Post #30: The Riddle of Self-No-Self

27 May 2023

“The Emperor Wu of Liang described all that he had done to promote the practice of Buddhism, and asked Bodhidharma what merit he had gained thereby. Bodhidharma replied, ‘No merit whatever!’ This so undermined the Emperor’s idea of Buddhism that he asked, ‘What, then, is the sacred doctrine’s first principle?’ Bodhidharma replied, ‘It’s just empty; there’s nothing sacred.’ ‘Who, then, are you,’ said the Emperor, ‘to stand before us?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Bodhidharma.”

—A Zen tradition recounted by Alan Watts in The Way of Zen

Epictetus has sometimes been described as a kind of early Western Buddhist, and there are indeed many passages of his Handbook and Discourses that have a distinctly Dhammic flavor. (Not so surprising, really, if the Dhamma is universal and only our human expressions of it differ, but still striking.) Yet there is also a big difference. For Epictetus everything depends on making a fundamental distinction: between an inner world of judgments and attitudes, cravings and aversions, mental and emotional reactions, where one is supposed to be entirely sovereign and above all constraint or limitation by others—and then the outer world in which I am as unfree as I am free in the inner. Identify yourself exclusively with the former and all will be well; be drawn into any kind of attachment to the latter, and you are doomed.

There is much to this as a practical guide in life, as Epictetus’s own biography illustrates, and as the experience of someone like James Stockdale reaffirms also for ours. To focus on what you can control and let go of what you cannot is no doubt a very liberating exercise, as anyone can confirm with a bit of personal experimentation. The question is, on the one hand, how far it is really possible to take this strategy in any given case, and on the other, both from a Buddhist and an everyday point of view, how sharply the line between the inner and the outer worlds is really drawn. Is our control of the one really so absolute, or of the other so nugatory?

It is true, of course, that the outer world is very far from being subject to our full control, although Epictetus’s account of our helplessness can seem a bit overcharged at times. Nonetheless he is surely right that nothing out there is ultimately ours in the sense we would like it to be, or in the sense that could keep us truly safe. What remains more questionable is whether our inner lives are so very different: are my thoughts and feelings, my deliberations and judgments, really mine as completely as Epictetus maintains? Or to push the case a bit more, in what sense are they mine at all? What is this self that is supposed to stand behind the stream of our experiences? Who or what am I really?

Everyday common sense has never been much troubled or detained by such qualms, and there is something to be said for common sense when one’s head starts spinning. On the other hand, the shadow of these doubts has probably crossed everyone’s mind at least in passing, and the more worldly students of the Dhamma seem to have been puzzled from the earliest days of the Buddhist dispensation by this most unintuitive aspect of the Teaching—the doctrine of no-self, whose proper understanding is said to mark the very entry to Nibbana itself. Even those making the most sincere effort to credit it have often been stumped by a simple question: if there is no self, then who is having trouble understanding it? Who is asking questions about it, if not I? Or more broadly, if there is no self, who takes an interest in the Dhamma and decides to walk on the Path, or not to?

The riddle has an orthodox answer: nobody decides, it just gets decided; there is deciding going on. And from a cosmic, god’s-eye perspective, that may even make sense. But from the more human point of view that underlies our everyday interactions and social institutions, it is not a very satisfying answer, obviously, and one that comes perilously close to sounding like nonsense, mere spiritualizing gibberish. “You cannot criticize or scold me, because I am not,” that kind of thing, or perhaps even, “I am not and neither is anything else, we are all just trapped in some dream or nightmare machine,” etc. etc. Not quite what the Buddha had in mind, I am pretty sure; personal responsibility must stand for ordinary purposes, and the world around us is not likely to be something merely imagined, even if it is hard to prove otherwise (thus Berkeley’s famous idealist challenge, according to which we are all just thoughts in the mind of God), and although it may not turn out to be, if we could ever find out, what we commonly take it to be either.

It’s hard to see how societies could operate without a well-developed and vigorously enforced sense of agency and responsibility; perhaps things could be sustained for an isolated day of lawless Saturnalia a year, but a second day would already put severe strains on the social fabric. Yet, even if we could agree on that much (and it may well be far more complex than I am presenting it here), this societal imperative need not make our belief in agency true in any more profound sense. The ways we habitually judge each other may have practical reasons that are conventionally valid, to be sure, but take no account of deeper truths; we may hold people responsible as strictly as we do not because we have metaphysical warrant for it, but simply because it is collectively beneficial. We behave better and are more amenable to social discipline on the assumption that we are selves accountable for our actions to others, whether the philosophical and spiritual foundation for our practices proves solid upon closer inspection or not.

