Tim lawsonA look at the Buddhist no-self doctrine
March 31st 2010 16:19
The purpose of this blog entry is to examine the Buddhist no-self doctrine and the difficulties that arise when it is combined with the rebirth doctrine. I will begin by describing the no-self doctrine and how it fits into the Buddhist philosophical framework. I will then look at a difficulty that arises when the Buddhist no-self doctrine is combined with the Buddhist rebirth doctrine: When there is no self, then who or what is it that is reborn? I will propose an answer to this question which I believe is consistent with the teachings of the Buddha.
Buddhist philosophy holds that we experience suffering (dukkha) because we are caught in the continual cycle of death and rebirth (samsara). The ultimate goal of Buddhism is to achieve liberation from this continuous cyclic existence; the final attainment of this goal is known as nirvana. Sidertis (2007, p. 32) explains that the Buddha holds that the reason we experience the suffering of samsara is because we are ignorant of the three characteristics: impermanence, suffering and non-self. In defining the Buddhist no-self doctrine, it is important, firstly, to define what is meant by the term ‘self’. The definition offered by Sidertis (2007, p. 32) states that, ‘By ‘the self’ what Buddhists mean is the essence of a person’. The concept of ‘the self’, for the purpose of this essay, refers to what is known as atta – the eternal soul: the permanent essence within everybody that survives death and is reborn in various different forms from one life to the next.
The Buddha’s no-self doctrine rejected the notion of a permanent essence or ‘soul’ that persists through countless lifetimes; this notion is known as anatta – literally meaning ‘no soul’. The Buddha’s rejection of atta is based on the notion of impermanence: the idea that nothing remains the same for more than an instant, that everything is transitory, that all phenomena is in the process of constant change. ‘To be born is already to have begun to die. Everything that comes to be passes away. Even the most apparently solid and enduring realities are secretly in process of dissolution...as a philosopher the Buddha saw this universal transiency as arising from the fact that everything, all distinguishable entities and processes (sankharas), are composite’ (Hick 1976, p. 332).
This ever-changing, impermanent nature of reality is, as I mentioned earlier, one of the key concepts in Buddhism and the doctrine of no-self arises from it. The esteemed Buddhist monk, Buddhagosa in the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification) wrote, ‘For there is suffering, but none who suffers; Doing Exists although there is no doer; Extinction is but no extinguished person; Although there is a path, there is no goer’ (Buddhagosa, p.587). This may seem to imply that Buddhists do not recognise ‘the self’ at all; however, there is a Buddhist need for describing ‘the self’ in order to function in society, even in monastic life. This ‘self’ is a fictional self, a self as a concept that can be used for its convenience, ‘the empirical self – the conscious personality that plans for the future, and remembers past and present experiences (including, may it be, experiences in former lives) as moments through which he has lived – is treated by Buddhist though as being real. Acknowledging all this, Buddhist writers explain that although in ordinary life we have to speak of the self, the concept is only a convenient fiction’ (Hick 1976, p. 335).
There is also a framework within Buddhism for describing and analysing human nature. This framework breaks what a person is down into five aggregates; these are known as the skandhas: the physical body (rupa); feelings or sensations (vedana); cognition, recognition, and interpretation (sanna); action states, which mould character, including will or volition (sankhara); the stream of consciousness (vinnana).
It should be noted that Buddhists use the skandhas to refer to human nature only as a tool to help analyse and describe what it is that makes up a person: Since the Buddhist view holds that there is no self, none of these elements, alone or in conjunction, make up a person or ‘the self’. The Buddhist view holds that you are constantly being reborn, that because everything is in constant change there’s nothing permanent that you can identify and use to identify what it is that makes up the self. Buddhists use the term ‘empty or’ ‘emptiness’ to explain that everything lacks an unchanging substance, everything lacks an inherent existence; so there is nothing that exists independently.
