What Did The Buddha Mean?

In the first segment of this lecture, we saw two things.

First, that the Buddha and his famous discourse on the not self,

says that you will not find the self in any of these five aggregates, and

second, that this is considered a very, very important fact.

Now, what may not be clear to you is why is this considered so important?

I mean, what is the connection between this idea that there is not a self,

and the Buddha's larger mission of ending suffering, ending dukkha.

You know after all, supposedly he delivered this discourse right after

the discourse about the four noble truths, and these monks were

enlightened upon hearing this course, but it's kind of not clear why.

Why exactly is the doctrine so important?

It doesn't take long to explain, why logically, this teaching might have led to

the enlightenment of the monks, so we'll just spend a couple minutes on that, but

then that is going to lead to a very interesting question.

Is it possible, that when the Buddha said you won't find the self in these five

aggregates, he did not mean to deny the existence of the self altogether?

That is the view of some scholars, maybe not a majority, but of some scholars.

I think it's at least a plausible view worth hearing, and it may have important

implications, because some people may find this a more useful teaching,

than the more conventionally accepting teaching, that the self does not exist.

As for the question, of how the Buddhist teaching led to the enlightenment of these

monks, to their liberation from suffering?

Well, here's an important clue.

These five aggregates are sometimes called the five aggregates of clinging.

You probably remember this term, clinging, from an earlier lecture when we talked

about the four noble truths, the Buddha's diagnosis of the human predicament.

He said that the source of our dukkha or suffering, the unsatisfactoriness of life,

is craving for things, and clinging to things that are not going to last forever.

Now, normally when you think about clinging to things,

you think about things that are kind of out there in the world.

I used my own favorite example, powdered sugar donuts, and

you imagine yourself kind of clinging to the donuts themselves.

But when you think about it,

the clinging is going to have to be mediated by the aggregates.

I mean there can't be direct contact between your mind and the donuts, right?

The way you apprehend the donuts, is well, first of all, you have this perception

of the donuts, whether you see them, feel them, taste them.

The perception may be associated with a positive feeling, and

that leads you to crave, and to cling to the donuts.

And, even leaving aside the way that things in the outside, the clinging

to things on the outside of your body, can be mediated by these aggregates,

there are things just floating around in here that you might cling to.

For example, opinions, which would be in the realm of mental formations.

You know, if you cling to them, you'll wind up arguing with people needlessly,

you may get sad when people reject your opinions, and so on.

That's a form of attachment, of clinging, so, basically all forms of clinging.

The Buddha apparently concluded, could be taken care of, if you could just

get these monks to quit clinging to these aggregates, okay?

And the way he accomplishes this, is there's a kind of refrain in this sermon.

He goes from aggregate to aggregate and

says that, In conclusion, this is not mine.

This I am not.

This is not myself.

He says that.

That kind of three-part refrain, about all of the aggregates, and

apparently the idea, is that once the monks realized these things are not

part of their selves, then they will let go of them.

Now I'm not sure it would happen so automatically in my case.

If you convince me that in some sense, myself isn't in these things,

I don't imagine my desire for donuts just vanishing miraculously,

but that is said to have happened.

To put a slightly finer point, on the logic of this, what the Buddha says,

he explains to the monks, look, a disciple who gets the picture

upon seeing that this, is not mine, this I am not, this is not myself,

will become disenchanted with each of these five aggregates.

And upon being disenchanted, he will become dispassionate, and

upon losing the passion, upon becoming dispassionate,

he will be released, he will be liberated.

That's what the Buddha says, he will be liberated.

Now, this leads to a question and possibly a paradox.

The Buddha says, that you let go of all this stuff and

you will be liberated, okay, but where are you once you're liberated on this map?

I mean, didn't we say, that according to Buddhist teaching, these five aggregates

constitute everything about a person, and everything about a person's experience.

So, I don't quite understand how this

person steps away from all this and remain intact in theory, right?

It sounds to me suspiciously like there actually is a self, and

the self is being liberated.

In any event, it's kind of hard to reconcile this,

with the basic Buddhist teaching, that these five aggregates

constitute everything there can be about a person, or a person's experience.

The idea that you let go of them entirely, and you're still around and

you're liberated.

It's not obvious to me how that works.

Now of course there are ways of resolving paradoxes.

Paradoxes arise in various religions, in philosophical systems, and

thinkers come along who purport to resolve them.

You can do that here.

Thinkers have thought about this.

