The thorny issue of anatta

If one can possibly find self or belonging to self whether within or beyond the aggregates, it will be very good! But can you find or have that self in reality?

But “right view” has to come first.

The right view is anicca, dukkha, anatta.

Other than what?.
With Metta

Some of Bhikkhu @Sujato’s previous observations may be helpful:

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That’s such a contrived argument to me. Without reading the suttas I would never even consider that the self is something I can change at will. People don’t think like that just because the suttas say so.

Do you really think if you ask a run-of-the-mill person on the street about the self they would say “Of course, the self is something I have total control over”? Worth giving it an empirical try!

Also the idea reiterated by B.Sujato (in the essay) that if something is ‘mine’ I would have total control over it and the ability to change it doesn’t make sense in a normal discourse: The money on my bank account is mine, not yours, not anyone else’s. Where is the idea coming from that I then should be able to increase or decrease it to my liking? Even if I invested it and get it back only in 2030 - and hence have no control over it at all - it’s still my money, not yours or anyone else’s.

So the normal usage of ‘mine’ doesn’t imply total control at all. Control depends on the nature of the object and circumstances. I can break my glas, but I can’t turn it into a bird. I can smoke my cigarette, but not on an airplane.

Hi, Gabriel, did you look at the link I gave to one of Bhante Sujato’s comments?

Sujato: Remember, unlike the Christian system where salvation comes from outside, virtually all the Indic systems took it for granted that salvation, happiness, freedom, nibbana, whatever you want to call it, come from finding your true self.

I found those comments, and the talks I referenced by Patrick Kearney near the start of this thread, very useful, and complimentary.

Since I hate people telling me to “just listen to three hours of talks and call me in the morning…” I’ll give the cartoon version. This undoubtedly has inaccuracies and simplifications and I’d be happy is someone more knowledgeable would fill in and/or correct the details.

  1. The discourse SuttaCentral is, in some ways, a bit like a joke. If you don’t get the punch line it’s hard to explain (not that I’m claiming to “get it”, either!).
  2. The discourse is talking about practice, not philosophy. Especially in the second section:

“So you should truly see any kind of form at all—past, future, or present; internal or external; coarse or fine; inferior or superior; far or near: all form—with right understanding: ‘This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self.’ …

  1. As Bhante Sujato says, the various ideas at the time, such as what eventually became Advaita Vedanta, was about liberation through one’s “true self”. Patrick comments that the Advaita Vedanta founders would actually have agreed with the Buddha that a self could not be found in the aggregates, for the same reasons as in the first part of the discourse. However, they used an argument analogous to “the eye cannot see the eye, but that doesn’t mean that they eye does not exist” to reason that there must be this “true self” in the background somewhere, and for them the practice would be to contemplate that “true self”, Atman, which they equated with Brahman.

I guess you can see the echos of those ideas in the way some Zen teachers I’ve come across talk about “finding your true self”, and some how some of the Thai Forest Ajahns seem (it’s hard for me to tell…) to be suggesting that there is a “knowing” that is outside of the aggregates, and can be identified with “the deathless”.

:heart:

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@mikenz66 It is a very good reminder about taking some time to contemplate the teachings of the Buddha and senior practitioners, rather than keep arguing the same points round and round. I’ve often found that stopping the thinking and to focus on the practical exercises and training is what really assists insights. Often I take a specific theme, such as impermanence, and focus just on that full time for a period of weeks or months. It doesn’t have to be until one ‘gets it’ but it helps to jolt the regular perspective, to move forward… bit by bit…

I don’t mean to sound preachy, or to tell people something that they’re already aware of. But it may be of use for someone reading this thread.

Metta :pray::dharmawheel::revolving_hearts::slightly_smiling_face:

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Sujato’s comments are in line with classic interpretations of the Upanisadic atman, but they don’t fully meet the texts actually. Nowhere do we have a notion of a ‘true self’. The atman is not the ‘authentic’ self, it is a vehicle, vessel, or instrument for liberation. The ancient Indians saw the possibility to produce a specific atman, to invest in a specific atman - and then this vehicle would become my vessel and transport ‘me’ to heaven and immortality.

