Ātman, Ego, and Rebirth

medieval peasants thresh
a sheaf of barley with flails

WHAT FOLLOWS IS my translation of the Sheaf of Barley Simile (Yavakalāpi Sutta S 34.248), along with some threads which I draw from it. The simile relates to my research into papañca: the past participle papañcita is used in a context that helps us to understand that word. Here I will be focussing on some other implications.

I have restructured the text so that the last part condenses several pages into a couple of paragraphs - without losing anything of importance. The central metaphor of the Yavakalāpi Sutta is that how we think about our existence determines whether we bound or free.

Sheaf of Barley Simile

Suppose that a sheaf of barley were laid at a crossroad. And six men might come bearing flails, and those six men might thresh that sheaf of barley. That sheaf of barley would be well threshed by those six flails threshing. Then a seventh man might come bearing a flail, and he might also thresh the sheaf of barley. So that sheaf of barley would be more well-threshed by that seventh flail threshing.

Just so the uneducated hoi polloi [1] are struck in the eye by pleasant and unpleasant forms, sounds, smells, tastes, tangibles, and mental objects. If an uneducated hoi polus[2] strives after future rebirth, that foolish person is more well-battered, just as the sheaf is more well threshed by the seventh flail.

Once upon a time the devas and asuras were massed for battle. The Asura Lord Vepacitti addressed the asuras: "If, sirs, in the midst of the battle the asuras are victorious and the devas are defeated, then binding Sakka, Lord of the Devas, with bindings, with his neck as the fifth[3], then lead him to me at Asurapura (the City of the Asuras). Sakka also addressed the devas: "If, sirs, in the midst of the battle the devas are victorious and the asuras are defeated, then, binding Asura Lord Vepacitti with bindings, with his neck as the fifth, then lead him to me at Sudhamma, the Hall of the Devas. In that battle the devas were victorious and the asuras were defeated. Then the thirty three devas, binding Asura Lord Vepacitti with bindings, with his neck as the fifth, lead him to Sakka, Lord of the Devas, at Sudhamma, the Hall of the Devas. There Asura Lord Vepacitti is bound with bindings, with his neck as the fifth.

When Asura Lord Vepacitti thought "the devas as just (dhammika) and the asuras are unjust (adhammika) now here I am going to the city of the devas”, then he perceived himself released from his binding with the neck as fifth, and possessing and endowed with the five divine cords of pleasure enjoying himself. When, however, Asura Lord Vepacitti, thought "the asuras are just and the devas are unjust, now I will just go to the asura city”, then he perceived himself as bound by bindings with the neck as fifth. And the five divine cords of pleasure faded away. So subtle were the bonds of Vepacitti, but more subtle are the bonds of Māra. Thinking (maññamāno)[4] is the binding of Māra, not thinking is release from the Evil One.

'I am…'
'I am this…'
'I will become…'
'I will not become…'
'I will be beautiful…'
'I will be ugly…'
'I will be aware…'[5]
'I will be unaware…'
'I will be neither aware nor unaware…'

…is an opinion (maññita), an anxiety (iñjita), a writhing (phandita), a proliferation (papañcita), [6] a state of conceit (mānagata)…

Opinions, anxieties, writhings, obsessions and states of mind are a disease, a boil, an arrow. 'We will dwell without the conceit of opinions, without the conceit of anxieties, without the conceit of writhing, without the conceit of obsessions, having destroyed conceit' this is how you should train.

~.o.~

The first point to make is that opinions etc, including papañca, are something that we add to the perceptual process, they are the seventh flail. We're already battered by the experience of our six senses, and then we add to the battering. This is consistent with texts such as the Salla Sutta which make a similar distinction between the pain from the senses, and the suffering of our reactions to pain. However the specific thing that we add in this case is striving after future rebirth (āyatiṃ punabhavāya ceteti).

However what got me thinking about this text today was that I was reconsidering my blog post Early Buddhists and Ātman/Brahman. It is here that I note my discovery, I think for the first time, that no Brahmin ever talks about ātman in the Pāli Canon, and that the Buddha never debates the subject with a Brahmin. This strongly suggests that, at the very least, we have to re-assess the idea that the Buddha was familiar with the Upaniṣads, or the extent to which the Buddha (i.e. early Buddhists) might have been familiar with Upaniṣadic themes.

In Yavakalāpi Sutta the Buddha takes an approach to self that, as far as I know, is not one that is found in the Upaniṣads. The statements above--the 9 statements starting with 'I am' (asmīti)--are not about an essential or eternal self; much less the merging of the self into brahman for the attainment of immortality. Where the Upaniṣadic ātman is trans-personal and identified with creation or creator, these statements are very much concerned with personal identity and personal continuity. So in reading this text we are not talking about the Upaniṣadic ātman, we are talking about the simple sense of being a self and having a first-person perspective.

Coming back to future rebirth, we see that seven of the nine statements use the future form of the verb, i.e. bhavissāmīti--'I will be', or 'I will become'--and therefore concern people's anxieties about a future life. It is entirely natural in a culture with a rebirth eschatology to be anxious about future lives, indeed as a moral technology this belief system actually depends on people having these anxieties to motivate their compliance with moral norms.

But this text is saying, quite distinctly, that opinions or anxieties about a future life are sources of suffering over and above the suffering induced by the senses. The ideal disciple does not indulge in opinions and anxieties about future lives. We might say that this is because they train for release from saṃsāra. However consider the simile involving Vepacitti which seems to be an allegory with the message that how we think about our sense experience, or (perhaps) what we make of our sense experience, is precisely what binds us to saṃsāra.

There's a interesting feature of the text. For humans being bound by the five cords of sensual pleasure (pañca kāmaguṇa) is synonymous with being caught in saṃsāra. The devas and asuras however operate in a different way. When Vepacitti perceives things correctly--perceives the devas as lawful or just (dhammika)--he is endowed with the divine version of the five cords. When his perception is distorted, the cords fade away. And note that the text speaks of seven flails related to the five physical senses, the mental sense, and then striving after rebirth as the seventh; while there are only five cords of sensual pleasure, and thinking. Indeed the problem for humans is precisely thinking (maññamāno), which is the verb usually associated with activity of mind (manas).

In any case the message is quite clear: even if you do believe in rebirth, it only causes unhappiness to think about rebirth; it only causes unhappiness to wish for a better rebirth; it only causes unhappiness to speculate about the nature of rebirth; in short: thinking in terms of being reborn is generally quite unhelpful. The whole point of Buddhism is to be liberated from rebirth, to not be reborn, to escape from the cycle. What the allegory of Vepacitti suggests is that if you even think in terms of rebirth, then you are caught in Māra's bonds. So the disciple should not be thinking in terms of rebirth at all, not having opinions or anxieties or conceits with respect to rebirth.

Therefore, even if you do believe in rebirth, there is no advantage in thinking about it or talking about it, and considerable disadvantage in doing so. It is best not to think about rebirth at all, since thinking in those terms binds you to Māra's realm. Belief in rebirth only leads to speculation, worry, proliferation and conceit which poison our minds.

~~oOo~~

---

Notes

[1] assutavā puthujjana: suta 'heard' sutavant 'possessing the heard' i.e. educated; puthu (many) jana (people). Greek hoi polloi 'the many'.

[2] pollus is the singular of polloi.

[3] This appears to mean bind his four limbs plus his neck.

[4] The word refers to all kinds of mental activity: thinking, imagining, having opinions; being convinced, being sure. The context suggests that here it refers to having opinions.

[5] saññin – possessing perception or recognition, a perceiver.

[6] The word iñjita is a past-participle (used as substantive here) from iñjati 'to shake, turn about, move, or vacillate'. In Pāli trembling is often associated with fear. The Pali Commentary says: "the reason for the meaning of 'iñjitaṃ' etc., is that through the vices (kilesa: lobha, dosa, moha, i.e. greed, aversion, and confusion ) beings shake (iñjita) and writhe (phandita), and are obsessed (papañcita) because they are afflicted by states of carelessness."