The notion of emptiness is therefore dependent on the doctrine of dependent origination. The doctrine of dependent origination is the idea that everything happens as a result of prior causes and conditions; that nothing originates independently, that all events or happenings – whether internally (in the mind) or externally (in the world) are causally conditioned by other events or happenings. Thus nothing comes to be without being caused or conditioned by something else; nothing exists autonomously or independently.
The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (2003, p. 29) explains ‘a key principle [in Buddhism] is dependent origination. This fundamental principle of Buddhism states that everything arises and ceases in dependence upon causes and conditions. The fourth-century Indian Buddhist thinker Asanga identified three key conditions governing this principle of dependent origination. First is ‘the absence of designer condition’, which pertains to the issue of whether or not there is a transcendent intelligence behind the origin of the universe. Second is ‘the condition of impermanence’ which relates to the notion that the very causes and conditions that give rise to the world of dependent origination are themselves impermanent and subject to change. Third is ‘the condition of potentiality’. This very important principle in Buddhist thought refers to the fact that something cannot be produced from just anything. Rather, for a particular set of causes and conditions to give rise to a particular set of effects or consequences, there must be some kind of natural relationship between them’. So the theory of dependent origination, not only supports, but is crucial to the no-self doctrine.
Many authors have pointed out the inconsistencies and difficulties that arise in Buddhist philosophy when the doctrine of no-self is combined with the doctrine of rebirth: the question asked is: if there is no independent, persisting self then who or what is reborn? (Hick: 1976; Reichenbach: 1990; Gowans: 2003; ). Reichenback (1990, p. 126) is particularly sceptical, stating ‘this view of the self (with or without the doctrine of momentariness, which simply exacerbates the problem) has serious implications for such basic Buddhist doctrines as the law of Karma, rebirth and liberation. For example, if there is no self, then espousal of rebirth seems nonsense, for it makes no sense to say that the same person would be reborn. That is, there can be no difference between birth and rebirth; we merely choose to call a newborn the reborn. Rebirth, like the doctrine of the self, is a fiction’.
Hick (1976, p. 335) notes that ‘the Buddhist conception of rebirth entails the possibility, and in some cases the actuality, of memory of former lives. [Also that] the Buddha himself, at the time of his enlightenment, recalled thousands of his previous lives and there are numerous cases in modern times, made use of in Buddhist apologetics, of ordinary people who have apparently remembered fragments of an immediately preceding life’. This begs the question, that if there is no self, then who or what is it that is reborn?
To begin to answer this question it is necessary to define what rebirth is in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth differs from that of the notion of reincarnation as expressed in Hinduism. The Hindu notion of rebirth is linked to the concept of an eternal soul that persists through death, thus in Hinduism the soul of a person moves from one life to the next: it is a fixed entity. Hick (1976, p.348) states that ‘the reports of individuals who are said to remember fragments of a past life, often discussed in support of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, have helped to fix the meaning of the word as signifying rebirth within the evolution of life on this earth. But the idea that rebecoming [or rebirth] must take the form of rebirth from the womb is not a Buddhist belief.
The traditional Buddhist view is rather that it may take this form or other forms in the numerous purgatorial and heavenly ‘worlds’. For the Buddha himself taught that only a small minority of rebecomings are as human beings’. Furthermore, the Buddhist notion of rebirth, as opposed to the notion of reincarnation, is inherently based in the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. Therefore rebirth is a process in which there is no eternal essence or ‘soul’ that is passed on, rather, what is passed on is the system of character dispositions, the karmic deposit of former lives, animated and propelled onwards by the power of craving. A simile that can be used to help understand this concept is taken from the Milindapanha by Hick. Hick (1976, p.351) describes the story in the Milindapanha in which a King is in discourse with a Revered Buddhist named Nagasena who explains that if some men were to light a lamp from a different lamp, that the flame would pass over but there would still remain two separate lamps. The second lamp receives the qualities of the first lamp, but remains distinct.
