I think that suttas basically say that whatever is impermanent is unsatisfacory, because it cannot provide lasting satisfaction. Seeing this, one doesn’t crave or cling, which leads to the cessation of suffering (Second Noble Truth).
Not seeing this is equivalent to ignorance, which means DO continues.
Anatta seems to me like a deeper teaching, which points to appropriation and self-view as an underlying cause of suffering.
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Hello Martin. While I do not disagree with what you wrote above, I have the impression @Thito is providing an additional perspective, as found in SN 22.59 below:
“Mendicants, form is not-self.
“Rūpaṁ, bhikkhave, anattā.
For if form were self, it wouldn’t lead to affliction. And you could compel form:
Rūpañca hidaṁ, bhikkhave, attā abhavissa, nayidaṁ rūpaṁ ābādhāya saṁvatteyya, labbhetha ca rūpe:
‘May my form be like this! May it not be like that!’
‘evaṁ me rūpaṁ hotu, evaṁ me rūpaṁ mā ahosī’ti.
But because form is not-self, it leads to affliction. And you can’t compel form:
Yasmā ca kho, bhikkhave, rūpaṁ anattā, tasmā rūpaṁ ābādhāya saṁvattati, na ca labbhati rūpe:
‘May my form be like this! May it not be like that!’
‘evaṁ me rūpaṁ hotu, evaṁ me rūpaṁ mā ahosī’ti.
SN 22.59
ābādha
- affliction, pain, distress; sickness, disease
I prefer ‘ābādha’ translated as ‘sickness’ or ‘disease’ rather than ‘affliction’ because ‘affliction’ sounds too mental, i.e., like ‘distress’. 
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Hello, I am just new to this forum and this is my first post (by way of reply). Thank you for this post. Perception and the sense gates, and specifically, what is in the Samyutta Nikaya in relation to this has been on my mind for some time now, and I am thankful to be able to participate in this discussion, even if I am not very clear with my first post.
I have to say I think “non-self” is perhaps better than not-self, or “empty of self” also seems fine to me.
“Empty” (sunya) is a very madhyamika thing, but I do think the term empty is used in the Samyutta Nikaya. Somewhere. I remember reading that English word “empty” to translate for something in Pali, in a sutta in the SN, but would have to search around for the sutta that I was reading at the time it came up. I do rely upon the sutta in SuttaCentral however.
This is an interesting topic to me, because I am actually working on close understanding of perception in the Samyutta Nikaya. I am looking at things like eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, etc. and the gratification, drawback and release from sense-consciousness.
There is considerable discussion in the SN on formation of identity views that come from grasping sense-consciousness, which in its first formation is affective (vedana) is it not?
Perception is described as one of the four fuels, because roughly if someone were to me toward a bed of hot coals, I would recoil and thrash and do everything I could to get the heck away from that, because I have a sense of self, and self preservation, and knowledge of pain, and who would want that? I think in this sutta about perception as a fuel, it is described as that which maintains and helps a person.
The thrashing and recoiling might be useless, nonetheless, the perception of what’s going to happen to me if I am dragged into a bed of burning coals, is what it is. It is awareness of “things as they are.”
For me, if I had a friend ask me about non-self, I might say to them, "well what it means is that you are not subjectively attached to your perceptions. You aren’t distanced, and unmoved in the way Kantian aesthetics might encourage you to be, but you aren’t driven by accumulating more and more layers of self-identification. Such as, “This isn’t supposed to happen to me. Why is this happening to me?”
Myself, simply because of my training and background, in which I speak constantly about all these different Western approaches as containing a “theory of self,” (an easy example … is it Cartesian theory of self in which “spectator” is deeply embedded), I tend to refer to the five aggregates, sense gates, etc. as critical components in an early Buddhist understanding, or theory, of the self.
That puts me on a field of understanding with my peers who are looking at all these Western theories of self, and allows me to say, "and well, Buddhist philosophy would (and does) challenge all of those as being “atmavada” - essentialism, substance philosophy, rationalism (the logos of Christian scholasticism), etc.
Myself, I am also looking at the Taittirīya Upanishad - the five kosas as locus classicus for the five aggregates - so I appreciate mention of the Upanishads in this thread. Thank you. I think this is a really interesting discussion. And just to summarize … in learning to try and speak with highly educated Westerners coming from diverse philosophical perspectives, I had to fall back on “non-self” as the plainest and most coherent way of expressing for them what Buddhist philosophy is trying to get at.
Regards, Megan
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Yes, it’s interesting to compare the 5 koshas of the Upanishads with the 5 aggregates. The obvious difference is that the aggregates aren’t sheaths for an Atman. There is something “beneath” the koshas, but nothing “beneath” the aggregates.
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Hi Martin,
Yes, definitely.