Religion has its part to play as well. In a theistic world liable to divine judgment, there must be some underlying self to hold one’s actions together, or else there would be nothing that could be judged. Again, though, the fact that it is crucial for our traditional religious institutions does not make it true, only necessary from a theological point of view. The contrary position, that there is in fact nothing to be judged, may be deeply counterintuitive at first, but it is not impossible to think oneself into it. Epictetus wrote that a beginner blames others, an advanced student blames himself, but a wise man blames nobody. In the Buddhist cosmology too, the ills of the world are not driven by willful evil, but by ignorance only; and that ignorance requires curing, not judging. Similar currents run through the thought of Socrates and Plato, albeit with complications about an immortal soul woven in (on the Platonic side at least) that can have no place in Buddhism.

The idea of a self that can (and should) be judged for the choices it makes, and that must be assumed to have some freedom if our judgments are to have any meaning, is not just something that our social institutions and our religions impose on us, it is also something we accept for ourselves. Perhaps we learned it in the family and from our peers, so it may not be an absolutely necessary feature of our experience (I’m not sure), but who could doubt that it has very deep psychological roots, indeed. Much of our conscious moral life revolves around inner dialogues about how we should choose between different courses of action, and how doing one rather than the other defines us, both in our own eyes and those of others. We certainly think that we have a choice in the matter, and we would probably arrive at other decisions if we didn’t. We can even ponder the nature and vagaries of our choices themselves. All this makes it practically impossible to think of ourselves as anything other than free agents, even if our actions may often look predictable to others (or social life would be impossible) and if they may all be ultimately driven by causes that we don’t control.

We blame ourselves too, not only for outright errors but for freely resolving to do things that we feel we ought not to have done. Along the way, we argue with ourselves, weigh options, exhort ourselves, finally either praise or censure and remonstrate with ourselves, depending both on how well we feel we thought things through and on the rightness or wrongness of the outcome of our inner deliberations. All this inner dialogue seems to require some sense of self if it is not to sound like mere babble, and how could we think of it that way and still take our moral lives seriously? Perhaps there is a way; but if so, it is not a very obvious one, to say the least, for anyone who ever wrestles with himself in this way, and it is hard to imagine any human being who never does.

Which is not to say that we are entire naive about our own sense of self. We know that it changes over time, and we could perhaps even get used to the idea that it changes every moment anew. We can get puzzled, even as we watch ourselves weighing options, by how the matter comes out in the end; just what tipped the scales, we may wonder, or where did the final decision really come from—as if we were not involved after all, but only observing an impersonal process with no core to it at all, much as the Buddha taught. We can even contemplate the possibility that perhaps all the to-and-fro was just meaningless theatrics around a choice that I could not, finally, have made any other way. Or if I could have made it differently—especially if doing so would have been the better choice (also no very unusual situation to find oneself in)—then why didn’t I? So we may well become mysteries to ourselves, as St Augustine put it so memorably in his Confessions; but what we cannot usually do is to shake the sense that the selves we seem to be, however confused, are quite real.

Perhaps the Buddhists don’t even mean to tell us that these selves we believe in so firmly are unreal, only that they are misunderstood. In the moment, we are not just falling victim to an illusion or merely imagining things; there is a momentary self as surely as there is a flicker, moment by moment, in a burning candle. It’s just that the flame is never quite the same, if we look closely enough, so the continuity we attribute to it is problematic, as we can see when the wax burns down. And so it is with us too, except for the felt experience that holds these moments together for us as it presumably doesn’t for inanimate objects (though it must be admitted that we know little of the inner life of the candle). What is more, the Buddhists conceded all along, indeed emphasized, that the sense of self, as opposed to its reality, is so powerful that it must be expected to linger, like the scent on fresh laundry (or the stench, back when urine and lye and even cow dung got used for washing, not detergent, as in the Buddha’s day), long after the cruder impurities have been wiped off the mind (Samyutta Nikaya 22:89). No wonder no-self is so hard to grasp: the final traces of self-belief that keeps blocking our view are said to be the very last obstacles cleared out of our way on the Path, the ultimate way-station before full and final liberation.

