Tagged: ātman
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Blanchard - Burning Yourself (2010)
1This paper proposes that the Buddhist teaching of Dependent Arising (paṭicca samuppāda) is structured as a polemic modeled on the Vedic fire rituals of the Buddha's time, particularly the Agnicayana, which were intended to create and perfect an eternal self (ātman) by re-enacting creation myths like that of Prajāpati. The author argues that the Buddha co-opted this familiar ritualistic framework to demonstrate how individuals, through their own habitual psychological "rituals"—such as clinging to feelings (vedanā), craving (taṇhā), and forming views (upādāna)—construct a false and impermanent sense of self. This constructed self, born from ignorance (avijjā), is what undergoes the cycle of "birth" (jāti) and "aging and death" (jarāmaraṇa), which is presented as a metonym for suffering (dukkha). By using this model, the Buddha refutes the Vedic worldview, showing that its methods, when understood as psychological processes, lead not to an eternal, blissful self but to the creation of a transient, suffering identity, a context that, once lost, made the teaching's structure obscure to later generations.
Jurewicz- Playing with Fire (2000)
2In her analysis, Joanna Jurewicz posits that the Buddhist law of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) is a polemical reinterpretation of Vedic cosmogony, which shares a similar structure and even specific concepts but is stripped of its positive value by the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anattā). The twelve links of the Buddhist chain are shown to parallel stages of Vedic creation, where concepts like *avidyā* (ignorance) and *saṃskāra* (volition) mirror the Creator's initial state and subsequent will, and later links like *nāmarūpa* (name-and-form) and the sense bases (*ṣaḍāyatana*) map onto the *ātman's* differentiation into the cognized world. The central Vedic metaphor of a creative, divine fire (Agni) is deliberately inverted, with its "thirst" to create becoming the destructive fire of craving (*tṛṣṇā*) and its need for fuel becoming clinging (*upādāna*). By systematically removing the *ātman* as the divine agent, the Buddha reframes the entire desirable Vedic creative process as a meaningless and absurd chain of events that inevitably culminates in suffering through becoming, birth, and death (*bhava, jāti, jarāmaraṇa*).
Wynne - The ātman and its negation (2010)
3The famous Buddhist "No Self" (anātman) doctrine is largely absent from the earliest texts because the original teachings were founded on a different and more subtle philosophy than the later, standard interpretation. Early critiques, such as the "Not-Self" (anattā) teaching, are grounded in a principle of "epistemological conditioning," where fundamental concepts including "self," "existence," and even space-time are not ultimate realities but are dependently originated through cognitive processes. This is why the early texts pragmatically avoid direct ontological statements like "the self does not exist," instead guiding practitioners to see that identifying with conditioned phenomena is "unsuitable" and thereby transcend the very conceptual framework that creates a sense of self. The explicit "No Self" doctrine developed later, as seen in texts like the *Vajirā Sutta* and the Abhidharma, when this subtle philosophy gave way to a "reductionistic realism" that analyzes the person as a collection of essenceless components within an objectively real world, thus shifting the focus from a radical critique of conceptuality to the denial of a specific entity.