Tagged: No Self
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Anālayo - Dependent Arising (2020)
1In the Buddhist concept of dependent arising, consciousness and name-and-form share a unique, reciprocal relationship, mutually conditioning each other like two bundles of reeds that can only stand by leaning together. This dynamic, where consciousness requires name-and-form for its content and name-and-form requires consciousness to be experienced, creates the continuous matrix of subjective experience. When this consciousness becomes "established" through desire, it perpetuates the cycle of rebirth, but the "unestablished consciousness" of an enlightened one (*arahant*) is no longer dependent on name-and-form, thereby ending future re-becoming. Ultimately, the text argues that consciousness is not a solution but a conditioned, impermanent, and potentially deluding part of the human predicament (*dukkha*), and its cessation is integral to achieving liberation.
Wynne - The ātman and its negation (2010)
2The 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.
Gombrich - What the Buddha Thought (2009)
3In *What the Buddha Thought*, Richard Gombrich argues that the Buddha was a brilliant and original thinker whose coherent system of thought can only be understood by placing it in its historical context as a pragmatic debate with and reaction to contemporary Brahminical and Jain ideas. Gombrich posits that the Buddha was not an essentialist philosopher but a practical teacher focused on how things function, redefining concepts like *kamma* from ritual action to ethical intention and clarifying "no-self" as the absence of an *unchanging* essence. A central thesis is that subsequent generations, failing to grasp the Buddha's use of metaphor, irony, and context-dependent arguments, took his teachings literally, thereby creating new scholastic doctrines—such as misinterpreting the *brahma-vihāras* as a path to heaven rather than nirvana. This process of misinterpretation, Gombrich contends, explains many apparent inconsistencies in the Pali Canon, which he establishes as the key evidence for understanding how the Buddha used fire as a central metaphor for non-random process and satirized Vedic cosmogony in the Chain of Dependent Origination.