Thank you Bhante - you’ve given me some food for thought here.
My preference for anattā as ‘devoid of any intrinsic essence’ conveys for me the idea of absence of both self (i.e., identity, i, me, personal ownership) and soul (i.e., any permanent essence that transmigrates between births). This way of seeing things came about through practicing netaṁ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā (‘This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self’).
I used to practice that phrase as I found in a translation: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is no soul of mine’, but I didn’t find the soul satisfactory in that practice. I think that’s because the word soul, for me, had Christian overtones - it’s culturally hard for those of us who’ve grown up in the West to disentangle soul from singing school hymns to England’s green and pleasant land. As a result, I actually used ‘this is no permanent part of me’ for na meso attā.
From there, the understanding of (an)atta as ‘(devoid of) any intrinsic essence’ developed for me.
I actually think soul is perhaps the best word for atta, but it’s our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage than makes us poo-poo ‘soul’ as a mystical piece of fabric that detaches from the body on death and magically elevates itself up to heaven. Soul as the notion of an intrinsic, permanent, enduring part or essence, covers atta for me in both the transmigratory and the personal senses (though I still avoid use of that s-word because of the connotations it holds for others).
I feel like ‘self’ for atta has emerged in Buddhist literature over the past 30-40 years, in part, in the same reaction to the Judeo-Christian notion of ‘soul’ (unless there’s a more commonly understood reason known to translators which I’m unaware of). The connotative differences between these two words are important - soul suggests something beyond this life itself that transmigrates; self focuses on identity and the personal . I believe that both of these connotations are important to the idea of atta. The difference between the two is almost the divide between traditional and secular that sometimes plays out on forums.
At the end of the day, we’re translating a concept, not a word. It is difficult to capture the entirety of what is meant by it. In addition, as per the downshift in the popularity of the word ‘soul’ (or equivalently, how the name ‘Adolf’ is less frequently given to children these days), the connotations of words change over time due to cultural shifts.
It also occurs to me that we’re also bound by our cultures in understanding those concepts and words, and further, by our own individual experiences. What I understand as self / soul is inherently different to what you do. For example, the word soul may have much less cultural loading for you than me.
That our notions and understandings of ‘self’ are defined by our experience of self was suggested to me in something you wrote above:
For minds that have a lot of either greed, aversion, or delusion, the self is each defined differently. A mind of greed, consumed by pleasurable sensations, might tend to see self in terms of the hunger for what comes to the senses. A mind of aversion would tend towards turning away from or ending sensory input. A mind of delusion might tend to see things in terms of only what is in front of them. Thus a mind that has more of an aversive nature might welcome death, but a mind that has more of a delusional nature might fear it. We’d approach self, life, death, suffering and the end of suffering quite differently because of that.
I do feel like atta is more than just the personal self. If it was just the personal self, netaṁ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā would be sufficed by just the first two parts of that phrase. Whilst the Buddha used redundancy, in this case, my feeling is that each of these three parts of this phrase are different. As I suggested above, the anatta of external sense objects doesn’t make sense to me from a practice point of view - I already know Donald Trump is not me or mine; it’s superfluous and meaningless to say that he’s not my self. However, it is meaningful to me to say that Donald Trump is devoid of any intrinsic essence or permanent state of existence.
I don’t envy the choices faced by translators such as yourself. It’s a difficult task for something that has such far-reaching consequences for people.
Thank you for the reply Bhante - and thank you for your wonderful resources and translations. We are all in your debt and you have my gratitude. May you be well - May you attain the highest.