Early Buddhists and Ātman/Brahman

It is well known that the teachings on anātman (translated variously as 'no-self', 'non-self', 'no-soul', 'not-soul' with variations particularly in capitalisation of self/soul) are important to the overall Buddhist program of transformation. Several books and many articles have been written arguing for and against various interpretations of the relevant texts - some finding an ātman affirmed, some finding it denied, and some taking a middle way between these two extremes.

It is widely accepted that the teachings on anātman must be set against the background of Brahmanical thought of the day. It is further generally accepted that the texts that have come down to us as the Upaniṣads, especially the Bṛhadāranyaka, Chāndogya, Taittirīya and Aitareya Upaniṣads, reflect the Brahmanical religion at the time. In the the Tevijja Sutta (DN 13) we find references to these four for instance [1]. It is often assumed that the Brahmanical faith formed the mainstream of religion at the time and place, though this is now plausibly disputed (see Rethinking Indian History), and it seems likely that Brahmins and their religion were new comers to the North-east of India, and in fact in the process of absorbing ideas from the samaṇa movements. In any case many people have pointed to passages in the Pāli Canon which show that early Buddhists were familiar with the Upaniṣads - and anatta in relation to ātman is one of the key aspects of this theme.

Just as the central uniting concept across all of the Buddhist texts is paṭicca-samuppāda, the central subject in these early Upaniṣads is the identity of brahman and ātman: the former being the universal essence, while the latter is the manifestation of that universal essence in the individual. As Signe Cohen puts it:

"An Upaniṣad can, most simply, be defined as an ancient text in Sanskrit that teaches that ātman and brahman are one and the same, and that the knowledge of this identity leads to liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth." [2]

However at the same time there was a theistic tendency present in the Upaniṣads which gradually became more prominent. In its theistic guise the grammatically neutral brahman becomes the grammatically masculine brahmā, and is equated with Prajāpati 'Lord of Progeny' aka the Creator God. The two terms are often ambiguous: as the first member of a compound they are both brahma-. Additionally the two are sometimes used side by side as if to make it clear that they are not to be considered distinct. As time goes on brahman is used less, and brahmā more.

We know a certain amount about the Buddha's contemporaries from polemics and parodies directed against them in the Pāli texts, though of course such portrayals must be taken with a grain of salt. Jains, Ājivakas and Brahmins are recognisable in the texts from the way they behave and how they speak. However, and this is my main point today: nowhere in the Pāli canon, so far as I can tell, does any Brahmin so much as express an opinion on ātman, and nowhere is the ātman doctrine attributed to a Brahmin. This is a surprising situation since this doctrine is one of the most characteristic and distinctive of that group. A subsidiary point is that while the founders and important teachers of religions are mentioned, Jains for instance talk about former teachers, and while there are even lists of the seven Vedic ṛṣi - the star of the early Upaniṣads - Yajñavalkya - is not mentioned in Pāli.

In Pāli the two Sanskrit words brahman and brahmā have coalesced into the single form brahmā (a masculine noun) which sometimes stands for religious ideals in general (it is often translated as 'holy' or 'divine' for instance), but in our present context always means the creator god. [3] The coalescence may be reflected in the confusion of the declension of the noun, [4] and we do not know whether the single, if somewhat variable, grammatical form in Pāli represents the state of Buddhist knowledge of Brahmanical beliefs, or whether a mechanical process of grammatical change obscured a difference (c.f. my comments on sattva, satka, satva in Philological Odds & Ends III sv bodhisattva). Notwithstanding the ambiguity of brahma- as the first member of a compound, in the context of the beliefs put into the mouths of Brahmins (or indeed into the mouth of Brahmā) there is no clear reference to brahman in any text in the Pāli Canon. [5] I'm not the first to make this observation, but don't have references to hand.

Parodies of the creator god are some of the funniest, and most damning of the Buddhist polemical texts - the creator god is portrayed as a deluded and bombastic fool, afraid to look bad in front of the other gods. The central Brahmanical idea of the identity of brahman and ātman is completely absent and has been replaced by the idea of brahmasahavyata - companionship or union with Brahmā. The word brahmavihara 'dwelling with Brahmā' is a synonym of this. However note that I have summarised Gombrich's discovery that the Buddhist texts seem to have lost the true sense of this allusion before the fixing of the Canon - The Buddha and the Lost Metaphor.

The clear references to Vedic texts noted by Gombrich and others (including me) have established that the Pāli texts themselves are aware of Vedic concepts. We find the names of Vedic ṛṣi, and Vedic traditions; references to sacrifices, sacred fires, mantras (in particular the Sāvitṛ mantra); references to sacred bathing, to worship of the sun. We find a high awareness of Brahmanical class (vaṇṇa) prejudice. We also find more oblique references to the five fire wisdom, and to Vedic cosmogony (especially as found in the BU and Ṛgveda 10.90). Many of these ideas and practices are still current in India more than 2000 years later! Although sometimes Brahmins are clearly just straw-men and present an inauthentic façade to be knocked down, there are many texts were Brahmins are recognisable even if not labelled as such. What's more the texts themselves record that many Brahmins of various kinds became converts (including prominent disciples like Sāriputta and Moggallana!) so the compilers of the texts had plenty of opportunity to mix with actual Brahmins. We have evidence of increasing Brahmin participation and influence in the Buddhist Sangha - some of which I discussed in A Pāli Pun. The text which most often seems to referenced is the Bṛhadāranyka Upaniṣad (BU). Those scholars who have tried to determine the geographical locations of the various texts (primarily Michael Witzel) place the BU in the eastern areas of North India in the Kingdoms of Kosala and Vidheha - precisely where the Buddha was active.

A conflicting picture emerges for which I have as yet no explanation. Brahmins in the Pāli texts are either old school Brahmins focussed on the sacrifice, or they are outright monotheists which is usually considered to be a late development - associated with later Upaniṣads or even the Puraṇas. A possibility is that the jaṭila or dreadlocked ascetics (especially Uruvela Kassapa) were ascetic Brahmins - the commentarial tradition certainly considers them Brahmins, though the nikāyas are more ambiguous. They are fire worshippers, some of them show allegiance to Brahmins (c.f. Sela Sutta) and have Brahmin surnames like Kassapa. But what beliefs they espoused is not revealed to us.

The Pāli texts appear conversant with aspects of the Upaniṣads, especially those related to cosmogony; and to Brahmin culture more generally, particularly concern for social class and stratification; and ritual purity. Certainly the subjects of atta and anatta get considerable attention, but they are never linked to the source i.e. the Brahmins themselves. Although we can easily make the cognitive link between a teaching against ātman and a group which we know espoused views on ātman, in practice the Pāli texts never seem to make this link! Indeed the important point about ātman from the Brahmanical point of view is not its eternal nature, i.e. not the fact that it participates unchanged in rebirth per se which is the focus for Buddhists, but its identity with brahman, since it is this identity that allows one to escape saṃsara (with more space I would discuss the proposition that this was by no means universally accepted by Brahmins in the Buddha's day). In short early Buddhists, perhaps the Buddha, but certainly the Early Buddhist texts, seem to have missed the main point of the Upaniṣads. The apparent fact of increasing Brahmanical influence in Buddhism makes this even more difficult to understand. Ironically centuries later they adopted more or less the same idea in the form of the Tathāgatagarbha for precisely the same reasons the Brahmins adopted it - it explains how liberation is possible for someone mired in saṃsara. There are also echoes in such ideas as absolute and relative bodhicitta.

