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.