SuttaCentral
It is concept. Doesn’t mean reality doesn’t work like that.
Just very simple fact that (1) kamma is following individual, (2) liberation is each for themselves, and (3) each person have unique past life chain is enough. I label them all together as the characteristics of individuality.
Maybe you don’t want that name for whatever reason, we can use another label for all these.
As long as we agree on the 3 points above, the rest is semantics, labeling.
As I understand it, these are the basically main reasons that the puggalavādins gave for proposing a puggala (individual):
But the Theravāda rejects the puggala, as do basically all other school of Buddhism besides the puggalavadins themselves I think. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but just that what you’re proposing is outside Theravāda orthodoxy AFAIK. The puggalavādins were very popular and they argued that the puggala was necessary and implicit in the Buddha’s teachings. Otherwise, how is the same individual liberated? How is kamma consistent with the same person across lives? Etc.
You would have to read the Pudgalavada and Theravada arguments to assess which view you hold. I’m not knowledgable enough on the subject.
Characteristics doesn’t mean an entity. It’s the same thing of individual streams of consciousness, whatver label one uses.
Individuality just says that unlike real physical rivers which can merge and branch out, the streams of consciousness is linear back in time throughout past lives, and doesn’t mix when they die at the same time or reborn at the same time.
The identity labeling is preserved. Therefore in past life recall, one can identify A was B, C was D in such and such a past life.
If there were to be mixing possible like real rivers, then such neat mapping is not possible.
Again, all these individuality thing is not self. Although it is very much a core reason why people conceives of a self.
To use another analogy, companies.
Meta, Google, SpaceX, they all are just fictional entities, without soul/self.
Yet, their individuality can be discerned. Meta earnings is not mixed with Google’s earnings. When Google is being sued, meta doesn’t pay the fine. SpaceX launch rockets, they don’t come under the control of meta or google, unless they pay for the product.
Of course the company analogy is imperfect as companies can merge or buy other company into itself. Individuality means no such merging or absorbing other lifestreams is possible for sentient beings undergoing rebirth.
Exception maybe some brahma realm where form and perception maybe the same or shared (not sure if it is like twins or hive mind/body). But the individual’s kamma/attainments still remains separated.
Conjoined twins share the same body, but different mind, so in that sense individuality depends more on mind than body.
You are correct. If one believes in God, God would have to be free of a Self too by Buddhist Philosophical views. But here is the lesson in what Buddha was so Skillfully yet successfully Teaching and why He thought possibly at first not to Teach. In teaching Dependant Origination, we have to go beyond existence and non-existence, even if God is believed in. There are Higher and Higher incremental planes of perception, and Buddha taught that the way we normally see things keeps us bound to this world. The Buddha Himself is said to neither exist nor not exist, in a sense the same would be of a Deity such as God, neither existing nor not existing, but able to be perceived by even a Higher principle than Dependant Origination, as existence both for God and a Buddha have been wiped out, but they are still able to abide in serenity and tranquility, Empty of a Self or grasping of to Samsara.
I think your question may refer to the dhatu: an individual/personal characteristic/nature:
Pages 142-3 from The Fundamental Teachings of Early Buddhism Choong Mun-keat 2000.pdf (144.7 KB)
Just because there’s an ontological emptiness doesn’t mean there’s a phenomenological non-reality.
“There is meaning in giving, sacrifice, and offerings. There are fruits and results of good and bad deeds. There is an afterlife. There are such things as mother and father, and beings that are reborn spontaneously. And there are ascetics and brahmins who are rightly comported and rightly practiced, and who describe the afterlife after realizing it with their own insight.”
If individuality is an illusion, not-real, conventional, not ultimate → Then this delusion is real, not-conventional, ultimate.
We need to differentiate right view from wrong view otherwise we have nothing to discuss. This distinction can only be made if we account for different individualities. Denying this gets us into very weird paradoxes.
If ultimately, someone being deluded and someone being enlightened is undifferentiated, the delusional view, that things are substantial, that there is a self, is correct. This would be the victory of eternalist argument.
