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
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.