Contra my previous enthusiasm for this idea, I think, therefore, that we must be cautious in accepting the conjecture that Early Buddhists were conversant with the traditions represented by the Upaniṣads. My suspicion is that the teachings on anātman/anatta do not relate directly to the ideas on ātman found in the Upaniṣads; that this is simply a coincidence of terminology, rather than a coincidence of ideology, however this would require a major rethink about the relationship between Buddhism and Vedism. Another possibility is that Buddhists only came into contact with Brahmins at a much later date than we usually allow for. Alternatively the Brahmins in the Canon, especially those who joined the bhikkhu saṅgha, might not have accepted the Upaniṣads - perhaps they moved eastwards for the same reasons that people fled Europe for America in the 17th century.

We must do more work to establish the extent of that Buddhist conversance with Brahmanical thought. Ideally we would go back over the research on ātman in Buddhist texts to date, and try to determine if it does in fact relate to Brahmanical views at all, or whether we need to look to another source.


Notes

1. DN13 records various types of Brahmins: addhariya, tittiriya, chandoka, chandāva and bavhārijjhā or brahmacāriya (the ms. disagree on the last, but there is a lost Brāhmaṇa text called Bahvṛca which would coincide with Pāli bavhārijjha). The chandāva brāhmaṇas are left out of some mss. and the connections are uncertain. Tittiriya and Chandoka correspond to Sanskrit Taittirīya and Chāndogya and to the Brāhmaṇa and Upaniṣad textual traditions of the same name. Although the Bahvṛca Brāhmaṇa is lost it is linked to the Aitareya Upaniṣad. Lastly addhariya corresponds to Sanskrit adhvaryu and is associated with the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad. These correspondences are discussed in the notes to Rhys Davids translation of the Dīgha Nikāya (p.303, n.2) and in Jayatilleke Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, p.479f.
2. Cohen, Signe. Text and Authority in The Older Upaniṣads. Leiden: Brill, 2008. p.39.
3. A cursory look at the Mahāvastu suggests that it also only uses brahmā and not brahman, or uses brahma- as the first part of a karmadhāraya compound (i.e. as an adjective). The vast majority of uses are in the compounds brahmacariya and brahmacārin. Along with the name King Brahmadatta these account for perhaps 90% of occurrences in the Sanskrit text.
4. The Pāli treatment of Sanskrit nouns ending in consonants is inconsistent. Our word brahmā sometimes follows the masculine -a declension, sometimes the -u declension; with other minor variations such as a vocative singular brahme and plural brahmāno perhaps drawing on the feminine -ā declension. Other -n nouns such as rājan, and attan show similar variability.
5. I have sought to identify all nikāya texts where a Brahmin makes a profession of belief. They are:
   • DN 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 27.
     
   • MN 49, 50, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 108.
   • SN 6.3, 4; 7.1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22; 35.132, 146, 151; 42.6; 45.38; 55.12.
     
   • AN 3.54, 56, 58, 59, 60; 4.23, 185; 5.191, 192, 193; 6.38; 7.62; 10.119, 167, 168, 176, 177.
     
   • Sn 1.7, 8; 2.7; 3.4, 6, 7, 9.
     
   In each case I have studied the text and translated relevant portions of it to be sure I understand it. Interestingly many of the narratives in these texts are repeated two or three times. For instance the story of Vāseṭṭha and Bharadvaja gets three closely related, but not identical tellings at DN 13, MN 98, and Sn 3.9. I think this tells us that at least three narrative lineages are preserved in the Pāli texts. It may be possible with close study to identify stylistic features in common and tease out other related texts that have multiple recensions within the Canon.
   

None dearer than myself

Indian King and Queen from
Understanding Patio Umbrellas.

One time the Buddha was staying outside the walled city of Sāvatthī (modern day Śravasti) in the park that the merchant Anāthapiṇḍika had purchased from Prince Jeta at great price. Sāvatthī was the capital of the Kingdom of Kosala [1] and was ruled by King Pasenadi. Pasenadi was a follower of the Buddha, and so was his wife Mallikā. Mallikā was wise and her husband often asked her opinion about things.

The Ūdana relates a time when the King and Queen were discussing spiritual matters and both realised that they held none more dear than themselves - despite being in love with each other. This troubled the King and made him seek out the Buddha. Hearing about the royal discussion he spoke an inspired utterance (ūdana):

Sabbā disā anuparigamma cetasā,
Nevajjhagā piyataramattanā kvaci;
Evaṃ piyo puthu attā paresaṃ,
Tasmā na hiṃse paramattakāmoti.

Going around all the directions in imagination
[Something] more dear than one's self, is nowhere found
The self of other individuals is similarly dear
Therefore don't harm another self that is loved.[2]

Hopefully this will already have struck readers as curious. Yes, the word being translated as self is atta, or ātman in Sanskrit. And yes, it is being affirmed as existent and the thing that we all hold most dear. What a surprise this text is! What to make of it? I think we must proceed cautiously and think pragmatically.

Firstly the use of atta here is most likely simply the reflexive pronoun - "me" - but even so it suggests a kind of egotism that we associate with ātman as self in any case. Many scholars have attested to the fact that nowhere does the Buddha explicitly deny the self - he never says outright "there is no self". It would be easy to get bogged down here if we allow ourselves to drift into metaphysics. However the Buddha's point was not about whether the self exists or not, but to encourage people to examine their own experience and the apparatus of experience. He is telling people who believe in an ātman (that links not only successive lives, but moments of consciousness) to look for that persistent factor (if they must) in their experience - in mind and the senses. Although the language, context, metaphors etc all vary the Buddha's advice boils down to the same thing for everyone: examine your experience, pay attention especially to how experience arises and passes away.

The text acknowledges that we all tend to think of ourselves as the most important person. We look after ourselves first, we tend to try to meet our own needs first, and we protect ourselves above others. (I speculated as to why this is in Why do we suffer?) This is not an absolute it is a generalisation and as a contrast we might think of the selflessness of a mother protecting her child as is referred to by the Karaniya Mettā Sutta (some well known characters in the Pāli scriptures, notably Bahiya, are gored to death by cows with calves). One of my preceptors says: "we all go around thinking that other people are thinking about us, but they aren't: they are thinking about themselves".

Surely this is not a positive thing? In fact surely this self-centredness and self-preoccupation is the big problem that we all have. I think this highlights an aspect of the Buddha's teaching. He himself does not seem to have been bound by jargon and formalised ways of talking about the Dharma. The Buddha himself seems to have felt free to present the Dharma in whatever way suits his audience. He is able to talk to Brahmins as a Brahmin, to Kings as Kings, to merchants as a merchant and to a farmer as a farmer. The Buddha so embodied and epitomised the Dharma that he could present his teaching in many different ways, as long as the person ended up paying attention to the conditioned nature of experience.

In a passage in the Saṃyutta Nikāya the Buddha questions Sariputta about his attainments. He does so employing a number of different metaphors and formal ways of talking about liberation. At first Sariputta is confused, but he continues to confidently answer the Buddha's questions.

Friends, the first question that the Blessed One asked me had not been previously considered by me: thus I hesitated over it. But when the Blessed One approved of my answer, it occurred to me: 'if the Blessed One were to question me about this matter with various terms and with various methods for a whole day, for a whole day I would be about to answer him with various terms and various methods.[3]

Maybe we could say that the one who is liberated from suffering is also liberated from jargon - which makes it seem all the more attractive in my view!

So my self is most dear to me, and your self is most dear to you. With a little effort I can imagine that since you experience selfhood in the way that I do, then you experience suffering in the way that I do [4]. You experience pain, and disappointment, and grief, in the way that I do. You also experience happiness and joy, and will ultimately experience liberation in the same way as me. Although we see ourselves, experience ourselves, as separate and unique, we are in fact very much alike. All humans seem to share certain basic emotions, and to have this instinct for self preservation. And it is by seeing that we share this characteristic that the golden rule emerges quite naturally - do unto others and you would be done by. One can nitpick and find exceptions, but lets keep an overview - the golden rule is a generalisation that describes the spirit of morality, not the letter. So despite the fact that we Buddhists are fixated on self and views on self, it's important to see this text as being about empathy, not about self.