Megan
Here’s a question:
Was the atman of the Upanishads capable or owning anything? If not, wouldn’t rendering anatta as “without owner” still leave room for the possibility of self?
My understanding is that the Buddha taught that there is no permanent being or essence behind the curtain of experience. That includes even the atman of the Upanishads. So if there is simply not a self, that covers all of the owning, belonging to, being a part of. Empty is empty. As Charles Patton wrote:
The atman was wrong view according to the Buddha, so he plugged all of the holes. I think not-self may go farther than without owner, as without owner was a part of defining what not-self covers.
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I’d say it’s definitely an implied meaning, yes. Atta owes the five aggregates, results of past actions, and so forth. But it does other things, too. It’s one those cases in which a translator works out whether to use a word in English that covers the same bases as the Indic word or to translate it closer to the functional meaning it has in particular passages.
It’s like red onions. Shouldn’t they actually be called violet onions or purple onions? Well, if the reader doesn’t actually know that a red onion is violet, maybe so. “Red” is used for a whole range of colors, and sometimes it really does mean “any of those colors.” In everyday use, though, we often used it to mean a particular color. Lots of words function in that way.
So, then, the meta-translation challenge is to establish a policy for how to handle that. Maybe in some passages, atta seems to mean an owner of something like the aggregates or senses. Is it wrong to translate it that way? No, but readers may throw up some static because, like calling red onions purple, it may sound strange to them. Strictly speaking, though, it’s just a matter of translation method: Whether to prioritize function meanings or not.
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I think this is true in theory, but in practice it may be a little different. The reason is that the focus remains on the readers who are not yet familiar with the Buddha’s teaching and for whom the translation is designed to provide an immediate grasp of the essence. Those readers would not be able to see that ‘not-self’ may be ultimately more accurate until they find a passage which says
so such readers would in my opinion be more benefitted by a rendering that would give them an immediate grasp of the essence rather than a rendering which is in theory more accurate but in practice more obscure.
What may need to be examined though is whether the above quoted passages would be enough for the recurring but still not completely familiar readers to understand that ‘red’ is also meant to include some shades of purple, that is to say that ‘without-owner’ is also meant to be a short-hand for ‘not an owner’, ‘not belonging to an owner’, ‘not part of an owner’, ‘no owner being a part of it’.
I would think that whether we choose ‘not-self’ or ‘without-owner’, we have in both cases to rely on the ability of the reader to grasp the meaning behind the words. ‘Not-self’ seems to benefit more experienced readers than first-timers, and if I have to choose I would rather accommodate the latter.
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I am scratching my head here wondering why the Buddha in his own words, chose to use “not-self” instead of “without owner”? We know that “without owner” comes from completely different Pali words than anatta.
The Buddha with his power of a Buddha did not know that “not-self” is worse than “without owner” and we need to wait 2500 years to correct him for the good of beginners? Who are we to attempt such action?
I am not sure about others but I don’t think “anatta” is suitable for beginner. Only arahant can fully grasp “anatta” while an anāgāmī still has “I am”.
I would say because ‘atta’ was a well known theory back then and people immediately grasped the meaning by antithesis
The issue here is that one is easy to understand after translation while the other remains obscure. The reason for this is that after 2,500 years, the cultural context has changed and nowadays people do not have the same references in mind while listening to/reading the teachings as they had back then.
This is how you choose to interpret this discussion, but you may need to understand that the cultural context has changed and so did the audience. Refusal to adapt the message to the audience will be detrimental to the audience.
With deep respect for the Saṅgha’s member, although I do not agree with your points, I will not go further into this discussion.
My last suggestion is: This is not a small matter and should be discussed instead in front of the senior monastics for guidance.
On the contrary, the primary thesis of the Upanishads is precisely that “consciousness is the self”. And it is this thesis that is directly opposed by the Buddha’s teachings. See, eg. MN 38.
Be careful about asking for textual evidence in a particular form. I too would like to see a lengthy debate between the Buddha and an Upanishadic philosopher on this topic. But when it comes to ancient texts, we just have what we have. It’s important to approach them with an ear to listen, not to make demands.
What we do know is that whenever the Buddha talks about not-self, he phrases it precisely to indicate that he opposes the Upanishadic view: tad tvam asi becomes n’eso’ham’asmi.
This is not the concern of a translator. The average French reader has not heard of the Neranjara River, but we do not say that the Buddha was sitting beside the Seine.
A translator is not a teacher, and it is not our place to reinterpret and remake the concepts and ideas of the suttas into a form that we believe will be palatable for our readers. That is the job of a Dhamma teacher, who will take the translation and explain it. But the Dhamma teacher cannot do their job properly if the Suttas have already been interpreted in a way that strips essential context and meaning. The task of a translator is to express in our language the ideas and meanings of the original text. That’s all.
