The Negation of Self
You've got to learn what self is before you can stop doing it
TL;DR: Much of the confusion and debate surrounding the concept of no-self or not-self comes from the fact that we tend to assume we already have a sufficient understanding of what self is before we’ve undertaken Dhamma practice. However, part of the practice is coming to understand what self is, which includes realizing that our normal conception of self was incorrect all along (or at least very imprecise). Before “not”-ing the self, we must learn what it really is — otherwise, we will be negating the wrong thing and ending up with the wrong idea of not-self.
The concept of self (or lack thereof) is of central importance in Buddhism. Indeed, the Buddha himself said that the primary differentiating factor between his teachings and that of other contemporaneous philosophers and spiritual teachers is that no one else teaches the lack of a self. But for such a fundamental part of Buddhist doctrine, it is scarcely understood, to the extent that it becomes a common allegation that this or that tradition or school of Buddhist thought implicitly takes on a self, thus leading the adherent further away from the truth that the Dhamma promises. It should be clear, then, that a resolution of this issue and a clear explanation of what the doctrine of not-self (anattā) refers to is of the utmost importance, but how to arrive at such an explanation is unclear, especially given the attempts and (apparent) failures of two thousand years of Buddhist philosophers.
But should we truly regard these attempts truly as failures? In some cases, the designation is clearly warranted — it would be naïve to think that all answers are equally valid solely by virtue of being professed by a respected Buddhist teacher. However, it would also be an error to assume that answers that appear different or even contradictory to one another are necessarily at odds. Given the subtlety, profundity, and ineffability of the concept being described, it is only natural that different teachers will attempt to explain it within their own linguistic frameworks, which may have merely representational differences (word choice) that are disguised as semantic ones. This being-at-odds on a syntactic level is not just understandable, but expected.
Before attempting to describe the concept of not-self itself, it must be made clear what type of a concept this is. Doing so will bring to light the cause of the difficulties we have described so far. Unlike many lexical items (“cat”, “dog,” “run”, etc.), self and not-self do not refer to anything that can be found within our everyday experience — these terms refer to a concept that is entirely hidden to those who have not yet undertaken the practice. In other words, not-self does not refer merely to a propositional concept, but it is a reference to a type of tacit knowledge, which means that the concept is semantically empty until one has gained the knowledge it is pointing to. Until that knowledge is gained, “self” serves as an empty placeholder, waiting to be filled. For example, if one were to speak of “the experience of a riding a bike without training wheels,” there would be two types of listeners: those who have and have not accomplished this feat. A speaker might employ all sorts of words to describe the experience, such as “freeing” or “exciting,” and may attempt to describe it in poetic language with phrases such as “the wind rushing through your hair,” cryptically and metaphorically as “the liberating acknowledgement of one’s precipitousness to fall into the blurring road beneath themselves,” or perhaps analytically as “fully engaging your vestibular system to maintain equilibrium as your feet move in circles.” All of these explanations are, superficially, at odds, and for the listener who has not yet ridden a bike without training wheels, the best they can do is guess at which explanation is the most accurate — were someone to give them an inaccurate description, they wouldn’t be able to tell. The explanations given here serve as placeholders, wherein the eventual lived experience can fill the semantic information.
One might object that even without actually being able to ride a bike oneself, it would still be possible to differentiate between clearly incorrect descriptions, such as “standing on your head eating ice cream”, simply by having observed someone ride a bike. But there is a further issue here. It’s only upon gaining the tacit knowledge of self that propositional knowledge of self can arise as well. To understand this, imagine that riding a bike is something that happens magically: you do a ritual, and then you are immediately transported to another planet where people ride bikes. Those who do not know how to ride a bike will not have made it to this planet and thus will never have seen someone else ride a bike. In that case, the moment they gain the tacit knowledge of how to ride a bike they also gain the propositional knowledge of what a bike is. Before that, they are completely in the dark, and they could very well think that riding a bike means “standing on your head eating ice cream”.
With this in mind, we should provisionally treat any terms used to describe self or not-self as simply poetic until we have experienced firsthand what they are referring to. It is precisely the inability to see the phenomenon due to lack of experience that leads us to attach these lofty terms to specific ideas that are not the thing being described. In other words, we very quickly jump the gun by assuming that we understand what a self is, and then think that by simply conceptually negating it, we can arrive at not-self. However, given that all the beginning practitioner can possibly know is an incorrect notion self, by assuming this analytic approach, they will inevitably be attempting to find the semantic fill-in somewhere within their misconceived experience, even if only conceptually. This leads them to make the critical mistake of assuming that not-self must be somehow a negation of their experience, or something that can be located within their experience, or a type of experience that somehow accords with the type of experience they have had so far. In doing so, they will always conceive of self inside or outside an element of experience. Indeed, this mistake is explicitly pointed out in MN 1 (emphasis mine — credit is due to Bhikkhu Anigha for his interpretation of this sutta):
“Here, bhikkhus, an untaught ordinary person…perceives the sensed as the sensed. Having perceived the sensed as the sensed, he conceives himself as the sensed, he conceives himself in the sensed, he conceives himself apart from the sensed, he conceives the sensed to be ‘mine,’ he delights in the sensed. Why is that? Because he has not fully understood it, I say.