In the translation above I have rendered 'cetasā' as 'imagination'. This seemed to fit the context - what is one doing when "goes around all the directions with the mind" except using the imagination? However it also helps to make an important point about Buddhist ethics. The key skill is not self restraint, or strong will power, but the ability to imagine the other. To put oneself in their shoes. As Sangharakshita says: "the Love which is the positive form of the First Precept is no mere flabby sentiment but the vigorous expression of an imaginative identification with other living beings." [5]

This text is a good example of the pragmatism of the Buddha. He's not interested in metaphysical questions such as whether there is a self or not - this is not a question that can be finally decided. One can believe in a self, or not believe, but it's just an opinion, just a view. If you do believe in a self then the Buddha's challenge to you is to find it in experience, and by doing so to draw your attention to the conditioned nature of experience. If you do not believe in a self, then his starting point will be different, but he will still draw your attention to the conditioned nature of experience. What this says to me is that there's no point in quoting dogma at people who have different beliefs, because dogma doesn't make any difference.[6] What makes a difference is practice and experience, not doctrine. Too many Buddhists focus on orthodoxy - having the right opinion - and seem to forget that according to orthodoxy Reality is ineffable. They refuse, however to follow Wittgenstein in staying silent about that of which nothing can be said. However it is true that confusion divides the will and can make wholehearted practice difficult if not impossible.

The main point though is the nature of empathy - which is imaginative identification - and it's role in ethics. Morality does not exist in the abstract. Buddhist ethics is about how we relate to other people. This imaginative identification, which underlies ethics, can become the whole path via practices such as mettābhāvanā, which culminate in Brahmavihāra - an earlier (and often forgotten) metaphor for nibbāna.


Notes

1. Śravasti and Kosala were north and west of Magadha - in what is now northern Uttapradesh.
2. Rāja Sutta. Ud 5.1 (PTS: Ud 47); and SN 3.8 (PTS: i.75) - the two texts are identical. This is my translation. Also translated by Thanissaro at Access to Insight; and Bhikkhu Bodhi. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha. p.170-171.
3. The Kaḷāra Sutta. SN 12.32 (S ii.54). Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha. p. 570.
4. cf Dhammapada 129-130 which represents a kind of negatively phrased counterpart of this verse.
5. Sangharakshita. The Ten Pillars of Buddhism. Windhorse, 1984. p.57 (my italics)
6. I noticed that two weeks ago when I attempted a novel interpretation of selfhood (Why do we have a sense of self?), and at other times when I have expressed a new idea to Buddhists, the reply is almost always to recite Buddhist dogma at me. Not only is it boring, but it so clearly does not come from personal experience that it almost makes a mockery of the Buddha's teaching methods. We know that some Buddhist metaphysical arguments have raged for more than 1000 years with no conclusion in sight, and this should alert us to the intractability of metaphysics and dogmas.

26.9.15 Compare

tad etat preyaḥ putrāt preyo vittāt preyo 'nyasmāt sarvasmād antarataraṃ yad ayam ātmā | sa yo 'nyam ātmanaḥ priyaṃ bruvāṇaṃ brūyāt priyaṃ rotsyatītīśvaro ha tathaiva syāt | ātmānam eva priyam upāsīta | sa ya ātmānam eva priyam upāste na hāsya priyaṃ pramāyukaṃ bhavati || BU 1.4.8 ||

This innermost thing, this self (ātman)--is dearer (preyo) than a son, it is dearer than wealth, it is dearer than anything else. If a man claims that something other than his self is dear to him, and someone where to tell him that he will lose that he holds dear, that is liable to happen. So a man should only regard only his self as dear to him. When a man regards only his self as dear to him, what he holds dear will never perish. 

Why do we suffer? An alternate take

In the first of two essays last week (why do we have a sense of self?) I explored how neuroscience might explain the emergence of self-consciousness or self-awareness. In this second essay I want to use an evolutionary-biology perspective and look at how the emergence of consciousness has left us with the problem of suffering; and why the Buddhist response to suffering is so useful.

In Buddhist terms we could say that we suffer because we are selfish, especially in relationship to sensory stimuli. I've explored this in a number of blog posts recently. [1] In order to find happiness we seek to obtain, maintain and retain pleasurable experiences. These are, however, inherently impermanent and unsatisfactory so that we find life itself unsatisfactory. But why are we this way? Why evolve a faculty that only makes us miserable?

Actually as social animals, despite our sense of being independent selves, we are not inherently selfish: rather we are instinctively gregarious, cooperative and empathetic. As humans, indeed as primates, these are very much part of our genetic heritage. Although there is conflict and competition in all primate groups, they are characterised by a high level of helping each other and working together for the benefit of the troop. So why do we become selfish? I think that the problem is a result of our own success - or because our success at exploiting the environment has outstripped our genetic evolution. We are genetically adapted, to take two examples, to scarce resources (e.g. diets low in sugar and fat) and small group sizes. Pleasurable sensations help motivate us to find and assess the goodness of food, and to contribute to the social group through, for example, cooperation and social grooming; while unpleasant sensations helps us avoid spoiled food and danger for instance. In short we are programmed to experience pleasure as happiness because in the world that we are genetically adapted to this makes us more successful.

About 10,000 years ago we humans began to use our ability to think ahead to our advantage. We began to cultivate food crops rather than scavenging, and to domesticate animals which we had previously only hunted. The result was a reliable food surplus for the first time in history. It was still somewhat related to climate patterns - drought was not unknown - but we could mitigate that through irrigation. We ate well and as a result grew stronger, lived longer, and our groups began to get larger. We began to make large scale permanent dwellings - the first cities seem to date from around 9,000 years ago. Large scale cities with hundreds of thousands of residents became possible as agriculture intensified. Civilisation provides many benefits to us individually and collectively. Importantly it makes reproductive success more likely, much more likely, which is positive in evolutionary terms.

It is sometimes said that humans have stopped evolving but this is not true. [2] It is true however that our cultural and technological evolution has outstripped our genetic evolution by orders of magnitude. In most cases we live in an environment to which are not genetically adapted. This is the result of a trend that began thousands of generations ago, and means that we have to consciously adapt to our circumstances using our ability to learn and innovate. As societies become more complex, we have to be better at learning and teaching these acquired skills because our genetic adaptation is less relevant. It's a self-reinforcing cycle, and the speed of change is increasing!

In a world of generalised surplus the relationship between pleasure and happiness becomes more abstract. [3] Once the relationship becomes abstract then it is a bit like abandoning the gold standard behind money - it's difficult to know the value of anything. The result is that pleasure becomes an end in itself. Similarly any pain, or the lack of pleasure, is bad and to be avoided. This gives rise to two extremes: on the one hand we theorise about an absolutely abstract ultimate pleasure (or equally an absence of pain) which awaits us (usually) in an afterlife; on the other hand we might decide or there is no greater good than pleasure here and now. These are the two extremes of eternalism and nihilism.

As group sizes soar we not only split into increasingly disparate factions, but we become accustomed to being surrounded by strangers to whom we have no social ties - they are not related and not part of our troop and we owe them nothing. Larger social groups require new social structures with arbitrary relationships. We may never meet those who lead our community for instance, or even their deputies. I've never personally spoken to a member of parliament of any country for instance. The result is alienation and a feeling of disconnection between us and the people around us.

So we find ourselves pursuing pleasures with considerable energy and ingenuity, but surrounded and led by strangers, and over several hundred generations this becomes the cultural norm. This is our norm. It creates a deep dissonance within us - emotional as well as cognitive - because we are overstimulated on the one hand, and alienated on the other. We find ourselves plagued by diseases caused by diet such as heart disease, obesity, bowel cancer and diabetes; by drug problems, alienation and depression; and by conflict, crime, civil strife and violence. To some extent this is balanced out, though, because at the same time this dissonance has driven the production of great art, music, literature and drama as people try to give expression to something more wholesome. However we are left with a considerable and worsening problem.

