Dear Richard,

You're right, most scholars today prefer "not-self" as the most useful
translation of anatta. Ven Thanissaro has written an article on this: see
his website "Access to Insight."

With metta,

Piya

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Richard Blumberg <richard@...> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
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