I think, we will get into this later, but

I think a particularly auspicious possibility,

is to think about the possibility, that maybe consciousness is what's liberated.

There are other Buddhist teachings where that kind of seems to be the idea,

but the fact is that in that one sermon,

he talks about clinging to consciousness, and then letting go of the clinging.

So, it seems like there's something that winds up outside of the system.

Well, there's an alternative to trying to actually resolve the paradox.

We can just ask the question of, is it possible,

that the interpretation of this discourse has been wrong all along.

Maybe he did not mean to assert, that there is no such thing as a self at all.

I mean, after all, in the sermon,

he never says flat out, there is no self, no such self exists.

And you might reply, well okay he doesn't say that, but we know that in

Buddha's thought, these five aggregates constitute everything there is.

So when he goes through, and says no self here, here, here, here,

he's seeing self can't exist, but the fact is, he never says in the sermon, these

five aggregates constitute everything about a person, and a person's experience.

Now both of these things certainly did become Buddhist teaching.

That these are exhaustive categories, and that the self does not exist.

There's no doubt about that, but as for the question of what was meant

by this first sermon, there is the real possibility,

that the idea was not To deny the existence of self.

Okay, well, what was the idea?

Well, one possibility is that he looked at these monks,

at the trouble they were having kind of dealing with things.

And he found they were all entangled with these feelings and mental formations.

They were attached to their body and he thought,

well, maybe if I put it to them this way.

These are not part of the self.

Maybe that will be a constructive way to think about it.

It's not that he's asserting a metaphysical doctrine.

He just says, maybe I should tell him, you don't have to own this stuff.

And in a way, when you look at the way he phrases it, that's kind of plausible.

I mean, he keeps saying, this is not mine,

this I am not, this is not myself.

That's a very, kind of pragmatically, useful way of putting it.

I don't have to own this.

I don't have to identify with this.

So, that is a real possibility that this was more of an instrumental doctrine,

a pragmatic doctrine than an assertion of metaphysical truth.

Now, I don't have a firm conviction one way or

the other as to what was meant in this discourse.

I would have to go through reams of Buddhist teaching to arrive

at some sort of confident opinion.

However, I do know someone who has gone through reams of Buddhist teaching.

We've already met him in an earlier lecture of Bhikkhu Bodhi, who

has translated reams of Buddhist teaching, including this particular sermon.

And this question of how we should take this doctrine

of not self came up in a conversation I had with him.

And what he says is really interesting and on point here.

>> And I would not say that the teaching non-self

means that there is no self, whether we don't have a self.

Though I would not say that when I explained it in that way, that it implies

that we do have the kind of absolute, unconditioned, indescribable self.

The way some of the Vedanta, the Hindu interpreters of Buddhism

try to interpret the Buddhist teaching of non-self.

What I would say is that the Buddha uses different modes of discourse

depending on the context.

And so when he's speaking within what I would call a contemplative context,

within the context of inside contemplation.

Or within the context of the aspiration for liberation.

Then he takes us at the primary obstacle to the attainment of liberation,

is the grasping or clinging to the mental and

physical components of our being as a self.

With the primary obstacle we could say, is the view of self that arises

in regard to the mental and material constituents of our being.

Or to the clinging to the notion that I am.

That there's some kind of true,

substantial core at the center of our being.

And so in order to debilitate and eliminate that clinging

to the view of self and to the notion of a substantial I.

The Buddha teaches not that there is no self but

that all of the objects of clinging are not self.

And the objects of clinging, or

what he sums up in what are called the five aggregates, or the five constituents.

Bodily form, feeling, perception, mental functions or

volitional activities and consciousness.

So within that framework, that liberative framework or

that framework of contemplative insight.

The Buddha teaches that one should contemplate all

the constituents of being as not mine, not I, not myself.

But in other contexts, what I would call the context of

ethical action or the context of karma and its fruit.

The Buddha teaches, again, not that there is a self, but he will use the language

of selfhood saying that, for example, one is responsible for ones self.

>> Now reinforcing Bhikkhu Bodhi's view of this is the fact that

there is a discourse in the teachings in which the Buddha says.

That it is unwise to hold that as a true and established view,

either that the self exists for me or that the self does not exist for me.

And another thing that may lend some strength to this view is the contention of

some scholars that the teachings, generally taken as earliest,

do not include the flat out assertion that no self exists.

And one of the scholars who has made this argument, he's named Peter Harvey.

And he wrote a book called Selfless Minds.

