No Soul for Westerners

An Exploration of the Buddhist Concept of Anatta

Modern Western culture is rooted in beliefs about jealous gods, personal saviors, souls that survive death and the implicit primacy of the individual over the group. Without the self, we’re lost. Unlike in Christianity and much of the conceptual and philosophical basis of Western society, Buddhism teaches that there is no such thing as an individual soul. For a long time I had an intuitive feeling that the doctrine of anatta (no self or no soul) was ‘correct’ (whatever that might mean), and when I became an official, card-carrying Buddhist I set about trying to understand the concept by reading various ancient and modern scriptures and commentaries.

The direct impetus for writing this piece was a MOOC in parapsychological research and theory I took in 2015. On the one hand presentations in the course supported, for example, the reality of extranormal powers gained by assiduous training in modalities like yoga or meditation, while on the other hand the theoretical framework of parapsychology implicitly takes as a fundamental unit the self or, more esoterically stated, the soul. In Buddhist training, meanwhile, extranormal powers are acknowledged to be a byproduct of a meditative practice also held to reveal insight into anatta or no soul. The subtle but important difference between these theoretical models can be illustrated by the following rhetorical question: How can you have a good ghost story if there’s no Uncle Freddy to haunt the house until the secret location of the lost will is revealed?

As a final project for the MOOC I proposed to explore the concept of anatta and its implications for parapsychology; that work is what I present here. I did not present it in the context of the course because in the end I felt my discussion was bit more personal and spiritual than I felt was appropriate for an international scholarly audience. However, if you are someone steeped in Western cultural and social tradition who is curious about how this whole no soul thing works, especially with respect to the afterlife, reincarnation and the paranormal, this blog post is for you!

Although I have a fairly extensive background in comparative religion and Western esotericism, it’s not until recently that a garden-variety Caucasian American like me could get access to not only fairly good translations of Buddhist teachings but also the institutional framework (sangha) that makes it possible to bring such teachings into one’s life. Lawrence Sutin’s All Is Change: the 2000 year journey of Buddhism to the West makes for fascinating reading on the many ways in which Western understandings of Buddhist concepts have been shaped to fit various Western political, religious and sociocultural agendas. He writes:

“There have been many obstacles to the understanding of Buddhism in the West – language, geographical distance, religious and cultural differences, colonial and postcolonial politics.”

The concept of no self is a particularly difficult one for people raised to believe in individual identity and personal soul. This is reflected specifically in how concepts like karma and reincarnation are interpreted in the West, an issue I will return to below.

Main Flavors of Buddhism

·         Theravada

·         Mahayana (including Zen)

·         Tibetan (aka Vajrayan)

Buddhism has been around for about 2500 years and comes in many different flavors. All Buddhist lineages are rooted in India, but probably the most well-known in the West are Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is heavily influenced by pre-Buddhist shamanic culture and, needless to say, the unique historical and social circumstances of the Tibetan diaspora. Zen is a subset of Mahayana Buddhism that came out of China. It has two flavors: Soto and Rinzai. My sangha (think church or congregation) is Soto Zen and was founded by a British woman, Reverend Master (RM) Jiyu-Kennett. An extraordinary trail blazer, she undertook rigorous training at temples in Malaysia and Japan before founding the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (OBC) in the United States. Much of the material I draw upon here comes from RM Jiyu or her students. I feel I can rely on this information because from what I have seen I respect the integrity and sincerity of training in the OBC sangha.

While aspects of Buddhist practice like mindfulness have been exported to the West as self help techniques stripped of any cultural or spiritual context, the concept of anatta is central to Buddhism. It’s an experience that those who train in Buddhism will, after a while, experience as a truth about reality. Formally, anatta means that:

• neither within the  bodily and mental phenomena of existence nor outside of them can be found anything that in the ultimate sense could be regarded as a self-existing, real ego-identity, soul or other abiding substance; or that
• while there is continuity (after death), but there is no special entity (that continues)

In order to get from here to there, however, we have to first understand how our sense of self works. Where do we come from? According to Buddhist understanding, our sense of a unitary self arises from the operation of [drumroll]  . . .

The Five Skandhas

·         Form

·         Sensation

·         Perception

·         Mental Formations

·         Consciousness

Skandhas offer an alternative schema for organizing the concept of the self, versus relying on Western notions like the big five personality traits and the five senses in psychology and physiology. Skandha translates as aggregate, heap or bundle; it refers to categories of perceptual events which we tend to cling to and identify with, as in you are conscious, you are thinking your thoughts, you perceive some things and feel others, and all this is somehow taking place in your very own mind in your very own body.

The difficulty for a Westerner in applying these categories is that it’s not at all obvious how skandhas are psychophysical processes apart from ourselves in addition to being, in fact, fundamentally impermanent. The Buddhist explanation for this is the observation that we cling onto our perceptions and thereby make them more real than they would otherwise be. Meditation can clear away some of these cobwebs of delusion. Theravadan nun Sister Khema offers an example of how during meditation the functioning of the skandhas may be unraveled:

“But if meditation has any benefit and success, it must show that first of all there is mind and there is body. There isn’t one single thing acting in accord all the time. There is mind which is thinking and making the body act. Now that is the first step in knowing oneself a little clearer. And then we can note, “This is a feeling” and “I am giving this feeling a name” which means memory and perception. “This is the thought I am having about this feeling. The feeling has come about because of the mind-consciousness has connected with the feeling that has arisen.” This illustrates how in meditation one becomes aware of the different skandhas operating.”