“He perceives the cognized as the cognized. Having perceived the cognized as the cognized, he conceives himself as the cognized, he conceives himself in the cognized, he conceives himself apart from the cognized, he conceives the cognized to be ‘mine,’ he delights in the cognized. Why is that? Because he has not fully understood it, I say.
(trans. Bodhi, 2009)
The misstep here is assuming that there is already a sufficient understanding of the self that can be negated. It is natural to assume that, since we already think of ourselves as having a self, i.e. that we conceive ourselves “as the sensed” or “in the sensed”, we can just do the opposite of that. However, our everyday conception of self is neither explicit nor precise, so doing this leads directly to the equally erroneous mode of conceiving oneself apart from the sensed — the self and the sensed arise separately but co-dependently, neither within nor apart from each other. The problem is that the self must be sufficiently understood before it can be negated — attempting to negate it before it is understood will simply miss the mark.
For example, if I tell you there is a color you’ve never seen before called “flarg” and that there is another color called “not-flarg”, which is the opposite of it, then simply negating flarg will not get you any closer to understanding not-flarg — the best you can do is randomly pick a color you have already experienced (which by definition is not flarg), and then negate it, which (assuming all colors come in opposite pairs) would be by definition not not-flarg. Analogously, the issue with not-self is that we assume we have seen flarg (self), thus misappropriating it as a specific color we have seen, like red, and then we conceive of not-flarg (not-self) as the opposite of that, which leads us to conceive of not-flarg as green, or perhaps the absence of color altogether, which we then think of as whiteness or blackness — itself a color, and thus clearly not the absence of color. In the same way, we assume we have understood self, and our negation gets us no closer to not-self.
Arriving at Not-Self
The concept of self must be taken within the context of the full Buddhist teachings — it refers to something specific, not something vague. It is important to recognize that the entirety of the first pillar of the Buddhist path, virtue (sīla), aims at making self noticeable to us. It is through the restriction of our actions that are implicitly or covertly driven by the sense of self that we get an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the self in its bareness. The initial virtue training serves as an attempt to “smoke out” the self like we would a parasite hiding inside our body: we raise the heat so that it becomes unbearable for the parasite to inhabit our body, at which point it sticks it head out, and having seen it, we can grab it and pull it out for good. In the same way, we smoke out the self, which nourishes itself on sensual pleasure, by rejecting sensual pleasures until the experience becomes so painful for the self that it pokes its head out, and we can see it clearly and understand how to remove it. At this point, we can begin to think in terms of not-self, as we have seen the parasite and understand what it would mean to simply not have the parasite in our bodies. It may take some time to fully remove the parasite, but at least we will concretely know what we’re working towards removing.
Before continuing, I want to make clear what type of a thing we’re looking for. The self is not a “thing” — we’re not trying to smoke out a concrete object that exists in our bodies or minds. Instead, the self is a view. However, before we see the self, we mistakenly take it to be a concrete object. Because of that, it can be somewhat helpful to use our mistaken intuitions to guide our search — but once we finally “catch” the self, we’ll see that it was nothing but a vaporous view.
What we should notice here is that the self has a close relationship to sensual pleasures. More specifically, it takes sensual pleasures as its nourishment — that’s why when we remove its food, it comes out of its hiding place in a frenzied attempt to look for more sustenance. But knowing what it feeds on is not enough to know the self, just as we can’t know a dog by looking at a bowl of dog food. What this can provide us with, however, is a place to look: if we want to find out what the self is, we would do well to look carefully around its feeding grounds.
The Self and Thirst
There are two common formulations that the Buddha uses to describe the cause of suffering: that suffering arises from craving/desire (taṇhā), and that suffering arises from ignorance (avijjā). More specifically, suffering arises from craving for sensual pleasures, and suffering arises from ignorance of impermanence, not-self, and suffering (annicā, anatta, dukkha). This leads one to wonder: is the cause of suffering ignorance or craving? The answer is: both. These two formulations describe the cause of suffering at two different levels, in the same way that we can say that the cause of death in a murder was both the gun shot wound and the motivation that drove the murderer to kill. What we see here is a strengthening of the link between sensual pleasure and the self.
Although the Pali word tanhā is commonly translated as craving or desire, it is more literally translated to “thirst,” as the word is derived from the Sanskrit word tṛṣṇā, meaning “thirst” or “desire”, which comes from the Proto-Indo-Iranian tŕ̥šnas (“thirst”), which can be further traced back to the Proto-Indo-European ters- (“dry” — think terra). Thinking of craving as thirst is significantly more elucidating, as it brings to mind a specific type of desire, one that is particularly strong and related to our survival. Seeing this may even lead us to question whether we have sufficiently understood the concept of desire. If I simply think the words “I want a cookie,” does that mean I truly desire a cookie? What if I think something I clearly don’t want, like “I want to be uncomfortable” — does this count as a desire? Clearly not. What, then, is the missing element that separates a mere thought from a desire and turns it into the type of thing that the self can feed upon? Furthermore, in what way can the self “feed” upon craving? Investigating thirst can help us find it.