Hick (1976, p. 343) explains that ‘at death the nama-rupa (embodied existence) disintegrates. Its elements come apart and the psycho-physical individual ceases to exist. He does not survive death, and he is not reborn to live again. That particular conjunction of elements which had held together for, say, seventy years is no more. But nevertheless an aspect of him does continue – not indeed eternally, but until it has finally expended itself, or become blown out (nibbanna) at the end of many lives. That which thus continues through aeons of time, playing a central role in the formation of individual after individual, consists of a system of character dispositions, the karmic deposit of former lives, animated and propelled onwards by the power of craving.’ In other words, in Buddhist thought, there is a part of the individual that does persist through death. Hick (1976, p. 345), in an attempt to explain this contradictory occurrence, states that that which carries over or ‘rebecomes’ is called vinnana, but not the vinnana that is consciousness and one of the five skandhas but ‘something more like the unconscious dispositional state which constitutes the karmic deposit of the past’.
This still leaves us with the question, if there is no-self, what is it that is reborn? Hick (1976, p. 346) says that ‘the first thought of the new life stream, which is the immediate successor to the last thought of the dying individual, is thus sometimes called the ‘relinking consciousness’. This first ‘thought’ is however not necessarily a conscious thought, and indeed in the case of an embryo clearly it cannot be. It is rather a complex dispositional impulse, carrying a set of basic character traits and a store of unconscious memories, all powered by the craving for existence. It might thus be better to speak, not of a first thought, but of the first moment in the mental life of the new individual. That this first moment must be the immediate successor to the last moment of the mental life of the expiring person, without hiatus, follows from the anatta doctrine, with its denial of any empirical self other than the continuous stream of (conscious) and (unconscious) mental life’. I find this description of the process of rebirth to be a plausible answer to the question, if there is no self then who or what is it that is reborn? The main reason I find this to be a plausible answer is because it describes the Buddhist notion of the rebirth process in a way that is compatible with the Buddha’s no-self doctrine.
References
Gowans, C 2003, Philosophy of the Buddha, Routledge, London.
Gyatso, T 2003, Lighting the Path, Thorsons, Harper Collins Publishers, London.
Hick, J 1976, Death and Eternal Life, Collins, Glascow.
Reichenbach, B 1990, The Law of Karma: A Philosophical study, Unversity of Hawaii, Honolulu.
Sidertis, M 2007, Buddhism as Philosophy: An introduction, Ashgate, Aldershot
Buddhist philosophy holds that we experience suffering (dukkha) because we are caught in the continual cycle of death and rebirth (samsara). The ultimate goal of Buddhism is to achieve liberation from this continuous cyclic existence; the final attainment of this goal is known as nirvana. Sidertis (2007, p. 32) explains that the Buddha holds that the reason we experience the suffering of samsara is because we are ignorant of the three characteristics: impermanence, suffering and non-self. In defining the Buddhist no-self doctrine, it is important, firstly, to define what is meant by the term ‘self’. The definition offered by Sidertis (2007, p. 32) states that, ‘By ‘the self’ what Buddhists mean is the essence of a person’. The concept of ‘the self’, for the purpose of this essay, refers to what is known as atta – the eternal soul: the permanent essence within everybody that survives death and is reborn in various different forms from one life to the next.
The Buddha’s no-self doctrine rejected the notion of a permanent essence or ‘soul’ that persists through countless lifetimes; this notion is known as anatta – literally meaning ‘no soul’. The Buddha’s rejection of atta is based on the notion of impermanence: the idea that nothing remains the same for more than an instant, that everything is transitory, that all phenomena is in the process of constant change. ‘To be born is already to have begun to die. Everything that comes to be passes away. Even the most apparently solid and enduring realities are secretly in process of dissolution...as a philosopher the Buddha saw this universal transiency as arising from the fact that everything, all distinguishable entities and processes (sankharas), are composite’ (Hick 1976, p. 332).