It's about this whole early Buddhist conception of the self.

And he framed this whole issue in a really interesting way.

Here's what he wrote.

A philosophical denial is just a view, a theory, which may be agreed with or not.

It does not get one actually to examine all the things that one really

does identify with, consciously or unconsciously as self or I.

This examination in a calm meditative context,

is what the not-self teaching aims at.

It is not so much a thing to be thought about as to be done.

So in a way we're back to Adjun Cha

who insisted that we shouldn't try to intellectualize about this no self thing.

Because basically he was saying, quit talking about it and just sit down and

do it.

And I've gotta say that in some ways, I like the conception of the teaching that

we're talking about here more user friendly.

Than the teaching as it's conventionally interpreted as being this kind of

doctrinaire thing.

I think it's in some ways useful and

for some people will be useful to think of the Buddhist teaching as just a way of

framing the issue productively, as kind of instrumental and pragmatic.

And here's why I think that.

If you look at the liberation of these monks that happens

in the course of the discourse on the not-self,

it's not necessarily a very appealing sight, I think, for many of us.

Because remember, the Buddha says they should become

disenchanted from every aspect of the mind and experience.

And that word disenchanted is sometimes translated as estranged from.

One translation has it as revulsed by.

So in any event, we seem to be talking about a pretty

thorough alienation from everything here.

And I don't know many people who would look forward to that.

And this is a reminder, by the way, that in these discourses,

the Buddha is typically talking to two monks.

They often began with his greeting the bhikkus, which means monks.

And that's a very special audience.

Remember, in those days,

these monks were people who had left society in search of truth and liberation.

They were willing to undergo very harsh austerities in search of truth and

liberation.

In fact So harsh that the Buddha presented the eightfold path,

which as we've seen is pretty arduous as a moderate thing,

as a middle way, that isn't as demanding as what these monks were used to.

Well, for an audience like that, they want full out liberation,

and so an extreme teaching makes sense.

For a lot of people, at least certainly to start with,

they would like to have more modest goals.

And so that's what I like about seeing the teaching of not self as saying,

basically, look, there´s nothing in here that you have to own.

There´s nothing in here that you have to identify with.

This particular hatred, this particular jealousy, this particular sorrow,

you don't have to think of it as yours.

And in fact, Buddhism offers a technique, which we discussed,

mindfulness meditation, that may help you in a certain sense,

weaken the connection of these things.

In a certain sense, even disown them.

At least to the extent of not letting them get the kind of traction they used to

get and control your thoughts and your subsequent behavior.

Now, at the same time, anybody is of course as free to

go as far as they will, all the way to the sort of liberation that the monks sought.

But this interpretation of the teaching leaves room for anybody.

It's just, you don't have to own anything here.

And if you want to own nothing, good luck.

Now, it is still the case, even if this interpretation of that sermon is right.

There is no denying that the idea of not self in the sense that

the self does not exist did become part of Buddhist teaching.

And it did include this emphasis on the concept of control that we

saw in the teaching.

In other words, the self as this controller,

as this CEO is thought to not exist.

So Buddhaghosa, who is one of the very most important Buddhist thinkers,

who lived centuries after the Buddha, said deeds exist, but no doer is found.

And this idea, deeds without a doer, has become part of the idea that the self

doesn't exist, things happen, you do stuff, but there's no CEO in there.

Meditators often report, those meditators who get so far into the practice

that this all makes sense to them, they talk about thoughts without a thinker.

They see their thoughts, but they become convinced that they're

in some sense not the thing that generated the thoughts.

And they also, by the way, these meditators, often put a lot of emphasis

on the other theme we saw in the Buddha's discourse, impermanence.

They, while meditating, are quite taken by the fluidity of things, and

this feeds into their idea that there's no substantial core there.

A lot of these meditators who say they have experientially apprehended

the idea of not self, say it's been very important, made them happier, maybe

better people, and in some cases they say it's been absolutely transformative.

We're going to be hearing from some of these people,

hearing what the experience is like, the experience of not self, and

the sense in which it has made a difference.

But, I want to be in position to assess the validity of their apprehension.

In other words, I want to ask not just has it been a useful experience for

them, but does it comport with what science is telling us about

the structure of the mind.

So before we hear from them, we're going to turn to the question

of what modern psychology has to say about the self and

we're going to do that in the next segment of this lecture.

And we're going to find that actually there's more support for

these meditative apprehensions than you might imagine.

Buddhism and Modern Psychology

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