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The Buddha’s Discourse on the Not-Self

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Buddhism and Modern Psychology

Princeton University

4.8 (3,216 ratings) | 300K Students Enrolled

The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people? All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.

Skills You'll Learn

Philosophy, Psychology, Mindfulness, Meditation

Reviews

4.8 (3,216 ratings)

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IP

Dec 23, 2018

This is a great effort which should be appreciated. Just because at a time like this, some are curious to know about the Buddhism, & with the psychological background, which adds more value for this.

AS

Feb 08, 2018

Acquired huge amounts of insight from this course and enjoyed reading the various perspectives when marking papers in the peer marked assessments. Thank you for providing such a wonderful course!

From the lesson

Does Your Self Exist?

The Buddha’s Discourse on the Not-Self16:48

What Did The Buddha Mean?20:17

Modern Psychology and the Self22:53

Taught By

Robert Wright
Visiting Lecturer

Transcript

So there was a pretty famous Buddhist monk from Thailand named Jung Chaw who

in the 20th century did a lot to spread awareness of Buddhism in the West.

And he once warned against doing what we're about to try to do.

I'm about to try to explain the doctrine of not-self or non-self or no-self.

The idea that, in some sense, the self, this thing

we think of as being inside of us, does not exist.

And Jung Chaw once, once wrote that if you try to understand the doctrine in this

way, by having somebody lecture about it or

read about it, that your head will explode.

Now, I assume he was exaggerating.

I guess we'll find out soon enough.

But, he was pointing to an important distinction between two different

ways of trying to apprehend this pretty hard to fathom idea.

One is the way he warned against.

You know, reading about it, hearing about it.

And the other is an experiential understanding of the doctrine.

That is, sitting down and meditating, and eventually,

maybe coming to kind of feel the truth

of the doctrine, see the truth of no-self,

become convinced that there is no self in you.

And it's certainly the case that most people I have seen who

seem convinced that the doctrine is valid that the self in some sense

does not exist are people who actually grasp the doctrine during meditation, and

some of them say that it

was transformative and has changed their lives.

And, and their perspective on not self is a very important one.

So eventually we're going to be hearing from some of them and hearing

about some of these experiences that convinced

them that the self does not exist.

But right now, I'm going to try to describe the doctrine

in, in you know the way that Jung Chow warned against.

I'm just going to do it by what he called intellectualizing.

I want to emphasize before we start that he was right.

It's a very hard, infuriatingly hard, doctrine to grasp in some ways.

And, it's even hard to understand what exactly the Buddha meant by the

not-self idea, and scholars don't, don't agree on exactly what he meant.

And in fact, as we will see, the kind of

mainstream interpretation of what he meant may not be true.

I'm going to, I'm going to kind of start by giving you

more or less the mainstream the kind of standard interpretation.

But as we'll go on to see, that, that may not

be valid, and it really matters which, which interpretation you buy into.

Now, the Buddha laid out the idea

of not-self in a famous sermon: The Discourse on the Not-Self,

that is said to be the second sermon he delivered after his enlightenment.

Remember, the first one was the Discourse on the Four Noble Truths.

And then, according to tradition, he gave this discourse on the not-self.

And it's a tribute to, it's a testament to

the importance of the not-self idea in Buddhist thought.

That tradition holds it to be the second sermon he delivered.

Another testament to the importance of the doctrine is

that, supposedly, in fact this is written in the

account of the discourse, the monks in attendance were instantly

enlightened once they heard this teaching about the not-self.

Okay.

So, what does, what does the doctrine mean?

Let's, let's, let's start to wrestle with that.

This is the word in in Sanskrit for not-self this is the

word in the closely related ancient language of Poly.

In both cases the an just means not.

So this means self.

And the question arises what exactly did the Buddha mean by the self?

After all it's a word you can use in a

lot of different ways and this was a long time ago.

Who knows how exactly it was being used then.

There are two ways to go about figuring out what the term meant.

One is to kind of delve into the

prevailing Indian philosophical discourse of the time

and, and, and try to gather what the word would have meant to the Buddha.

That's not what we're going to do.

We're going to take what is in some ways

a more straight-forward course, which is we're going

to try to infer what the Buddha meant by self from his argument against the self.