This ever-changing, impermanent nature of reality is, as I mentioned earlier, one of the key concepts in Buddhism and the doctrine of no-self arises from it. The esteemed Buddhist monk, Buddhagosa in the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification) wrote, ‘For there is suffering, but none who suffers; Doing Exists although there is no doer; Extinction is but no extinguished person; Although there is a path, there is no goer’ (Buddhagosa, p.587). This may seem to imply that Buddhists do not recognise ‘the self’ at all; however, there is a Buddhist need for describing ‘the self’ in order to function in society, even in monastic life. This ‘self’ is a fictional self, a self as a concept that can be used for its convenience, ‘the empirical self – the conscious personality that plans for the future, and remembers past and present experiences (including, may it be, experiences in former lives) as moments through which he has lived – is treated by Buddhist though as being real. Acknowledging all this, Buddhist writers explain that although in ordinary life we have to speak of the self, the concept is only a convenient fiction’ (Hick 1976, p. 335).
There is also a framework within Buddhism for describing and analysing human nature. This framework breaks what a person is down into five aggregates; these are known as the skandhas: the physical body (rupa); feelings or sensations (vedana); cognition, recognition, and interpretation (sanna); action states, which mould character, including will or volition (sankhara); the stream of consciousness (vinnana).
It should be noted that Buddhists use the skandhas to refer to human nature only as a tool to help analyse and describe what it is that makes up a person: Since the Buddhist view holds that there is no self, none of these elements, alone or in conjunction, make up a person or ‘the self’. The Buddhist view holds that you are constantly being reborn, that because everything is in constant change there’s nothing permanent that you can identify and use to identify what it is that makes up the self. Buddhists use the term ‘empty or’ ‘emptiness’ to explain that everything lacks an unchanging substance, everything lacks an inherent existence; so there is nothing that exists independently.
The notion of emptiness is therefore dependent on the doctrine of dependent origination. The doctrine of dependent origination is the idea that everything happens as a result of prior causes and conditions; that nothing originates independently, that all events or happenings – whether internally (in the mind) or externally (in the world) are causally conditioned by other events or happenings. Thus nothing comes to be without being caused or conditioned by something else; nothing exists autonomously or independently.
The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (2003, p. 29) explains ‘a key principle [in Buddhism] is dependent origination. This fundamental principle of Buddhism states that everything arises and ceases in dependence upon causes and conditions. The fourth-century Indian Buddhist thinker Asanga identified three key conditions governing this principle of dependent origination. First is ‘the absence of designer condition’, which pertains to the issue of whether or not there is a transcendent intelligence behind the origin of the universe. Second is ‘the condition of impermanence’ which relates to the notion that the very causes and conditions that give rise to the world of dependent origination are themselves impermanent and subject to change. Third is ‘the condition of potentiality’. This very important principle in Buddhist thought refers to the fact that something cannot be produced from just anything. Rather, for a particular set of causes and conditions to give rise to a particular set of effects or consequences, there must be some kind of natural relationship between them’. So the theory of dependent origination, not only supports, but is crucial to the no-self doctrine.
Many authors have pointed out the inconsistencies and difficulties that arise in Buddhist philosophy when the doctrine of no-self is combined with the doctrine of rebirth: the question asked is: if there is no independent, persisting self then who or what is reborn? (Hick: 1976; Reichenbach: 1990; Gowans: 2003; ). Reichenback (1990, p. 126) is particularly sceptical, stating ‘this view of the self (with or without the doctrine of momentariness, which simply exacerbates the problem) has serious implications for such basic Buddhist doctrines as the law of Karma, rebirth and liberation. For example, if there is no self, then espousal of rebirth seems nonsense, for it makes no sense to say that the same person would be reborn. That is, there can be no difference between birth and rebirth; we merely choose to call a newborn the reborn. Rebirth, like the doctrine of the self, is a fiction’.
Hick (1976, p. 335) notes that ‘the Buddhist conception of rebirth entails the possibility, and in some cases the actuality, of memory of former lives. [Also that] the Buddha himself, at the time of his enlightenment, recalled thousands of his previous lives and there are numerous cases in modern times, made use of in Buddhist apologetics, of ordinary people who have apparently remembered fragments of an immediately preceding life’. This begs the question, that if there is no self, then who or what is it that is reborn?
