The Self-Effacing Buddhist: No(t)-Self in Early Buddhism and Contemplative Neuroscience

Abstract

One of the core teachings of Buddhism is the doctrine of anattā. I argue that there is good evidence that anattā as understood in early Buddhism should be viewed less as a doctrine and a metaphysical pronouncement (‘no-Self’) than as a soteriological claim (‘not-self’) – an appeal and a method to achieve, or move progressively closer to, liberation. This view opens up anattā to empirical scrutiny – does un-selfing, as an act, lead to liberation? Neuroimaging data collected on Buddhist or Buddhism-inspired meditators show interesting correspondences with this view of not-self as a possibly soteriological strategy. First, meditation leads to a quieting of the narrative self. Second, this quieting of the narrative self seems to lead to at least momentary increases in well-being. Third, this process can be learned, and seems to be already underway after a mere 40 hours of experience. Finally, very highly accomplished meditators seem to be able to tune down even the core self and truly experience anattā, including an apparent subduing of reflexive awareness.

Acknowledgements

I thank Warren Todd for comments on an earlier version of this paper, and an anonymous reviewer for invaluable comments and nudges.

Notes

1. Person being defined here as the experiential, embodied unit most of us would call ‘me’: an ‘organized, temporally extended system of mental and physical events characterized by dense causal and functional interconnectedness, including complex physical and psychological feedback loops’ (MacKenzie 2010, 81). There seems to be little controversy that Buddhism does not deny the existence of a person defined suchly.

2. Note that the Buddha takes each of the khandās in turn; I singled out consciousness, simply because it seems closer to what Western philosophy would consider to be pertinent to a discussion of the self, making the semantics read less oddly.

3. Translated here as ‘painful’.

4. Note that from a Buddhist perspective, an alternative, more emergent or Gestalt-type view (i.e. the Self emerges out of the kandhas taken together, as a property of the ensemble of kandhas, not of each single one taken on its own) would not work either, as argued by MacKenzie (2010). First, by Buddhist definition, the psychophysical complex formed by the kandhas is the empirical person, and the empirical person is clearly in flux and therefore impermanent (and suffering); second, the psychophysical complex could, by definition, not be an independent owner and controller of its parts.

5. ‘For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist. […] I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.’ (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.4.6.)

6. The simile of the chariot is used in other passages of the Canon as well, e.g. the Vajirā Sutta (SN 5.10), but never with the negation of the existence (or ontological findability) of the chariot.

7. Thus foreshadowing Mādhyamika philosophers like Candrakīrti: ‘[The self] is like a cart, which is not other than its parts, not non-other, and does not possess them. It is not within its parts, and its parts are not within it. It is not the mere collection, and it is not the shape.’ (Madhyamakāvatāra, 6.51)

8. That this sense of self is a primary aspect of experience can be derived from the ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ – barring psychopathology, I will not mistake my perceptions, thoughts, emotions … for anyone else’s (Shoemaker 1968).

9. Vasubandhu is not the only Buddhist thinker to posit reflexive self-awareness; for instance, Thompson (2011) refers to the Yogācāra-Svātantrika philosopher Śāntarakṣita (725–788 CE) who claims that ‘reflexive awareness [svasaṃvedana] is what distinguishes sentience from insentience’ (161), making self-awareness a defining feature of consciousness.

10. The Sanskrit word for the Pāli attā.

11. Note that Albahari also claims that the Vedic concept of Ātman, in the mind of many scholars, has been vested with too much Cartesian-style eternality; her view is that it basically refers to the witnessing consciousness, thus bringing Buddhism and the Vedic traditions much more closely together that is often assumed.

12. To list the first 18: ‘There being “I am,” there comes to be “I am here,” there comes to be “I am like this” ... “I am otherwise” ... “I am bad” ... “I am good” ... “I might be” ... “I might be here” ... “I might be like this” ... “I might be otherwise” ... “May I be” ... “May I be here” ... “May I be like this” ... “May I be otherwise” ... “I will be” ... “I will be here” ... “I will be like this” ... “I will be otherwise”’.

13. Note that the strategy of not-self provides a clear but implicit link to ethics. Thanissaro emphasizes that I-making involves the setting of boundaries between self and not-self; those boundaries are fluid, partly because they depend on our desire for happiness and our attribution of agency and control, which may serve, at any given point, to narrow or broaden one’s definition of self to include narrower or wider circles around one’s person. Especially in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the knowledge that everyone yearns for happiness and that the boundaries between ‘me’ and ‘you’ are permeable are seen as strong rational (and sometimes empirical) grounds for compassion (e.g. Goodman 2009; Harris 2011; Todd 2012; Verhaeghen 2015).

14. Meditation also has long-term psychological benefits (for a comprehensive meta-analysis on mindfulness and meditation as therapy, see Goyal et al., 2014), but it isn’t clear whether these benefits are associated with I-unmaking. There is good evidence that changes in self-focused attention (rumination and worry, which can perhaps be taken as proxies for ahaṅkāra) drive the changes in psychological outcome (a statistical reanalysis of 6 clinical trials shows that changes in self-focused attention explain 44% of the variance in psychological outcomes after meditation/mindfulness training; Gu et al. 2015).