Eventually some individuals began to emerge who used their powers of reflection to examine the human situation. During the so-called Axial Age (ca 800 BCE - 200 BCE) many such individuals appeared including Lao-tzu, K'ung-tzu, Isaiah, Zoroaster, Yajñavalkya, Mahāvīra, Gautama, Pythagoras, and Socrates. One thing they all seem to have done is call into question the pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself, and encourage us to relate to each other in more wholesome ways. The greatest of these individuals was Gautama, the Buddha - he saw the nature of the problem more clearly than any other human being before or since. Since the Axial age we Westerners have swung between puritanism and hedonism, from eternalism to nihilism in response to our inner dissonance without any great success in quelling it. For some time now some of us have been exploring the Buddha's middle-way, although in Britain's last census more people identified their religion as Jedi (0.7%) than as Buddhist (0.3%).

Neither hedonism nor puritanism address the underlying relationship we have with sensory stimulus, especially pleasure, so neither can resolve the fundamental dissonance, nor produce lasting happiness. The extent of suffering in the world (various 20th century genocides for instance) makes belief in God untenable for any thinking person, but the abandonment of old values in reaction to the loss of faith has had a devastating effect on society. Plurality has lead to moral relativity and reinforced the confusion over values. The sad truth is that as much as some of us find the choice and variety of contemporary life exciting and stimulating, the majority feel overwhelmed and anxious or angry (fuelled in part by a media with a vested interest in stimulating precisely these emotions). Increasingly people are closing their minds and hearts - or turning for example to drugs [4]; or the ersatz, but less challenging, community provided by the internet. [5]

So we suffer because, as a side effect of civilisation, we have an aberrant relationship with sensory stimulation. Instead of experiencing ourselves as being part of a complex web of relationships with people and the environment, we feel isolated and alienated. We are overstimulated most of the time, and continually stoke the fire because we are convinced that pleasure is happiness in a generalised abstract sense. Selfishness is a by-product of this process, not a cause - which is to turn traditional Buddhist narratives on their head. Civilisation has been a two edged sword which may suggest why periods of barbarism punctuate the history of civilisation. Buddhist practice offers the best way forward because it directly addresses these problems with practical methods and suggestions. [6]


Notes

1. Examples of recent posts on our relationship to the senses include:
   
   • In the Seen...
   • The Simile of the Chariot.
   • How is suffering created.
2. see for example 'Humans are still evolving - and it's happening faster than ever'. The Guardian 11.12.2007.
3. Here I have to make a broad generalisation which glosses over some important questions such as endemic poverty and whether the subsistence farmer is better off than the hunter gatherer etc. Certainly agriculture is at different stages around the world (I've seen farmers using all-wood ox-drawn ploughs in India for instance), but there has been a general trend towards more sophistication. My remarks are intended to apply mainly to my audience who I take to be English speaking internet users.
4. It is ironic the extent to which terrorism, supposedly the greatest threat to our society, is funded by western drug habits - certainly Middle-Eastern terrorists are funded by opiate production, and opiate production is driven by the demand for illicit opiates in the west.
5. See my comments on virtual community [19.9.08]
6. Although Buddhist practice is the overall theme of this blog I did summarise the entire Buddhist path in a way which is relevant to the current post in another two-parter back in 2005: - part one (generosity, ethics, and patience), and part two (vigour, meditation, wisdom).
   

Why do we have a sense of self?

This essay is part one of two in which I explore how contemporary ideas in neuroscience and evolutionary biology can help to make sense of the human condition and the Buddhist response to it. I begin with selfhood, the sense of being a 'self'. The notion of a self - having a self, being a self - comes in for sustained and often bitter criticism from Buddhists. I have argued in several blog posts [1] that it is not the self per se that is the problem, since without it we could not function, but selfishness or self-preoccupation. Selflessness, the opposite of selfishness, is not the absence of a self, but an attitude which values others at least as much, if not more, than one's self.

One might well ask why the very idea of selfhood - often the word 'ego' is used though it hardly fits the context - is so problematic for Buddhists? And if the sense of self is the root of all our problems, why do we even have it? Why did we evolve so unsatisfactory a faculty in the first place? I find the traditional answers to this question deeply unsatisfying and I know from talking to other Buddhists that I'm not alone in this. [2]

I've dealt with some of these questions in previous posts (see below) so here I want to look at where the sense of self comes from and why we have it. This is one area in which we need to quietly drop the tradition and find a better answer. I believe that neuroscience can provide a more satisfying answer to these kinds of questions, while leaving us the full scope of Buddhist practice as the best response the problems we encounter.

To my mind the best explanation for we we have a sense of self is put forward by Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens. Organisms, he says, are complex self-regulating mechanisms. Even a single cell is able to respond to changes in it's environment which allow it to survive better than if it were simply passive. So for instance if we are too hot we sweat, this fluid evaporates and this cools us down. This process has limits, but it enables us to tolerate a wide range of hot conditions, opening up ecological niches that might not be available otherwise. However sweating means we lose salt, and therefore we must ingest more salt. So the situation is complex and requires constant monitoring. In order to most successfully monitor our current state we need to compare a number of variables from the present (e.g. temperature, salt levels) with those in the past. Ideally we will have access to information about both the immediately preceding moment, but also to some longer term data which enables us to respond to trends in change. Even a single cell organism is able to monitor and adjust for such quantities as salinity, temperature, internal pressure, availability of food, light and dark, presence of predators, toxins, pathogens; and to do this without anything like sentience. We humans have a far bigger job. On top of each cell monitoring and regulating itself in concert with it's neighbours near and far, we have internal structures and systems such as organs; and we have an overview of the whole for maintaining things like balance, and readiness for action, and for the all important social interactions that we maintain. There is a vast, elaborate array of internal states at a variety of levels to keep track of. This is the primary function of our brain. We map all of this information in our minds - largely unconsciously - and keep track of it. This is the most rudimentary level of consciousness.

We also maintain archives of previous states: we can compare our present state to the immediate past so that we can respond to trends in the environment. If I am a little hotter now, but know that I'll be cooler again soon because it's late afternoon and the sun is getting low in the sky, then the need to cool my body is less urgent. Longer term memory enables us to understand trends and minor fluctuations better. But a consequence of this ability to compare our present state with many previous states is that we develop a sense of continuity. There is our map of our internal states now, and there are all these previous states. Demasio argues that the sense of continuity is an illusion. Consciousness is a series of discreet states of awareness, a snapshot of how we are now that can be compared with how we have been. This happens fast and often enough to give a sense of continuity - much like a film gives the illusion of motion by using 25 frames per second.

At some point in the evolution of this faculty the comparison of states begins to take in mental states. When it takes in the act of comparing then there is an element of self-awareness. We become aware of being aware, and because of the sense of continuity we have the feeling that there is a constant presence 'I' behind the observations and acting on them. However contra what most Buddhists say the 'I' naturally experiences itself as embedded in a complex web of relationships with the environment and other individuals. 'I' is not naturally alienated from these relationships. [3] Next week I'll look more at why 'I' has become alienated, and in two weeks will look at the 'I' as the basis for empathy.

This is not mere epiphenomenalism - the idea that consciousness is caused by the matter of the brain, and not the other way around - because it suggests that the demands of consciousness have driven the evolution of the brain. If anything the brain is an epiphenomenon of consciousness.

A further advance on this faculty is the ability to predict future states. This is the basis of imagination - the ability to project ourselves into the future and see if a course of action is fruitful, or if a situation is likely to be dangerous. It enables us to plan ahead, to predict the kind of impact the environment is going to have on us and to make preparations. It enables us to devise ways to overcome problems before they arise - by building a structure to keep the rain off before it comes, or planting crops that won't be harvested for several months, and to store food for winter or famine. Without the 'I' none of this would be possible.

The sense of being an embodied self, then, emerges naturally from the evolving faculties of the human organism, and it is important to our healthy functioning. However we are still left with the problem of suffering and what to do about it, which is the subject of next week's essay.