So an analogy would be: if you were

an archeologist from a future civilization and you came

across this term Santa Claus, and you didn't

know what it meant, and then you came across

a lecture I had delivered arguing that Santa

Claus doesn't exist, and something I said was that

Santa Claus couldn't exist because no man can visit

a million homes or more in a single night.

Well then, if you were this archeologist, you

could infer this Santa Claus character must have

been someone who was thought to visit a million or more homes in a night, right?

That would be a valid inference.

And we're going to do something comparable in, in assessing

the Buddha's argument about not-self, and we're going to infer

from it the properties he associated with the self,

and how he seems to have thought of the self.

Now, I want to, before we get into that, give you

kind of a broad overview of the structure of the Buddhist argument.

These are what are called the five aggregates.

And according to Buddha, Buddhist thought,

they together constitute everything there is

about a person, including the person's

body, the person's mind, the person's experience.

Everything is in one of these five aggregates.

I'll run over them quickly, although the

details don't matter much for today's purposes.

Okay.

Form, in principal, actually a applies to

anything physical in the world, but, but in

this context you can just think of it

as being the body, the person's physical body.

Feeling we've talked about.

You know, pleasant, unpleasant.

As we've said, by this term the Buddha did not mean emotion.

Emotion, would, would be over here in mental formations,

along with various other things: desires volition.

You know?

The, the, kind of the energy that

motivates willful action, and thoughts and so on.

perception, of course.

You know?

You know what perception is.

consciousness.

You know?

The trouble with talking about consciousness,

is, it's kind of hard to define.

People have different conceptions of it.

We won't get too deeply into it.

But, you know, it refers to the phenomenon of subjective awareness.

And the reason I've chosen to, to kind of

draw it like this, give it a kind of privileged

place in contact with all of these other things

is because, you know, the awareness is of these things.

These things can be the, the contents of consciousness, so to speak.

Which isn't to say that these things are not in contact among themselves.

So for example, a perception can have a feeling associated with it and so on.

So what the Buddha basically does, according to the standard interpretation

of this discourse on the not-self, is he goes through these aggregates.

And he goes through each one and he

talks about the properties that the aggregate seems to

have, and he says these properties are not

compatible with the properties we associate with the self.

The, the, the self could not be, you know?

Show me where the self is.

Could it be here, here, here, here, here?

And he concludes: no, it, it couldn't be, given

what he asserts about the nature of these aggregates.

So what does he assert?

Well, there's basically two properties that he

says you'll find in all of these aggregates.

One of them is impermanence.

Now as we know, you know, the

Buddha saw impermanence everywhere, I mean literally everywhere.

Every, everything was impermanent so certainly

the, the five aggregates would be impermanent.

And he, he goes around with the monks he says, okay

what about form what about feeling, is it permanent or impermanent?

The monks say it is impermanent, and he says, well in that event, if it

is impermanent, if this is characterized by change, is it proper to call it self?

And they say no, it's, it's not.

And so we can infer from that, that he must have

thought the self had a property roughly the opposite of impermanence.

That's not necessarily to say that the self would last forever.

But, he, he seems to thought of the self as something that persists through time.

And that is consistent with the way we use the term.

RIght?

I mean when I think of myself, I think of a self that was

intact when I was 12 years old, and it's the same self I have now.

I've changed a lot since I was 12, I'm, in, in, in a lot of ways.

But, fundamentally, there was some essence in me, I kind of think, intuitively,

some, some essence in me that accounts for kind of continuity of identity.

So we do think of the self, in a common, sensical way, as being something, kind

of solid, a kind of essence that endures through time; its structure endures.

and, the Buddhist said, no.

There's too much flux.

Everything is changing all of the time in all of these

aggregates, so, it, it's hard to imagine a self being there.

So, one thing he's saying the self is, is kind

of, you know, it has this kind of substantial persistence.

There's one other thing we can infer about his conception of the self from the

argument he delivers here, and that is that the self is associated with control.

And the way we know that is that the second basic argument he

makes after the impermanence argument is, he says, he goes

around the aggregates and he says, like feeling for example.

He says, if feeling were self, then feeling would

not lead to affliction, and, and the deal would

be that you could just say, may my feelings

be like this, or may my feelings be like that.

In other words, you could just control them.

