What I am, that I am forever. But in puthujjana experience asmimana or conceit “I am” is inseparable with self-image which is derived from self-identificaton with impermanent things. This is a very serious existential contradiction*, and Dhamma points out to him that he is a victim of wrong self-identificaton.
And just like the Four Noble Truths are one structure, so one who sees one of them, sees all the Truths, impermanence, dependently arisen nature of things and anatta are one structure, who sees impermanence sees dependent arising and anatta.
Existence itself… involves a self-contradiction. Kierkegaard (CUP , p. 84)
Nanavira Thera:
And where does the Buddha’s Teaching come in? If we understand the ‘eternal’ (which for Kierkegaard is ultimately God—i.e. the soul that is part of God) as the ‘subject’ or ‘self’, and ‘that which becomes’ as the quite evidently impermanent ‘objects’ in the world (which is also K.’s meaning), the position becomes clear. What we call the ‘self’ is a certain characteristic of all experience, that seems to be eternal. It is quite obvious that for all men the reality and permanence of their selves, ‘I’, is taken absolutely for granted; and the discrepancy that K. speaks of is simply that between my ‘self’ (which I automatically presume to be permanent) and the only too manifestly impermanent ‘things’ in the world that ‘I’ strive to possess. The eternal ‘subject’ strives to possess the temporal ‘object’, and the situation is at once both comic and tragic—comic, because something temporal cannot be possessed eternally, and tragic, because the eternal cannot desist from making the futile attempt to possess the temporal eternally. This tragi-comedy is suffering (dukkha) in its profoundest sense. And it is release from this that the Buddha teaches. How? By pointing out that, contrary to our natural assumption (which supposes that the subject ‘I’ would still continue to exist even if there were no objects at all), the existence of the subject depends upon the existence of the object; and since the object is manifestly impermanent, the subject must be no less so. And once the presumed-eternal subject is seen to be no less temporal than the object, the discrepancy between the eternal and the temporal disappears (in four stages—sotàpatti, sakadāgāmitā, anāgā-mitā, and arahatta); and with the disappearance of the discrepancy the two categories of ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ also disappear. The arahat neither laughs nor weeps; and that is the end of suffering (except, of course, for bodily pain, which only ceases when the body finally breaks up).
In this way you may see the progressive advance from the thoughtlessness of immediacy (either childish amusement, which refuses to take the tragic seriously, or pompous earnestness, which refuses to take the comic humorously) to the awareness of reflexion (where the tragic and the comic are seen to be reciprocal, and each is given its due), and from the awareness of reflexion (which is the limit of the puthujjana’s philosophy) to full realization of the ariya dhamma (where both tragic and comic finally vanish, never again to return). L 27
It is the merit of the existentialist philosophers that they do in fact bring the problem to light in this way. What happens is this: the thinker examines and describes his own thinking in an act of reflexion, obstinately refusing to tolerate non-identities, contradictions, and excluded middles; at a certain point he comes up against a contradiction that he cannot resolve and that appears to be inherent in his very act of thinking. This contradiction is the existence of the thinker himself (as subject).
You will find this contradiction illustrated in the passage from Camus in Nibbàna [a], but it is more concisely presented in the later part of the Mahà Nidàna Suttanta (D. 15: ii,66-8), where the Buddha says that a man who identifies his ‘self’ with feeling should be asked which kind of feeling, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, he regards as his ‘self’. The man cannot identify his ‘self’ with all three kinds of feeling at once, since only one of the three kinds is present at a time: if he does make this identification, therefore, he must do it with the three different kinds of feeling in succession. His ‘self’, of course, he takes for granted as self-identical—‘A is A’—that is to say as the same ‘self’ on each occasion. This he proceeds to identify in turn with the three different feelings: B, C, and D. A is therefore both B and C (not to mention D); and C, being different from B, is not B: so A is both B and not B—a violation of the Law of Contradiction. But whether or not it is with feeling that the puthujjana is identifying his ‘self’, he is always identifying it with something—and it is a different something on each occasion. The puthujjana takes his existence for granted—cogito ergo sum (which, as Sartre says, is apodictic reflexive evidence of the thinker’s existence)—and is in a perpetual state of contradiction.
L 75 [L. 75 | 82] 15 December 1963 - Ñāṇavīra Thera Dhamma Page
[a] (‘Of whom and of what in fact can I say “I know about that!” This heart in me, I can experience it and I conclude that it exists. This world, I can touch it and I conclude again that it exists. All my knowledge stops there, and the rest is construction. For if I try to grasp this self of which I am assured, if I try to define it and to sum it up, it is no more than a liquid that flows between my fingers. I can depict one by one all the faces that it can assume; all those given it, too, by this education, this origin, this boldness or these silences, this grandeur or this vileness. But one cannot add up faces. This same heart which is mine will ever remain for me undefinable. Between the certainty that I have of my existence and the content that I strive to give to this assur-ance, the gap will never be filled. Always shall I be a stranger to myself.
…Here, again, are trees and I know their roughness, water and I experience its savour. This scent of grass and of stars, night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes, - how shall I deny this world whose power and forces I experi-ence? Yet all the science of this earth will give me nothing that can assure me that this world is mine.’) A more lucid account by a puthujjana of his own predicament could scarcely be desired. This situation cannot be tran-scended so long as what appears to be one’s ‘self’ is accepted at its face value: ‘this self of which I am assured’, ‘this same heart which is mine’. The paradox (Marcel would speak of a mystery: a problem that encroaches on its own data)—the paradox,
(His) very self is not (his) self’s.
(More freely: He himself is not his own.)
Dhammapada v,3 <Dh.62>), must be resolved.