Notes

1. Links to my other blog posts on ego.
• Ego Again [20.2.09]
• Anatta in Context [24.10.08]
• The Problem of Self-preoccupation [11.3.06]
• Ego in the Spiritual Life [4.3.06]
  


2. Many people struggle to see how suffering in this life is caused by actions in a previous life for instance. Also on the one hand saṃsara is said to have no beginning, no first cause; while on the other Buddhist cosmogonical myths suggest that we have fallen from a pure state at some point in the distant past, and Mahāyāna Buddhists talk of original purity. This begs the question of how we became defiled! The Buddhist discourse on self (ātman) makes little sense, in my view, unless we understand the intellectual context of the day: for my take on this see Anatta in Context [24.10.08] So we're left with considerable ambiguity.
   
3. I looked at this in my post: The Meaning of oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ particularly with reference to Glucklich, Ariel. 1997. The End of Magic. Oxford University Press.

Ego... Again

I have written a number of times on the subject of 'ego' (Ego in the Spiritual Life, The Problem of Self-preoccupation, Anatta in Context). On the whole I seem to take a different line to mainstream Buddhist teachers. After a discussion recently I wanted to revisit this subject. Regular readers will know that for the past year or so I have been developing a particular take on the Dharma. My approach stems from my answer the the question: "What is it that arises in dependence in causes?" My answer is that the emphasis in the early Buddhist texts is that it is dharmas that arise in dependence on causes, and that in this context dharmas should be understood as mental objects, that is the mental equivalent of the objects of the physical senses. And having pursued this line of enquiry through my practice I have some faith that it is a very useful approach.

Today I was talking with a friend today who was insistent that it is "egotism, and self absorption" that causes us to make the kinds of errors that cause us suffering. I want to explore this idea again in the light of my recent thinking. I believe that this idea has it's origins in the refrain:

yad anattā taṃ netaṃ mama neso ‘haṃ asmi na meso attāti

That which is non-self, this is not mine, it is not 'I', it is not my self.

We find this phrase again and again in the suttas, but it doesn't stand alone. It is said in reference to the process of cognition or experience: the khandhas, i.e. the apparatus of experience; or about the objects of the senses, i.e. the contents of sensory experience. Sue Hamilton points out that although the lists are enumerated separately the overall emphasis is the identification with experience as a whole. It should be noted that in the Pāli texts the Buddha never categorically denies the existence of a self. So, rehearsing the argument: the Buddha explained that the apparatus and contents of experience are impermanent, and therefore unsatisfactory, and therefore non-self, and thus we are mistaken if we identify ourselves with them. I have already explained (Anatta in Context) that in my view this can, and perhaps should, be linked to the search for the Absolute (brahman) through the Self (ātman) which was a feature of many śramaṇa sects as well as most brāhmaṇa sects. The Buddha seems to have eschewed the search for absolutes of either existence or knowledge, although some later Buddhist philosophers went down the road of looking for them.

So how would I characterise the problem of egotism? Firstly we could say that egotism is self absorption; and secondly it is tied up with seeing the self as a manifestation of the Absolute. My earlier post on selflessness deals with the problem of self absorption, and I have dealt with absolutist thinking as well. Here I want to look at the perception of selfhood in relation to dharmas.

Why do we experience a self? This is a very vexed and difficult question, and one that has been addressed in many different ways with many different results depending on starting assumptions and method of argument. I like the idea put forward by Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens. Damasio proposes that the mental map of the body and it's processes underlies the sense of self. The process of maintaining the body in an optimum state requires us to be aware of how the body is now, and how it is changing. The basic question the system must answer "is the current state better or worse for survival?" When we add to this awareness of mental states, and awareness of being aware, then something like a sense of being a self contained, self aware 'being' emerges. Continuity is important in keeping the body in it's optimum state. Note that sentience or even consciousness is not required for this because even a single celled organism is capable of maintaining it's internal state as close to optimum as the environment will allow. And this is part of the reason I like Damasio. No extra entity - no homunculus or 'little person in the head' as he calls it - is necessary for this maintenance, but a sense of continuity emerges from the complexity of the task in the case of higher animals. An awareness over time, and under different conditions, gives us survival fitness. The fact that we are aware of being in relation to the past, and with reference to possible futures is what gives us a sense of personal continuity. Damasio points out that the state of awareness that underlies this is not in fact continuous itself, but is constantly being constructed and reconstructed. The upshot is that we are capable of very complex and long term behaviour in order to maximise our wellbeing. We need not go to the extreme of logical positivist inspired behaviouralism and claim that there is no such thing as mind and that there is only behaviour. We may not fully understand consciousness as we experience it, but we need not dismiss it, or dismiss those aspects which we don't understand as non-existent! My point is that self-awareness helps us survive, and gives us choices. Damasio's theory doesn't take into account our social nature for instance, and the extent to which identity and behaviour are influenced by social factors.

It's important to be clear that anyone who abandons concern for their own wellbeing, and/or acts to harm themselves is not admirable. Selflessness has it's limits - we must be concerned for our wellbeing at some level. Although there may be times when one might sacrifice one's life for another, on the whole we need to care for ourselves. Someone who does not maintain a positive sense of self may allow others to manipulate them, or to exploit them. We have to make decisions about how we behave under various circumstances. To do this we must have a sense of what is important to ourselves, a sense of personal values. There are all too many horrific examples of what happens when we abdicate moral responsibility to others. In short we must be a self, must be a strong and positive self, in order to function well as an individual and in society. Selfishness on the other hand is a lack of awareness of others. The counterpoint between self and other, and how we impact on one another is addressed in the first three of the six perfections.

Where the Buddha helps is in identifying the mistaken conclusions we come to on the basis of our self-awareness. Self awareness comes from bodily sensations, and from mental experiences and representations of sensations. The problem of egotism then boils down to coming to wrong conclusions about the nature of experience. We might seek to re-experience previous pleasures, or to experience new pleasures. I suppose we have all done this and so we know the answer to the question of whether or not it works. Pleasure can't be sustained, no experience can be. Similarly we go to extraordinary links to insulate ourselves from suffering - we may even cut ourselves off from society and community in order to do this. And again, having tried to escape suffering we know that it doesn't work. The Buddha asks us to pay attention to those doubts that come up when our attempts to organise the universe to our satisfaction fail to pay off. Rather than coming up with a yet more elaborate plan for happiness we need to stop, as far as we can, and pay attention to how experience actually works. One of the things that I've noticed is how little control I have over what goes on around me - I can't stop myself from having experiences. Some are pleasant, some are not, most are kind of neutral, but the flow of experience is never ending, except perhaps in the deepest stages of sleep. Even in the very attenuated and refined experience of meditation there is experience - which was the subject of my post on Communicating the Dharma.

So for me it is not that helpful to characterise our fundamental problem in terms of ego, or egotism. Egotism is an effect not a cause. It is an effect of a mistaken relationship to our moment to moment experience. And to my mind the place to attack the problem is at the root. Indeed this is a common Buddhist metaphor - don't muck about pruning the tree of craving, pull out the roots of it! I don't think we address being self-referential if we don't address the nature of the experience of self, and this draws ironically us away from the personal. I'm not likely to enjoy having someone trying to undermine my sense of self, or tell me that my self is bad. However I can see the logic of the error in judgement with relation to the senses, and I'm drawn to trying to deal with this problem.

In fact although the rhetoric is quite different the methods are more or less the same: ethics and meditation. But so often an attack on ego has a ring of unkindness about it. It's as though we are being blamed for causing the problem in the first place. I recall a well known Zen Roshi who wrote about suicide that it is fundamentally a selfish and egotistical act! I was struck by the insensitivity of this so-called 'master'! I believe that if they really understood the choice that no one would choose suffering, or that in good circumstances anyone would see suicide as a solution to their problems. We suffer through ignorance not through informed choice, and sometimes that suffering can feel unbearable. So blame is hardly appropriate.

