. In my own practice it began with Loving-Kindness (metta) meditation and simply following the breath. Many months, years, or even a lifetime can be spent on these foundational exercises. But with a strong enough foundation one can practice simply looking at what is arising before one’s awareness. And with practice one sees directly the truth of the Buddha’s teaching of Not Self.
Some people may worry that without a Self to cling on to, they would become lost or disoriented. But for those who have experienced it, quite the opposite happens. The experience is not confusion, but rather openness to the world in the form of compassion. What is lost is “stickiness” as Pema Chödrön says in describing the Tibetan term Shenpa, or clinging or being hooked to an ego and everything we build up around it. No longer stuck in the past, we are able to be fully present with friends and family. No longer stuck in a future, we are able to be present with ourselves and attentive to our own needs.
To quote Anam Thubten Rinpoche, discussing the experience of Not Self and its implications: “… you realize that there is nothing to gain and nothing to lose ultimately. There are no enemies. There are no friends ultimately. There is not even any I. From this moment on the only thing that matters is to live life from compassion, awareness and wisdom.”