He says the same thing about the, the form, the body, you know.

If it were self, you'd be able to control it.

It would be under control.

Okay?

And by the way you may not, you may not buy these arguments

but, but for now the main thing is just to, to lay them out.

They're not, not intuitively clear to everyone.

It's important, there's a distinction here that needs to be made, okay.

When the Buddha talks about control, he's not, he's not saying,

apparently, what we might guess that he would say about the self and control.

You know, you might guess he'd say the self is the CEO.

It's the thing in control.

It's the thing that asserts control.

In this sermon at least, he's saying the self should be under control.

That seems to be part of his definition of the self.

It, the self's house should be in order.

Now that may mean that there is also a controller within the self.

For all we know, what he says in the sermon doesn't exclude that.

And in fact, there's another sermon in which he kind of suggests

as much, another discourse, and that's where it's getting into just a little.

I personally find, find it kind of amusing.

It involves this character named Augavesinna,

who's kind of an annoying character.

He denies the Buddha's teaching on the self.

He says, no feeling is self, perception is self, mental formations are self.

And he confronts the Buddha, he seems to think he can win a debate with the Buddha.

Now, if you want my advice, it is do

not debate the Buddha on matters of Buddhist doctrine.

The Buddhist scriptures are full of cases where the Buddha encounters someone who

doesn't understand the doctrines or wants to

deny them, and they sometimes challenge him.

They never win.

But in this case he is he is challenged.

Augavesinna is sure that he can win this

debate with the Buddha, so he takes him on.

he, he, he, he repeats.

Yes this is self, this is self, this is self.

Exactly what the Buddha denies.

And here's how the Buddha handles it.

He says, okay, tell me, A ugavesinna, a

king, and he even names some kings, a king, does a king have the power within

his domain to say who should be executed, who should be banished, and so on?

And Augavesinna says, yes, yes he has, and he should have that power.

And the Buddha says, well tell me, do you have the power to say of your form, of

form, of your body, you know, let my body be like this, let my body be like that.

And Augavesinna then falls silent.

He doesn't say anything.

The Buddha asks him again.

Augavesinna still doesn't say anything, and at this point the

Buddha brings out a rule that I didn't realize existed.

He says, he says you have to understand there

is this rule that if someone refuses to answer a

legitimate question asked by the Buddha three times in a

row, that person's head will be split into seven pieces.

And as if to drive this point home, a spirit appears above Augavesinna's

head, wielding an iron thunderbolt, and threatens to split his head open.

So far as I know, this is the closest that anyone has ever come to actually

having their head explode as, as Jung Chaw

warned while trying to apprehend the not-self concept.

And, and it actually didn't happen in this case.

He gives in, he says you're right, my, I don't have control ultimately over

my body, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on.

So, in this case, the Buddha is invoking the kind of, what

we would call today the CEO metaphor, the closest thing to it.

The king he does seem to be kind of associating in a certain sense of the self

with the controller and not just asserting that it should be itself under control.

But in any event what's clear is that the Buddhist says the self is about control.

The self is about, kind of, persistence through time.

A kind of solid, some sort of solid core that persists.

And these things are lacking throughout the aggregates.

And, and that's the end of the story.

Now, a lot of people find this a little unsettling.

I mean, we think of ourselves as having these, these selves,

you know, and we, we think there is a CEO in here.

It's me, it's myself, I am in charge.

And we also think that, you know, I have endured through time.

You know, it, it's the same CEO in some sense that it was when I was 12.

Well, if this interpretation is, is true and I've given you kind of the standard

interpretation of the, of the Buddha's foundational

discourse on the not-self, then there's bad news.

Then, then, you know, if, if, if that is

your conception of the self and if you like it.

That the, the self is that there isn't

the control within you that you would maybe imagine

or hope for and there is not not

the permanence of self that you might have imagined.

Now, you may in addition to not buying this or

resisting it, you may wonder, well why does this matter?

Let's suppose it's true.

This just doesn't seem like news I can use.

What do I do with this idea that the self doesn't exist?

Okay, well that's where we're going to address in the next segment.

And we are going to explore the alternative

interpretation to the interpretation I've just given you.

And as you'll see, that may be in a way more user-friendly interpretation, maybe

an interpretation that, that does you more good, that you can get more out of.

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