Similarly I don't think that examining cause and effect in the world is necessarily going to help much, although more than one of my colleagues have argued against me on this point. Sure, gravity makes things fall, for instance, and erosion will eventually wear away a mountain. The objects of experience do change if we wait long enough. But if the problem at it's root is our moment to moment relationship to experience, and if our experience is changing in each moment, then oughtn't we to look at the experience rather than the object of experience for insight? Another way of saying it might be to examine statements like "no thing arises" - this is common in Mahāyāna circles and is recorded in the first line of the Arapacana acrostic. In which sphere is this true? I think this is a straightforward proposition if we are talking about the realm of experience; but it is nonsensical if we are focussing on the objects of experience. And unfortunately many Buddhists end up saying nonsensical things about the objective pole of experience!

The problem is not ego in relation to the objects of experience, not even ego per se, it is the very nature of experience itself that is the root of our problems. This is where we can make a real difference.

Anatta in Context

In comments to some other posts I discussed the context of the idea of anatta (Sanskrit anātman) and I thought it might be useful to give it more prominence. Anatta is usually translated as no-self, or as non-self. Misleadingly it is often rendered as egolessness - I'll get to why this is a problem shortly.

Anatta is the third of the tilakkhaṇā or three marks. In the Dhammapada 279 it says that sabbe dhammā anatta - All dhammas are non-self. The order of presentation of the lakkhanas is significant. In fact it is helpful to work through them backwards. We might ask for instance why are all dhammas anatta? They are anatta because of the second lakkhana - dukkha. Dhp 278 says in fact that sabbe saṅkhārā dukkha - all compounds are suffering.

Backtracking a little we need to look at what atta or ātman is. Ātman, using Sanskrit because it fits the context, is a concept introduced by the philosophers associated with the Upaniṣads. It was introduced not that long before the Buddha and was a distinct move away from the Vedic religion which had revolved around sacrifices to gods, and bonds between this world and the cosmos known as bandhu. It was also associated with a new idea about reincarnation - Joanna Jurevich has shown that reincarnation in a nascent form is, contrary to popular opinion, present in the Ṛgveda. However the Upaniṣads made reincarnation dependent on the actions of the person, on their carrying out of their religious duties and ceremonies. Ātman here was the immanent aspect of godhood - brahman. Not to be confused with the masculine personification of godhead Brahmā. Brahman was an abstract absolute transcendental principle. However the Upaniṣads equate ātman and brahman. The latter idea became highly influential in the popular form of Hinduism known as Avaita-Vedanta. The immmanent and transcendent aspects of godhead were not two. Brahman was said to have only three attributes (trilakṣaṇa) : satcitānanda - being, consciousness, and bliss. Ātman seems to have been the most influential religious idea in India at the time the Buddha was born. One's attitude to ātman - to the nature of selfhood as immanent godhood - was what defined many religious discussions, just as the existence and influence of the Christian God define religious discourse in the present.

Returning to the Buddhist anatta idea we can see that where there is an experience of dukkha - suffering, misery, diappointment, grief, etc, then that is not blissful. What is not blissful is not, ipso facto, ātman. Now the Buddha says that all compounded experiences are disappointing. The Buddha seems to have considered all experiences associated with the senses or the mind, which he considered as being synonymous with all unenlightened experience, as being disappointing (dukkha). Hence his constant refrain that the senses and the cognitive apparatus are anatta - not the ātman.

Note also that the Buddha taught that cittā - consciousness - arises in dependence on contact between a sense organ and a sense object. Because of this we must consider all sense experience as compounded or complex. More crucially cittā ceases when the contact ceases. Now if consciousness (cit) is a dependent product of contact, then brahman in it's cit aspect is conditioned! This is a major blow against the Upaniṣadic philosophy that doesn't get much attention these days because Buddhists are largely ignorant of that philosophy and fail to see the relevance of it.

We need to briefly mention that the reason that the Buddha said sabbe saṅkhārā dukkha, was because he had already observed in Dhp 277 that sabbe saṅkhārā anicca. Compounds are compounded of dhammas - and these are the objects of mano, the mind, and therefore saṅkhārā is more or less synonymous with cittā when used in this sense. Because we fail to properly see dhammas as ephemeral and fleeting (see also Language and Discrimination) we find all of our experiences disappointing. (The argument for unpleasent dhammas is more complex, but it also amounts to disappointment).

So in forward order: experiences are fleeting; because we don't get this at a fundamental level we find experiences disappointing; and because experience is not blissful it cannot be ātman. So nothing related to the body, senses, or mind - the apparatus of experience - can be the ātman. This is the proper context for the idea, and is the only context where it really makes sense.

Now for a variety of reasons, most of which relate to later Buddhist failure to take interest in the context the Buddha was operating it, the doctrine became decontextualized. Buddhists began to make new explanations for what the Buddha meant by anatta. One of the most prominent became that the Buddha taught that we have no self. There is apparently, and here I rely on Sue Hamilton, no explicit denial of self per se in the Pali Canon. What the Buddha denies is that any aspect of our experience is ātman in the sense of immanent godhood. The Buddha is trying to reframe the religious discourse away from ātman and towards a consideration of the existential experiential situation - he repeatedly refused to answer metaphysical questions and responded that he taught "suffering, the cause, the end and the way to end suffering".

A popular version of this corruption is that the Buddha taught something called "egolessness". Now this is problematic in several ways. The term ego is introduced by Freud's English translators - he called the psychic function in question "ich". Using Latin led to a reification of the term in popular usage - it moves from being an abstract function, to being a concrete part of the person. One can now speak of "having an ego", for instance, as though ego is a "thing". One can have too much ego, or perhaps too little. This is a dismal error that flies in the face of Buddhist approaches too being as process as well as what is intended in psychological jargon.

Buddhists take this one step further by making the ego wholeheartedly bad, and proposing that all people should be egoless. A person with no ego would be incapable of communication or learning, or any kind of interaction. Egolessness would be disastrous for the individual. I've expounded this at length in the past. Ātman as the immanent godhood is nothing at all to do with the ordinary sense of self. The Buddha even at one point suggests that a sense of self is essential for the development of empathy! I've suggested that the English word "selfless" is much more in keeping with the Buddhist concept - it means not, someone with no self, but someone who is altruistic! A final irony is that Buddhists who promote egolessness are often the same ones who are proponents of the doctrine of tathāgatagarbha (literally "the matrix of one who is like that") - or Buddha nature. Now some of the tathāgatagarbha literature equates the tathāgatagarbha with ātman (see for instance Williams, p.98-9). So while treating anatta as egolessness, they promote the idea of an intrinsic immanent Buddhahood which is like the ātman. So we're basically back to Vedantic eternalism at this point, the very kind of idea which anatta was designed to critique.

The idea of anatta is often elevated to being "the doctrine of anatta". I don't think it was ever intended as a stand alone doctrine. It seems more likely that it required not only a Buddhist context, but the Vedantic context against which it was being offered as a polemic, in order to make sense. So on the whole it does not make sense in the present. Anatta was part, and only a part, of a Buddhist demolition Vedantic arguments which are not relevant in the modern west, though it may still be relevant in India. What we need at present is a Buddhist critique of the Christian idea of creation, and the scientific idea of evolution. Both tend to draw attention away from the existential situation and from the problems associated with the apparatus of experience - and therefore neither are likely to be helpful in the Buddhist Enlightenment project. Perhaps a subject for a future rave...


Bibliography

• Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism : a new approach. The I of the beholder. Richmond, Surrey : Curzon.
• Williams, P. 1989. Mahāyāna Buddhism : the doctrinal foundations. 1st ed. London : Routledge.