Thus, denying individuality reaffirms the self.
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I’ve used Individual and Self here as were used in this thread. However, I would say that Atta in Anatta would be better translated as Soul, and InDIVIDUAL actually betrays the buddhist message, meaning something that can’t be divided or destroyed.
Self as a continuum, arisen and ceasing, is real; Individual soul is an illusion. However, I don’t think I can singlehandedly change the non-self nomenclature, alas; conventions.
I think sometimes in religious philosophy we go off the rails too much.
We can actually prove that water on earth, bound to a certain amount of gravitational force, evaporates at 100c if there are no other variables present.
Furthermore, when I boil this cup of water, that cup of water over there doesn’t evaporate.
Which is what I think the Bhante is trying to differentiate here. In both cases, there’s no indestructible waterness present; but we’re discussing the process that gets the water to evaporate, and there’s a difference between water on the stove and water in the freezer.
If I do not protect the skin from sunburn on the beach, whatever insights i have into self or not-self, emptiness, insubstantiallity, does that really protect me from the pain i will have to deal with that evening?
If I only become more and more careless about the consequences of choices and deeds, because i believe there is no self and another self will experience the results, not me, does my wisdom grow?
In what way does such wisdom protect? I believe it protects foolishness.
In the end, i believe it is enough to understand that i am the heir of my decisions and deeds based upon my personal understanding of things. The kamma follows me like a shadow.
I also feel we must still answer the question why we all have a stable sense of self. Is this really a construct? Is this really due to attachement? Who says so? Who has investigated this in an unbiased manner, not led by the answers in the sutta’s?
This is good, it’s conventional self, or individuality.
Yes, this is the made up self, it’s a self delusion. It’s the root cause of suffering. One has to see all as empty of self to get rid of this self delusion.
Our job as Buddhists is to follow the Buddha’s words, practise and attain. One is certainly free to practise on one’s own with one’s own views, but if it doesn’t align with the suttas, one shouldn’t claim that it’s a Buddhist practise.
I believe it is more like this…one can have a mistaken perception of something. For example: There is a rope but one sees it as a snake. But when this distortion ceases, it is not that the rope ceases.
Nothing really changes. The ropes remains the rope. The only thing that ceases is the wrong view, the distortion.
Likewise, the sense of self an sich is not a distortion but experiencing it as an atta, as a kind of homunculus in the mind, a kind of mental entity that feels, lives, dies, knows…that is the distortion.
If it is really seen that it was never an atta, a mental entity, that knows, that feels, that lives, then the sense of self does not cease but it is now purified. There is no perception that what lives this life is a mental entity. Probably it is more something like light.
Making claims on what Buddha taught, realised, is uberhaupt at risk. How sure are we about all this?
Must we really trust those who are so sure? In the end we all must rely on ourselves. And that is also what Buddha says. Make an island of yourself, a refuge.
You got it nice just before this part.
Just as seeing a rope as a snake produces fear, seeing what is not self as self produces this sense of self. So when no-self is seen (stream winner), and then kept on purifying into becoming perception (arahanthood), then the sense of self would diminish and then be totally gone at arahanthood.
It’s what’s termed as “I am” in the sutta, or conceit. One lives life without any sense of self at all.
I don’t think anyone here is denying that. And this isn’t religious philosophy; it was pointed out in the Western tradition by the philosopher David Hume, one of the British empiricists who was highly skeptical of religion AFAIK.
We can observe that within certain conditions, water will boil. Yes. But we haven’t proven that there is a fundamental causal force or entity which generates something else. It’s just an empty conditional process which is also based in consciousness and perception to establish.
The fact that there are such causal processes is what allows us to demonstrate that there is no actual, real causality there. The fact that there are conditional patterns we designate is what allows us to analyze them and show that their nature is transient. If there were actual self-generating causality or other-generating, etc., then things would be a lot different! And ultimately, it seems that the Buddha would say the consequence of such a world is that the spiritual life cannot be fulfilled. Because it would fall into eternalism/annihilationism.