To begin to answer this question it is necessary to define what rebirth is in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth differs from that of the notion of reincarnation as expressed in Hinduism. The Hindu notion of rebirth is linked to the concept of an eternal soul that persists through death, thus in Hinduism the soul of a person moves from one life to the next: it is a fixed entity. Hick (1976, p.348) states that ‘the reports of individuals who are said to remember fragments of a past life, often discussed in support of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, have helped to fix the meaning of the word as signifying rebirth within the evolution of life on this earth. But the idea that rebecoming [or rebirth] must take the form of rebirth from the womb is not a Buddhist belief.
The traditional Buddhist view is rather that it may take this form or other forms in the numerous purgatorial and heavenly ‘worlds’. For the Buddha himself taught that only a small minority of rebecomings are as human beings’. Furthermore, the Buddhist notion of rebirth, as opposed to the notion of reincarnation, is inherently based in the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. Therefore rebirth is a process in which there is no eternal essence or ‘soul’ that is passed on, rather, what is passed on is the system of character dispositions, the karmic deposit of former lives, animated and propelled onwards by the power of craving. A simile that can be used to help understand this concept is taken from the Milindapanha by Hick. Hick (1976, p.351) describes the story in the Milindapanha in which a King is in discourse with a Revered Buddhist named Nagasena who explains that if some men were to light a lamp from a different lamp, that the flame would pass over but there would still remain two separate lamps. The second lamp receives the qualities of the first lamp, but remains distinct.
Hick (1976, p. 343) explains that ‘at death the nama-rupa (embodied existence) disintegrates. Its elements come apart and the psycho-physical individual ceases to exist. He does not survive death, and he is not reborn to live again. That particular conjunction of elements which had held together for, say, seventy years is no more. But nevertheless an aspect of him does continue – not indeed eternally, but until it has finally expended itself, or become blown out (nibbanna) at the end of many lives. That which thus continues through aeons of time, playing a central role in the formation of individual after individual, consists of a system of character dispositions, the karmic deposit of former lives, animated and propelled onwards by the power of craving.’ In other words, in Buddhist thought, there is a part of the individual that does persist through death. Hick (1976, p. 345), in an attempt to explain this contradictory occurrence, states that that which carries over or ‘rebecomes’ is called vinnana, but not the vinnana that is consciousness and one of the five skandhas but ‘something more like the unconscious dispositional state which constitutes the karmic deposit of the past’.
This still leaves us with the question, if there is no-self, what is it that is reborn? Hick (1976, p. 346) says that ‘the first thought of the new life stream, which is the immediate successor to the last thought of the dying individual, is thus sometimes called the ‘relinking consciousness’. This first ‘thought’ is however not necessarily a conscious thought, and indeed in the case of an embryo clearly it cannot be. It is rather a complex dispositional impulse, carrying a set of basic character traits and a store of unconscious memories, all powered by the craving for existence. It might thus be better to speak, not of a first thought, but of the first moment in the mental life of the new individual. That this first moment must be the immediate successor to the last moment of the mental life of the expiring person, without hiatus, follows from the anatta doctrine, with its denial of any empirical self other than the continuous stream of (conscious) and (unconscious) mental life’. I find this description of the process of rebirth to be a plausible answer to the question, if there is no self then who or what is it that is reborn? The main reason I find this to be a plausible answer is because it describes the Buddhist notion of the rebirth process in a way that is compatible with the Buddha’s no-self doctrine.
References
Gowans, C 2003, Philosophy of the Buddha, Routledge, London.
Gyatso, T 2003, Lighting the Path, Thorsons, Harper Collins Publishers, London.
Hick, J 1976, Death and Eternal Life, Collins, Glascow.
Reichenbach, B 1990, The Law of Karma: A Philosophical study, Unversity of Hawaii, Honolulu.
Sidertis, M 2007, Buddhism as Philosophy: An introduction, Ashgate, Aldershot
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