Say a mathematics professor is well known for their work in number theory. They end up teaching a course on it for a while in their career, and the talks are recorded. Later on, they decide they’d like to lecture to more fresh students and get them interested in some material, so they do some intro to or more fundamental courses, and the talks are recorded there as well.
Later, while studying their career post-mortem, someone comes across the recorded talks. They don’t have much information on the life of the person, just some papers and lectures. They hear the lectures on number theory, and other lectures on basic statistics. “Ah! There was a clear evolution in their thought! The math in this basic statistics course is constantly relied on in the course on number theory, whereas the number theory lectures are fewer and clearly suppose basic statistics. They must have taught number theory towards the end of their life.”
The lectures are arranged in playlists, the intro material in one compilation and the number theory lectures in another, and there’s another miscellaneous talks playlist. On trying to put the material in some chronology, one looks at the playlists of lectures and determines the intro playlist older (the one which ‘obviously’ is more essential and thus first), then basing the chronology of other lectures around that decision.
In reality, the professor started with the more advanced lectures, and just because the content is more advanced has no bearing on the reality of the chronology of their teaching. The first students in the number theory class were already versed in the essentials needed for doing more refined math; the later students needed introduced and made interested in math.
[The message of this is not, therefore, that the aggregates discourses are earlier, or even that they are early. It is to say that making an assumption about the material in a corpus and then elaborating on the conclusions of that assumption is not establishing anything certain or obvious; it’s merely the elaboration of data around an assumption.]
There is absolutely nothing wrong and fictional about anatta and aggregates in the suttas, but what is wrong here is the underlying philosophical and impersonal approach to reading and interpreting the suttas: dukkha is not an abstract problem of a generalised person in the world, and the Dhamma is not about the reality or non-reality of the world or yourself. - Just throw away the metaphysical approach with its inevitably illogical, self-contradictory hot mess of speculation and unsubstantiated assumptions, covered with fig leaves of notions of mystical insight and magical liberating visions, throw away the incomprehensible and inaccessible third-person view and get back to the very origin and foundation of all views - experience itself, your and only your personal experience. Because dukkha is a personal problem - it’s the problem, it’s your problem, it’s your dukkha. And the Dhamma is given as the answer to that one particular question: “What must I do to get rid of my dukkha once and for all?”
These Notes … assume, also, that the reader’s sole interest in the Pali Suttas is a concern for his own welfare. The reader is presumed to be subjectively engaged with an anxious problem, the problem of his existence, which is also the problem of his suffering. There is therefore nothing in these pages to interest the professional scholar, for whom the question of personal existence does not arise; for the scholar’s whole concern is to eliminate or ignore the individual point of view in an effort to establish the objective truth – a would-be impersonal synthesis of public facts. The scholar’s essentially horizontal view of things, seeking connexions in space and time, and his historical approach to the texts,[b] disqualify him from any possibility of understanding a Dhamma that the Buddha himself has called akālika, ‘timeless’.[c] Only in a vertical view, straight down into the abyss of his own personal existence, is a man capable of apprehending the perilous insecurity of his situation; and only a man who does apprehend this is prepared to listen to the Buddha’s Teaching. But human kind, it seems, cannot bear very much reality: men, for the most part, draw back in alarm and dismay from this vertiginous direct view of being and seek refuge in distractions.
There have always been a few, however, who have not drawn back, and some of them have described what they saw. Amongst these, today, are the people known as existentialist philosophers, and an acquaintance with their mode of thinking, far from being a disadvantage, may well serve to restore the individual point of view, without which nothing can be understood.
…
There is no suggestion, of course, that it is necessary to become an existentialist philosopher before one can understand the Buddha: every intelligent man questions himself quite naturally about the nature and significance of his own existence, and provided he refuses to be satisfied with the first ready-made answer that he is offered he is as well placed as anyone to grasp the Buddha’s Teaching when he hears it. None the less many people, on first coming across the Suttas, are puzzled to know what their relevance is in the elaborate context of modern thought; and for them an indication that the existential philosophies (in their general methods, that is to say, rather than their individual conclusions) afford a way of approach to the Suttas may be helpful.