Obviously this is relevant to the question of individuality, because individuality is a conditional process of the same kind. No one is denying the empirical continuity. The question here is about whether such individuality is “ultimate” and holds true even beyond convention. I think most conversations like this one just consist of people talking past one another though. So I’m not sure how fruitful they are without more nuanced measures for dialogue.
This is enough.
I dunno why we need to go here. As long as people don’t misunderstand no self doesn’t mean no individuality as defined above, it’s no issue.
This is possible yes, but unless the thread is filled with Ariya beings, then the deeply etched habit of substantial thinking remains and can be detected.
Personally speaking (hah!) I do not have direct insight to others minds nor am I an Ariya being so the best I can do is be mindful of my own deeply and fundamentally and really substantial habit of substantialist thinking (hah!)
Based upon whatever success I (hah!) have in such mindfulness to detect this inherent and fundamental habit (hah!) of substantialist thinking, I can try and detect it in others (hah!) and point it out. Of course, false positives and false negatives are possible and I (hah!) could be surrounded by Ariya beings in this thread and forum 
Do we? Westerners are encouraged to believe in individualism and more and more lately to engage in identity politics, which, already, have been demonstrated to go absolutely nowhere. I returned from BC saying there’s a problem with that place because of its excessive individualism. The entire society has broken down and its riddled with corruption.
Do we experience individualism or do we construct it? Is it a socio-cultural performance? Are we interpellated into individualism? Or disciplined and punished into it? Is it an appropriate framework from which to argue the more or less, pro or con? Western law for instance, assumes not the individual but the “reasonable person” and more and more the “educated reasonable person.” Western ethics assume universal humanity, equity. Typically the individual comes in tension with the group or state, usually in application to social mores. Politics, which is a particularly vicious domain.
I just learned that elephants all have individual names and call each other by names. It seems the process of differentiation begins with the matriarch and group call and response and then moves to individual call and response.
We have empathy. People have the capacity to be affected by others. It is necessary for human survival. Those who don’t have it are mentally ill, dangerous and destructive and do terrible things to their fellow living creatures and human beings.
Great comments, my report of Charles Taylor above in this thread was an attempt to move the discussion towards how people actually are, and behave towards one another.
Great! I’ll look at it, thanks ! 
I wonder if the often decried Buddhist indifference toward the sufferings of the world, as opposed to Christian (aid agencies, collections, etc) stems, in large part, from the tendency towards solipsism, abstraction, and intellectualism found in early Buddhism.
Of course this is not universal, BGR being a notable exception.
Gee.
I found temples to be a refuge in Japan. In Nagasaki, I discovered most of them trying to escape some flash downpour or another wandering that place. No need to do anything other sit on the outer veranda absorbing the deep dark quiet of the interiors, infused with centuries of incense, and appreciate, rather than be drowned in, the plonk, plonk, plonk, shush, shush, shush of the rain. Some temple monk would come in quietly through the back, place something - in there - ‘oh look foreigner, not tromping around disrupting and destroying things’ - and disappear with his gentle presence, or not. (One time I found a huge urn containing the ashes of 40,000 cremated Japanese soldiers from WWII, eek! Huge statue of Kannon looking over them).
I think at one point charity was an integral part of social health (charity included slaving btw) in both Judaism and Christianity, but it’s little more than propaganda now, and from what I have seen perpetuates more social ills than assists to ease.
My affection for Buddhism comes from Japan, and, of course, the people there who practiced it and showed me the way.
The Little Girl and the Rapeseed Flower.pdf (587.3 KB)
There’s also the Tzu Chi foundation which is focused heavily on this aspect. Of course, they are from a predominantly Mahāyāna Buddhist background. So maybe you are referring specifically to Theravāda, in which case there certainly is this issue.
I think in Theravāda countries, a lot of it has to do with the culture of merit making. It’s taught that the most merit is in giving to the Saṅgha. So often lay people will give tons and tons of resources to a wealthy institutional Saṅgha, where those resources are not really sent elsewhere.