The funny thing is that, many years ago, I would have argued exactly the way you do now. But gradually, little by little, I learned to appreciate the depth and meaning of the Buddha’s teaching in its historical context. I realized that many of the ideas that I held, such as that “not-self” was primarily a psychological notion, were conditioned by what I had heard and read from 20th century teachers. It took me a long time, with much reflection and study, to unpick these assumptions in myself.
One of the reasons that I believe this is important is that, IMHO, the psychological application of the doctrine of not-self is often misleading and even harmful. It is easily latched on to by those with disorders of identity, who lack a coherent and healthy integrated sense of themselves, and it becomes a justification for dissociation. Paradoxically, this leads to extreme forms of narcissism, where a person’s egoistic attachments become divorced from the professed doctrine of not-self. This is especially apparent among young and/or emotionally immature men, who are attracted by the doctrine of not-self because it appears intellectual, hard-core, and nihilistic. This is far from a marginal concern, as several popular Dhamma teachers manifest obvious narcissism and delusionality while purporting to explain not-self, sometimes even claiming to be arahants.
Leave aside the question of the proper role of a translator. And leave aside too the question of whether a philosophical interpretation of not-self is more or less comprehensible than a psychological one. I would a thousand times rather a casual reader come away from their first sutta thinking, “What was that about?” than have them think, “Ahh yes, now I understand not-self.” These are deep matters, and they should appear deep.
Not at all! Healthy debate is essential. 
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Exactly. I think @Martin may be confusing the Upanishads with the later vedantists, shaivists, etc who, in response to the Buddhist critiques, attempted to make distinctions between personal consciousness and the “true” self.
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Though the “pure consciousness” of the Upanishads is far removed from sense-consciousness in the suttas, which is transient and dependent arising.
I’d suggest that sutta vinnana is comparable to the manomaya sheath, but not to the Atman.
Anyway, the important difference is that there is something “inside” the koshas, but nothing inside the aggregates.
Anatta negates Atman.
I think you could argue that the Buddha took neti-neti to its logical conclusion.
I think that the meaning of anatta must at least be like this that it, just like anicca and dukkha, leads to dispassion in the context of contemplation. To weaken the thirst, hunger, grasping. But i also think it has a more philosophical meaning.
I think its meaning, in this context of contemplation, might be not really different from that standard formula: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
The commentaries explain that the opposites:
‘this is mine’ is induced by craving
‘this I am’ is induced by conceit
‘this is my self’ is because of wrong view.
Bodhi says in MN, note 257: These three - craving, conceit, and views - are called the three obsessions
(gaha). They are also the mainsprings behind conceiving (MN 1) and mental proliferation (MN 18).
I do not think the purpose of anatta or this formula is to get involved in a Quest for Identiy. Because the risk is that one keeps conceiving a Me and keeps trying to find an answer in an psychological intellectual way. One get stuck in views of self (MN2). In fact one gets stuck in conceiving. Conceiving is Mara says a sutta.
I do not believe this means there is no answer but we must abandan that route of conceiving not to get stuck to any fabricated answer.
Regarding anatta ‘not-self’, it will be better to see how various expressions presented in SN/SA suttas for the meaning of anatta (pp. 57-60):
Pages 55-60 from The Fundamental Teachings of Early Buddhism Choong Mun-keat 2000.pdf (447.3 KB)
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AN,Bodhi, note 1823 refers to AN-commentary and says: “When the characteristic of impermanence is seen, the characteristic of non-self, is seen”. Among the three characteristics, when one is seen, the other two are also seen. Thus it is said: 'When one perceives impermanence, the perception of non-self is stabilized. …“the perception of non-self is stabilized (anattasanna santhati): the perception of non-self consists in the contemplation of non-self, which occurs thus: ‘All phenomena are non-self’ because they are coreless; because we have no mastery over them; and because they are alien, void, hollow, and empty. This perception is stabilized, firmly established in the mind.”
Quit a challenge to translate anatta into 1 English word which immediately relates to all these meanings.
I think it’s conditionality (idappaccayata) which underlies anicca and anatta. It results in instability.
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That is literally the whole point. What the brahmins mistakenly assume to be a “pure consciousness” is, when seen in accordance with truth, conditioned and impermanent.
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I use ‘without intrinsic essence’.
I believe -atta’s rendering as ‘self’ is a secularist reaction to its previous rendering as ‘soul’.
These are both imperfect renderings of the connotations of atta as a permanent essence of some sort that transmigrates between lifetimes. I believe this understanding of atta was common in the Buddha’s time.
My understanding is that the a- prefix is a privative sense - an absence.
The idea of anatta as ‘without intrinsic essence’ has a bit more mileage when we consider external sense objects - for example, the White House, or Antarctica. It doesn’t make sense to talk about these in relation to the personal self - ‘The White House is not self’.
It’s more meaningful to say ‘The White House is without intrinsic essence’.
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