It is not only the (post-Buddha) Vedanta teachers who don’t see atman in the khandhas, this can be found already in the pre-Buddhist teachings of Yajnavalkya: “He perceives, but he can’t be perceived” (BU 3.7.23); “you can’t perceive the perceiver who does the perceiving. The self within all is this self of yours” (BU 3.4.2). The impossibility to directly perceive ātman finds its clearest expression in the famous formula of ‘neti, neti’: “About this ātman , one can only say ‘not-, not-.’ He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped” (BU 3.9.26, BU 4.2.4, BU 4.4.22, BU 4.5.15).

Most probably, however, the Buddha and the earliest Buddhist composers didn’t know Yajnavalkya’s teachings directly. More in line with Bronkhorst the Buddha probably reacted more to older Brahmin notions and contemporary sramana teachers.

In short, if one forgets the classic interpretations (atman = brahman, atman as ‘true self’ etc.) and reads the pre-Buddhist Upanisads one necessarily comes to the conclusion that the atman was not the ‘true’ self but rather the ‘correct’ self - in the sense that from all the possibilities of ‘investment’ it was about investing in the correct atman which truely lifts me up to immortality in the afterlife.

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Yes, that’s what I was trying to say. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.

I didn’t realise you were an expert on this area. Thanks for the insights. Interesting to hear about the “correct self”, as opposed to the “true self”.

So is your concern that the Buddha doesn’t really provide a convincing logical argument against this “correct self”?

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There are a few matryoshka questions within each other, but my first concern is that our pre-conceived notion of what a ‘self’ is clouds our understanding of the text.

After that my concern would be if there is a real argument or if it’s a later polemic - a caricature in order to dissuade monastics from listening to other teachers. But in this case I would assume more that there was originally a legitimate argument and that transmission chopped off the context so that now it’s more difficult to reconstruct the concepts involved.

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I think the suttas make a convincing argument about the aggregates being impermanent and unsatisfactory, but not about there being nothing “beneath” the aggregates. To me the Sabba Sutta looks like an assertion, and not a logical conclusion.

Interesting comments about the Thai Forest ajahns, didn’t Ajahn Chah talk about “the one who knows”?

Yes, it does come down to practice in the end, observation rather than intellect. The question then is whether we discover an absence, or a presence.

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MN44:20.2: “They experience three kinds of contact: emptiness, signless, and undirected contacts.”

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Or there is the possibility that the Buddha wasn’t interested in making an argument about something beyond direct experience (he does refuse to answer various philosophical questions), and just gave instructions on how to practice with what could be experienced (in this case the khandha classification).

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Yes, that’s the sort of thing I was thinking of. It seems to be very common in the Thai Forest groups, from Ajahn Mun onwards. And, of course, it may well be a very useful way of approaching practice. I’m no expert on this, so I don’t want to say much more, but it certainly comes up in discussions such as this thread I started:

To some extent, it is nothing wrong if you hold such a normal discourse of “self”: This is my will, my money, my body … even though you do not have total control over it and the ability to change it.

The teachings of anatta “not-self”, such as “this is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self” (n’etam mama, n’eso 'ham asmi, na m’eso attaa ti) in the SN/SA suttas, have different focus and understanding to see and to know self “atta” “atman”, for overcoming dukkha in daily life.

What is “the correct atman”?

Do you consider there is something “beneath” the aggregates is logical?

There are just eleven (11) posts available before this thread reaches 200. Since it seems to be meandering around and moving away from discussion of the EBTs the moderators will close the thread when it is seen that 200 post have been made. … So please make sure that your remaining contributions are substantial ones! :slight_smile: :wink:

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I find this arbitrary and think the discussion was actually quite close to the logic to the suttas. Oops, only 10 posts left.

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