All this remains quite opaque to me, I’m afraid, and I suspect that the reasons why a proper understanding of no-self is so difficult run far deeper than our day-to-day lives. In the famous Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (more cause for being afraid), space, time, and causation are presented not as inherent features of things, the way we ordinarily take them to be, but rather as categories we impose on our sensory experience to make it intelligible. We don’t get a choice in the matter; it is a function of how we are built. But it is still a real feature of the world as it is for us, though not as it is in itself. Of that world in itself, not bound by our notions of time and space and causation, we have no conception; and perhaps the answer to the riddle of the self and its freedom is to be found here. Maybe the trouble is that the split posited by Kant applies to our very selves as well as to anything else: when we are aware of ourselves as creatures living within the bounds of time and space, our ordinary sense of causation applies; but that is not all there is to us, and we are also part of the world as it is in itself, beyond those categories, though we can have no clear understanding of that world precisely because it is not subject to the necessary categories of our experience. And in that other world, freedom and self may have quite different meanings than in ours.

Human science for centuries and even millennia kept tightening the mesh of determinate causation that surrounds us, but then it took a drastically different turn a little over a hundred years ago. Relativity theory, in particular, began telling its so far irrefutable but utterly unintuitive story about space and time, and then quantum physics arrived at positing causal processes that are even more plainly incompatible with how we normally experience the world, to the point of dumfounding our intuitions altogether. So our place in the world, while better explored than ever, has not lost its fundamental mysteriousness, and perhaps the Buddha’s via negativa (see Post #24 on what the Dhamma is not) still applies: the self is not what it appears, a solid and abiding thing; but to say what it is not in this manner does not imply that nothing remains, any more than it would be right to say that Nibbana is nothing at all. (It cannot be called something, or anything; its nature—and even using that word is not quite correct—is not for words to capture.) Or to put it the other way around, our language evolved around the demands of survival, not those of ultimate truths.

I am not claiming that I understand these philosophical, scientific, and spiritual enigmas; I do not. But what I can see, I think with a measure of clarity, is that we should be as wary of thinking that we have understood the self when we have said what it is not as when we take for granted, in the more ordinary way, that we know what the self is and that it presents no deeper difficulties for us. Nay, more than that: it would be far more dangerous, I’m pretty sure, to be misled by a false conception of no-self than it would be to remain naive and believe in the ordinary self that others believe in too and around which our everyday lives are structured.

Reading: The Questions of King Milinda (a Hellenic king in one of the Asian territories conquered by Alexander the Great, Bactria, asks a Buddhist sage to explain the puzzling doctrine of no-self to him), available in an abridged English version edited by N.K.G. Mendis (Buddhist Publication Society 2007).

P.S. (5 June 2023): Let me add—with thanks to Simon Addams, who raised the issue in a discussion—that by more canonical standards than mine, speculations about the self-no-self puzzle are not judged very favorably. (This may also be a good time to remind the reader that I do not claim to be a “good” Buddhist, or any Buddhist at all, but only someone who has come under the influence of the Teaching. To be sure, I engage in furious “I-making” all the time, and whether I have understood much of what I discuss is not for me to say.)

In the Sabbasava Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 2.7–8), such staples of philosophical self-inquiry as “Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I?” are sternly dismissed as preoccupations of the unwise, inviting mere speculative views that lead the unwary inquirer into the thickets off the Path, towards the Dhammic wilderness. Whether one affirms the self or denies it, either way one remains beholden to self-delusion and ignorance, it is said; nothing is gained by replacing one assumption, that there is a self, with another, that there is no self; only direct insight can break this impasse, when what we take to be the self dissolves under the magnifying glass of close observation. (Making sense of such paradoxical-sounding profundities is not my forte, so let me refer the reader to Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s discussion of the question in the introduction to his online translation of the Alagaddupama Sutta.)

The great questions raised by the Teaching are meant, if I am not mistaken, to be resolved not by mere reflection, but by walking the Path to its end; that holistic orientation, with experience at its foundation, needs to be kept in mind with all Buddhist tenets, but of course it does not solve the problem that we are presented with when such conundrums as self-no-self are held up for our righteous contemplation. The Dhamma is not up for discussion, strictly speaking, only for discovery and verification; but all Teachings are nonetheless open to questioning in good faith, if I understand the Buddha’s exhortations correctly (perhaps most impressively immediately before his death, see Digha Nikaya 16:4.5).

However eager we may be for the truth, all our views must remain problematic until the very end of the Path, just as the aspiring Platonic ascender from the bottom to the top of the Cave and into the light of the sun cannot exchange his opinions for wisdom all at once; as we walk on, we get a chance to refine our ideas and perspectives, let us hope, but we should keep in mind their limitations until the final goal is reached. Right view, as an indicator of direction and an aspiration, stands at the entrance gate of the Path, but the real thing awaits us only at the finishing line. Then again, all these are mere interpretations from a self-maker with philosophical sympathies as strong as his Buddhist leanings, so nothing I say should ever be taken for more than speculation of a kind that in the eyes of a Buddha would perhaps be fit for compassionate smiles only.