I've been following this thread with enormous interest; this is quite a
remarkably well-informed and thoughtful group, and I've learned from every
post. Thank you all. Here are a few observations, which I hope will help
keep people thinking skillfully about a most important idea.

First, we have been talking much more about 'atta' than about 'anatta'. In
my rendering of the Anattalakkhana Sutta, (
http://dharmastudy.org/suttas-2/anattalakkhana-sutta/), which I use in the
course I teach at our local university's continuing ed program, I use the
term "not-self" to translate 'anatta', and I provide the following note to
the passage in the sutta in which the Buddha tells the five 'bhikkhus' that
material form is 'anatta':

"The term 'not-self' really has no precise and idiomatic translation in
English. It�s not that the Buddha is saying that form is not what we mean
when we talk about self, as we might, for example, point to a duck and say
'that's not a chicken'. Rather, he�s making a positive statement about form,
saying that it falls into the category of those things that are 'anatta' �
'not-self'. Defining something as 'not-self' limits the meaning of 'self' in
a profound way. I can say that my house is not my self; that�s true from
both a Buddhist point of view and a Western point of view. But that�s a
trivial truth; no one really would claim otherwise. When I say that
form/body is 'not-self', though, I�m making a claim that radically denies
what many people believe, either unthinkingly or dogmatically, and I�m
radically limiting the possible scope of any practical notion of 'self'."

I think that part of the problem in thinking about 'atta' is that the term
points in two directions, which muddles our dualistically inclined minds. In
the one direction, it points toward a technical term in a doctrinal
tradition which the Buddha's thinking stood in explicitly radical opposition
to. The term 'atman' in the Brahminical teachings referred to a real entity
which is the foundation of our sense of Self and which was eternal and
"real" in a way that our transitory bodies were not (in some passages, the
'atman' is actually described as a tiny homunculus). In the Upanishadic
extension of Brahminism, 'atman' was in fact identical with 'brahman', the
monadic eternal Truth, and the goal of spiritual practice was to realize
(i.e. both to profoundly understand and to reify) that unity and so attain
'moksha' or "release". In this sense, the term 'atta' is equivalent to the
theistic idea of "soul", and the Buddha is saying, with relation to that
point of view, that nothing has the kind of essential nature attributed to
soul and that, therefore, there is no soul, or no Self. That's the direction
toward which, I think, Nagarjuna was looking when he developed his
understanding of emptiness.

That first understanding of 'anatta', as Noa Ronkin points out, is based on
an ontology that's focused on processes rather than on substances and their
attributes. The Buddha's teaching, it seems to me, is all about experience -
the process of experiencing. I'm not talking subjectivity or idealism here;
it's not like there are objective phenomena that we can only know through
subjective experience. Experience is real, and "real world" events - the
interactions of the physical 'dhammas'- are among the conditions from which
experience emerges. It's that understanding of conditioned emergence of
experienced phenomena ('paticcasamuppada', frequently translated as
"dependent arising") that I think, in some important but non-mystical way,
prefigures the current scientific understanding of "self-organization" that
ardavarz and others were introducing to the discussion.

'Paticcasamuppada' is also a bridge to the other direction in which 'atta'
points - the sense of an identity that, while it may not be eternal,
persists from moment to moment despite impermanent and constantly changing
conditions. Again, 'anatta' in this sense may prefigure modern science: in
this case, the Uncertainty Principle. The most common statement of the
Uncertainty Principle is that we can't know simultaneously know both the
location and the velocity of quantum level objects, such as photons. A
necessary correlate of that principle is that there's no individual photon
(call it "Jim" or "Agnes") that's recognizably distinct from other photons,
i.e. that has self-identity. It may be significant here that in defining the
three basic 'dhamma' seals, the Buddha used a different term for the third
seal than for the first two. It's 'sabbe sankhara dukkha' and 'sabbe
sankhara anicca' ("all contingent things are 'dukkha'", "all contingent
things are impermanent"), but 'sabbe dhammata anatta' ("all things whatever
are not-self"). (I may have the Pali a little bolloxed; I don't have my
notes here.) I don't think it's wrong to see quantum objects as 'dhammas' in
this sense, but I also don't think that it requires that we conceive the
Buddha as a being who "knew" the world in the same way that, say, Stephen
Hawking does.

So, with the term 'anatta', the Buddha is saying that there is no essential
"Self" (or "soul"), and that it is not possible, from any given experience
or sequence of experiences, to identify a "self" which in any way embodies
or owns or is embodied in or owned by that experience or sequence of
experiences; another way of saying that is that while the "self" we
experience at any moment emerges from precedent conditions, it is not
possible, even if it were possible to know all current conditions, to
predict what "self" that particular body or cognizing being will experience
next moment. The Buddha, I believe, rejected determinism; that rejection is
what allows us to behave intentionally, to behave skillfully, to influence
the experience that becomes the next moment, the next day, perhaps the next
life.

This certainly doesn't resolve any question, but it may help us see more
clearly why it's good to be done with "I-making, my-making, the conceit of
self".

With regard,

Richard


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