I do think it’s important to acknowledge some of the unnoticed benefits though. In Thailand for example, anybody can have lunch. Just go to the nearby temple or monastery and you are free to partake of all the food there. There’s really no reason anyone needs to go hungry in Thailand, because the monasteries are like food banks. There’s also the fact that monasteries have historically administered education and medicine. I know of someone who’s father was Buddhist because the Buddhist temple gave him an education and he felt so grateful that he converted to Buddhism and wanted to support the Saṅgha.
So there are societal benefits which are less obvious than large relief projects. But we definitely should acknowledge the huge amount of resources that could be distributed to help others in need rather than over-emphasizing only giving to monks.
I’m not sure I would say this is characteristic of early Buddhism. Maybe you disagree?
To me, it is much more characteristic of classical Theravāda, where beings are readily reduced to impersonal atoms and there’s little emphasis on great compassion and so on and more emphasis on equanimity, rejecting the world, etc.
In terms of early Buddhism, I feel the Buddha was a much more holistic teacher. He clearly valued actions that were good for oneself and others. He rarely reduced ‘beings’ into mere conventions if at all; he just pointed out the lack of permanent essence or substance in persons, not the conditional person as such. Of course, there is also the clear soteriological focus, especially for monastics. But there is a very human and just plainly reasonable, balanced approach to life there. There is more freedom of emotional expression, maybe.
The precepts for monks such as relying on alms food, not handling money, and receiving other requisites from laity creates a mutual relationship that is more engaged and involved. The monastics were much less settled and institutionalized, and so there were naturally less problems associated with that state of affairs.
The project we are working on in Italy is meant to benefit the community, both locally and in Italy and Europe more broadly. We will be replacing and repairing an old slaughterhouse area with a donation-based retreat center that will invite people from various traditions to teach without price tags. We will be reforesting and maintaining the old forest of the area. We want to work with the local priests and churches to do interfaith activities, as well as engage with the local community to offer benefits of Buddhist monastics without expecting anyone to convert. Obviously it will also be meant to give more opportunity to women without the harsh religious discrimination. Hopefully it can help contribute to the world!
Hi @Meggers 
Thanks for your comments. You may have read the discussion, but just to give context I wasn’t making the case that individuality is a fixed and fundamental aspect of reality. The opposite I think that looking at larger scales is a good contribution to this discussion! Thank you @stephen as well.
We should certainly include ‘individual societies’ in the discussion! Cause-and-effect continuity at the level of a whole group of people. Famine affects everyone in the society. It’s not the same as individual hunger. Where we draw the lines for individual continuity is fuzzy. Families. Neighborhoods. Ethno-cultural groups. Countries. Religions. All good points.
There is also dissociation which we haven’t mentioned. Some people have multiple personalities, and some personalities may have preferences, knowledge or even certain health conditions which other personalities don’t have. To speak of one single individual is a bit confusing and fuzzy there. I don’t think the Buddha ever addressed this in our textual accounts. Anybody know?
Interesting fact about elephants! Reminds me of so many arguments to the effect that “only humans have so and so ability; animals can’t so and so.” In most cases, they seem rarely substantiated beyond mere assumption and anthropocentric bias.
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Additional note: I think Buddhism (and other philosophical traditions too) have a lot to contribute through the non-dualist notion of personality. Early Buddhist philosophy doesn’t contain mind/body dualism. Instead of “me the subject who is faced with the world of objects,” there is a dependent and connected relationship between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ events. It’s not one opposed to the other, but each in relationship to one another. This makes sharp contrasts between one subject and another more difficult to delineate. Because subjects are not separate substances from their environment. It also rejects clear borders between persons and their material environment. Like in the elements contemplation mentioned recently.
Hi, not interested to get into discussion on this, but I think Buddhism is not “non-dual” and rather is trying to display that subjective-objective is not a valid distinction, but one that is persistent and difficult to resolve. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sure that Buddhism is not “non-dual” and it is a mistake to understand that as its root philosophical structure. Tantra could be classified as “non-dual” but it was imported into Buddhism and transformed. The outcome is still emptiness.