Thanks for this. The comments by Hayes do sound very similar to the Puggalavadins: are they derived from the Puggalavada, or is this a coincidence?
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It’s not a coincidence, but part of a sympathetic appraisal of the Pudgalavāda, at least as it’s presented by Siderits.
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Interesting historical discussion. I didn’t realize the Pudgalavadins accepted anatta; it is just that they have a different interpretation of anatta. In that case, I retract what I posted earlier and will give this more thought and read up more on this philosophy. I found this piece which is highly sympathetic to them:
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Sorry, this is wrong - my memory’s playing tricks on me. The word should be vetulyavādin.
Vitaṇḍavādin has a more complicated history, being variously applied to proponents of Lokāyata philosophy (whatever that is, for this term too has a complex history), anti-Buddhist polemicists in general, and people who disagree with the Mahāvihāra’s position in (what Buddhaghosa thinks to be) an especially unreasonable way.
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Did he? I have never seen any of his teachings stating that there is no atman. Only that various things (e.g. 5 khandhas) are not atman. I would love to know if he ever explicitly taught that there is no atman.
I am not fussed about which word to use, whether ‘self’ or not, but I do think this is an important point. I always found the traditional example of a cart not being a cart because when you take it apart none of the parts are a cart, quite stupid. It seems like such an uneducated, over-simplistic and absurd logic.
For example if you take apart a bee, you end up with a load of parts. But the bee is dead! The bee-ness is gone because the parts have been disassembled and sure enough bee-ness is not to be found in the parts. But it does not mean there is no such thing as bee-ness!
Similarly when you take water apart you will not find the properties of water in the constituent gases, oxygen and hydrogen. For the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Now this is quite well understood in a detailed manner with Complexity Theory, and the study of emergent properties in complex systems.
In the topic of atta, the Buddha seems to have steered us to examining the khandhas, which are processes, right? Could this be because he viewed ‘who we are’ to not be a static entity such as may have been proposed by atta theory, but instead as complex beings made up of complex processes? And could that not be quite well in tune with the idea that our ‘experience of self’, or to use less controversial words, ‘the experience of being me’, is the emergent property of the interdependence of various processes?
And naturally that experience (and thus what some people would label their ‘self’) changes as those processes change.
Exactly. Now, is it possible to have an invalid interpretation of an experience (e.g. some experience a sensation and interpret it to be God…)? Could we have errors in our interpretation of the experience, and not the experience itself?
Imagine we thought that vehicles were living animals -since they move around, make noise etc. However you saw vehicle taken apart and then see that our take on what it was initially was wrong. It was a mistake. So we misinterpret the five khandas to be Self.
with metta
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sign me up!
Yes sure. So on the one had we do have an experience of what it is to be us. We can;t deny that. And on the other hand, we have conceptual ways of explaining and interpreting that experience, which means some people end up thinking there is an independent soul or whatever.
But that idea of there being an independent self or soul (attā) being false, does not mean that there is no ‘self’ in the sense of our ‘experience of self’, or ‘the experience of being me’.
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True. But don’t forget- there is something there, not that there is nothing there. However someone could argue that they experienced a ghost after seeing a moving leaf. The illusion is experienced as part of the experience itself.
With metta