The Problem of Self-preoccupation

Last week I wrote that self-preoccupation was something that keeps us from happiness. I'd like to go into this a bit more this week. I translated sakkaaya-ditthi as self-preoccupation. The literal translation is personality-views, or as one translator puts it, self-identify views . These are views like "I exist, I do not exist, I will exist in the future, I will not exist in the future, etc". The common feature of all of these are that they are pre-occupied with self. I've already spelled out one route away from self-preoccupation in my essay on the six-perfections. But why is self-preoccupation is problematic?

I live with six other Buddhist men in a large house in Cambridge, UK. One evening a few weeks ago we had our usual meal together, and then moved onto our weekly Wednesday business meeting. After one fairly straight-forward item we found ourselves navigating a bit of a minefield as three issues in a row were brought up which people felt uneasy or upset about. I find this stuff really difficult. I find conflict distressing, and the meeting was very uncomfortable for me. In reflecting on the best part of an hour of difficult communications, in what is typically a very harmonious household, one thing became clear: that personal preferences were at the heart of our difficulties. We all, me included, were holding out for what we wanted, for what made us feel comfortable. Often this is not a problem but on this night what we wanted did not coincide, what we wanted was in conflict with what the others wanted.

There is a powerful story of harmony in the Pali Canon called the Culagosinga Sutta. In this story three Buddhists live a very simple life together in a wood. They own very little, but what they do have is shared between them. They live "in concord, with mutual appreciation, without disputing, blending like milk and water, viewing each other with kindly eyes". [Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation] Each man makes sure that his friends' needs are met before he sees to himself. They practice acts of loving kindness with body, speech and mind, both in public and in private. And how is this concord achieved? Each one puts aside his own wishes and does what they the others wish to do. This is not too difficult for these men however because they share a spiritual vision and that guides all of their actions in anycase.

The strongest experience of harmony in my life so far was on my ordination retreat - four months in the mountains in Spain. A very regimented life. I struggled with it to be honest, but the level of harmony amongst us was remarkable because we were all giving up our preferences. It was a period of letting go of the familiar, and learning to live with what was: no running hot water for instance, or snakes slithering through the undergrowth, or blazing hot sun, or the absence of our favourite breakfast cereal. It was different for each of us, but grittily real. We also seemed very aware of the needs and wants of others. I recall feeling incredibly grateful to my friend Shantaka who regularly placed a cup of (decaf) coffee in front of me at breakfast, without my having to ask. To be seen and responded to in this kind of way is really delightful. I often felt a sense of chagrin at my own selfishness during the four months, and I came away with a resolution to be more helpful to others.

It's interesting to sit and hold these two experiences: one of discord, and the other of harmony, and reflecting on them in the light of the ideal portrayed in the Culagosinga Sutta. On the one hand I was largely self-preoccupied and that led to a painful situation. On the other I was willing to give up my self-preoccupation for the greater good and found that liberating. I once asked one of my mentors about the problem that we all face of the gap between our aspirations and how we actually behave. He told me that the way to bring them closer is through reflection. Well, I'm still reflecting, but I do find myself letting go of some of the small things and being happier as a result.

Ego in the Spiritual Life

* note that I've used some diacritics in this essay and to see them properly you need to use a Unicode font.

self portrait

I'm a bit of a heretic when it comes to ego. A lot of Buddhists will tell you that ego is the root of all evil. This is simplistic, and, in the modern west, dangerously so. I like to oppose that idea by saying: "ego is absolutely essential in the spiritual life!"

Ego as a term came into being when Freud was translated into English in 1923. Freud himself used the German 'ich' which would normally be translated simply as 'I'. The use of Latin words to translate Freud made it seem that ego had the same sort of status as say metatarsus. Ego, however, is just an idea, a way of talking about a function of the psyche rather than any kind of actually existing entity.

The function Freud was referring to is rather complex. But simplistically it refers to our sense of selfhood. This sense of selfhood forms the basis for how we interact with the world. All human beings pass through a series of reasonably well defined developmental stages. Freud is often, perhaps unfairly, associated with a particular phase of development which he identified - the anal phase. We may disagree over the specifics of the stages, and there have been many models, but it is quite apparent that human beings develop over time, and that infants develop into mature individuals. These developments affect every aspect of the individual, although some may be perceived as being primary mental, and some primarily physical.

Our sense of selfhood appears quite early - around two years old. We become self-aware to some degree long before our bodies are fully developed. A little bit later, around age 3 or 4, comes our sense of other people as separate individuals. This is normal human development. If we fail to develop a sense of selfhood, then none of the rest of our development can proceed. Similarly if we do not develop a sense of people as separate individuals, then we cannot relate to them as people - they are either treated as extensions of our self, or not as people at all. Again all subsequent development is impeded by this lack. Without an ego, without the self-awareness function of the psyche we do not develop into fully functioning human beings.

It's common to hear someone who is bragging, or insistent on getting their own way, described as having a "big ego". However when I started thinking about this I realised that it’s not a matter of having too much ego. The reason people act to reinforce their sense of self is because they are insecure, they doubt their own existence as a self. What they need is not less ego, but more! R.D. Laing is rather out of fashion these days as the trends of treating emotional and behavioural oddities have moved towards chemical approaches. However he coined a very useful phrase: ontological security. By which he means a well defined sense of oursleves as concretely existing. In his book, The Divided Self, he argues that schizophrenia can be seen, in part at least, as an adaptive response from someone who lacks a sufficiently strong sense of ontological security. I find much to recommend this view.

But Buddhism says that the idea of self is false, and that self is at the root of craving and therefore the whole problem of evil in the world. Well sort of. The arguments over what Buddhist texts say about 'self', or indeed what the word itself means, fill many books. Scholars have come to a range of conclusions over what various schools of Buddhism have said about the existence of a self. The Pali texts, from my reading, seem to focus more on the preoccupations of selfhood (sakkāya-ditthi), rather than selfhood per se. And this makes sense to me, because if the absence of ego is a debilitating developmental problem, and the goal of Buddhism is the absence of ego, then Buddhism is creating a lot of vegetables! It is true that the Buddha said that phenomena lack an unchanging essence, but this statement is attacking the Upanishadic idea of a soul (ātta) which exists independently of mind and body, and is permanent and unchanging. I don't think that this is the same thing as a sense of selfhood in the sense that I am talking about it.

The approach of some Buddhists to feelings of insecurity regards selfhood, is to attack the ego with even more vigour. After all this is what the masters in the old stories do. But I think we are different in crucial ways from many of the great spiritual heros of the past. I think many of us have been held in arrested states of development. Our societies tend to encourage infantile behaviour, reward it even. Most of us have some way to go before our ego’s are strong enough to withstand the rigours of all-out spiritual practice. Paradoxically we must have a strong sense of self in order to contemplate a world in which we are not the most important being. If you tell someone with poor self-esteem that they have to kill off their ego, then you are asking for trouble.

I said earlier that our sense of other people as people is dependent on our sense of selfhood. That the early Buddhists knew this is shown by a verse in the Pāli Canon which suggests that by reflecting that all beings regard their sense of self just as preciously as we regard our own, we can develop the empathy which stops us harming them. [Samyutta Nikāya 3,8 (8) ] It is a rare passage to be sure, but it neither denies selfhood, nor demonises it.

There is no doubt that if we are self-preoccupied then it will be hard to be really happy. Getting caught up in the preoccupations of self does tend to be painful. However it doesn't seem practical to me to treat self-preoccupation by trying to annihilate any sense of self. It's interesting that in English we have the adjective selfless, which doesn’t mean 'lacking a self', but 'concerned for the welfare of others', or 'not being self-preoccupied'. Selflessness then need not say anything about whether or not we have a self, or an ego, but it does point to an attitude which seeks the benefit of others. Self-preoccupation, as I argued in my essays on the six perfections, is best tackled by becoming aware of other people as people. And for that we need to have a sense of selfhood.

So: ego is absolutely essential in the spiritual life!



See also these other Raves on the subject of Ego.

• The Problem of Self-preoccupation.
• Anatta in context.
• Ego... Again.