Skandhas are not problematic in themselves; they are a variety of sub processes that more or less come together at birth and separate at death. The self and identity exist due to our clinging to skandhas, but there is nothing fundamentally real or permanent about either; it is continually being brought into being and dissolving. Ideally, the concept of anatta should not be understood as annihilation of the self but in terms of the ability to perceive the self we identify with as a creation in (non-teleological) progress.

Even if that’s the case, what’s so bad about identifying with the experiences of the skandhas? The problem is that our experiences of identity are unreal and impermanent; worse yet, our attachment to them is why we suffer and cause suffering. Buddhism calls these three facets of reality or “Marks of Human Existence” anatta (no self), anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering).

If our experience of identity and selfhood during life is due to a delusion based on clinging to the experiences of impermanent skandhas, what is the self or soul after death? RM Jiyu's understanding of Buddhism led her to teach that the self is an impermanent combination of several components. One component is personal (ego, sense of self, body image) and does not survive death. Another is Buddha Nature and, while it survives death, does not do so on a personal or individual level. A final part of the living person is their karma, that is, spiritual force set in motion by volitional action.

Ontological Components of Human Being

·         Personal identity

·         Buddha Nature

·         Karma

We have already talked about how the self is a delusion caused when we identify with or cling to the routine operation of the skandhas; let us now consider what Buddha Nature might be.

Rather than being a god entity identifiable in terms of a culturally articulated location in a social hierarchy, Buddha Nature is an ontological state that can be accessed or at least approached through meditation and contemplation practices. Training that results in understanding that you create your perceptions yet not are the creation of your perceptions, or becoming aware of your awareness versus your personality, are pointers to the realization of Buddha Nature. Those who may be impatient with meditation will still come to understand, by aging, that while memories come and go, awareness is self-sustaining.

A verbal expression of the experience of Buddha Nature is “I create the perception, but not what is aware of the perception.” Perception is human and temporary; awareness of the perception is Buddha Nature. In 1938 J.W. Dunne, famous for writing about dreams and completely ignorant of Buddhism, advanced a rather curious mathematical proof of awareness of consciousness which I encourage people to look more at: “We are self-conscious creatures aware of something which we are able to regard as other than ourselves.” (The Serial Universe)  What I find interesting about his work (which I can barely follow, but seems logical as far as I can follow it) is the idea that self-awareness and other awareness are both complicit in the human experience of being. But I digress.

What about Karma? Karma is a concept that seems to fit in nicely with certain Western moral tendencies and as such is perhaps the easiest for Westerners to think they understand. Forget all that. Karma is the force set in motion by any volitional (willed or intended) action, good or bad. Good volitional action or positive karma (based on compassion or non-deluded understanding) gets reabsorbed into Buddha Nature and causes no further karmic ripples. Bad volitional action (based on delusion, hatred or desire) creates negative karma which will continue after a being’s death and result in the birth of a new being or beings.

To summarize, what Westerners think of as a unitary, transcendent individual identity, Buddhism breaks down into 1) a delusion of permanent personal identity, 2) the transcendence of the Buddha Nature component of identity, and 3) the continuing consequences of volitional action, almost as if they could be mapped as vector forces.

In The Book of Life, RM Jiyu gives her own explanation of what might survive after the death of a being:

“Nor is just one being likely to result from the death of a previous being. An unconverted carnal lust may be reborn in an animal form. An unresolved confusion at the time of death may be reborn in a muddle-headed human. A secret and hidden evil act may cause the birth of a fixed or wandering ghost, just to give a few examples. Thus, the death of one human could result in the rebirth of an animal, a human and a ghost all out of the unpurified karma of that human’s karmic stream.”

Not believing in personal soul, Buddhism also does not hold with reincarnation as popularly conceptualized in the West. From Zen is Eternal Life:

“The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth should be distinguished from the theory of reincarnation, or that of transmigration, for Buddhism denies the existence of an unchanging or eternal soul. The forms of man or animal are merely the temporary manifestations of the life force that is common to all.”

Initially I was surprised to learn that Buddhists don’t believe in reincarnation, and worked on the problem long enough to distill my understanding into a tweet: ‘Put in a body once a life/Reborn with every passing thought.’

On the other hand, memories of past lives pop up in meditation and unusual dreams; they are even reported in research. What’s up with that? When I asked the head monk at my temple, he said it’s as if karma tends to collect in clumps that float around together until a suitable being is ready for birth and then latches on to it. It made me think of the stories you hear about the big floating garbage area somewhere out on the Pacific, but he may have been thinking of a story our teacher RM Jiyu told:

“Imagine you have a bag in which you’ve brought home some fish. You eat the fish, but you carry the bag around and it still smells of fish … We all carry the impregnations of past lives, but they’ve got nothing to do with us.”

 (Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett, quoted in Meetings with Remarkable Women (Lenore Friedman, 2000) pp 191-192)

Karma is about volitional action. There always choices. They’re not always the ones you want.

In part two, I’ll discuss implications for parapsychology and put in references.