Thirst, in its deepest sense, is something profoundly primordial. The quenching of thirst is seemingly the most fundamental instinct not just in humans, but in all life. All life that we know of subsists on water, from the most basic unicellular microscopic organism to the most complex of mammals. The regulation of water intake, which is essentially what thirst is, is perhaps the most basic unifying factor amongst all life, and in seeing it as such, we can draw a straight line from our current experience as humans to the basic experience of being an amoeba floating around in a body of water, doing what it needs to do to stay hydrated. To some extent, we can already see some of the elements of what we take to be a self, such as the distinction between internal and external (even when floating in water, thirst isn’t quenched until external water becomes internal), and the instinct for preservation.
But arguably the most important aspect to become aware of is the sense of compulsion behind thirst. When we think of desire, we tend to think of something that defines us in a pleasant way, such as our hopes and dreams — we desire to become an actor, teacher, husband, wife, parent, etc. Even more simple desires, such as the desire for a certain meal, become defining factors of our identity — we think that I am someone who likes macaroni and cheese, but doesn’t like sushi, and someone who likes comedies but doesn’t like horror movies. By “likes”, we refer to a general propensity for desire — we mean that someone who likes macaroni and cheese will habitually desire it, even if they don’t desire it at any one time, and someone who doesn’t like sushi will simply never desire it. We see our identities as linked to our desires, and we even base our searches for romantic partners on those who have the same desires (“I’m looking for someone who likes [habitually desires] romantic walks on the beach”).
We should notice here that all of our desires have a similar flavor: they all begin “within” ourselves in a certain state at one point in time and take the form of a projection of ourselves in another state at a later point in time. That is to say that if we desire a piece of cake and submit to this desire, the desire arises out of the current cake-less state and projects itself into the future as the achievement of a cake-having state. The desire then “pulls” us into the future along the thread of that projection to arrive at its goal in a process of becoming. In this way, the desire desires to form a future self, and when we acquiesce to the desire, we actualize that future self. In this way, desire is constitutive and fundamental to the sustaining of the self — they are inextricably linked.
By linking our desires to our identities in this circular way, we implicitly view both desire and self as things that we are in control of. After all, our identity, which is an extension of the self, is that one thing which we see ourselves as controlling — that which enables us to make choices and take action in our lives. Since we see ourselves as controlling our selves, and since our selves are constituted by and founded in our desires, we see ourselves as controlling our desires. This conception of self and desire seems to be borne out by predictive processing theory, a leading model of the human mind, which posits that all our actions are guided by (1) the brain’s predictions, (2) an “error detection module” that determines whether we are currently meeting the brain’s predictions, and (3) doings that seek to reduce those errors arising between the current state and the prediction.
Further, we normally take refuge in our identities as they have a sort of tranquilizing power — they are one thing we can ostensibly be sure of (“cogito ergo sum”) in a world that is otherwise chaotic. Taking refuge in identity means refuge in our desires, including our desire to continue having an identity. And as beings that innately want to continue living, which means persisting in a specific identity, we value our identities, and take pleasure in their persistence. Consequently, this means that, since our identities are rooted in our desires, and since we take pleasure in our identities, we take pleasure in our desires. Taking pleasure in our desires, we see them as pleasant. Seeing our desires as connected to our identities, which are connected to our sense of self, we see them as something that we can control. On these bases, we implicitly view both desires and self as pleasant, self-defining, and voluntary.
Thirst, however, is not viewed in such a positive light. Thirst is viewed as a biological signal, like pain, which is unpleasant. The presence of thirst signals that something is fundamentally wrong and that we are in danger. Because water is readily available in the modern, western world, we don’t typically experience thirst as a feeling worthy of fear, and so we overlook its danger. But if we were to imagine ourselves lost in a desert, then there could hardly be anything more terrifying than the awareness of a growing thirst. Thirst is a mortally dangerous problem — it signals a mortal threat to the persistence of our selves. Even if we don’t see fear and danger in thirst, we can likely all agree that it is not a pleasant feeling — thirst must be distinguished from the quenching of the thirst, the latter of which is indeed pleasant.
Because thirst is shared among all beings and because it is not pleasant, we are less likely to view it as part of our self. Instead, we tend to view it as a problem that we wish to get rid of, in the same way that we view pain as a problem that we want to make go away. Thirst is seen as something that hinders us from being ourselves — if we’re playing basketball, one of our “identifying” desires, and we notice thirst arising, we need to take a break from our “self-actualization” by means of playing basketball and acquiesce to this imposition of biological need. We hope we can quench our thirst as quickly as possible so that we can return to the game, i.e. return to “being ourselves”, thus continuing with our desires that define us. In the same way, we see relief from mental illness as a “return to being ourselves”, in the sense that we can return to doing the things we desire. For example, someone with OCD may say that their medication allows them to “be themselves again”, which means that they no longer have to stop what they’re doing to cater to their compulsions. Of course, “what they’re doing” is always based in desire, such as the desire to “be feeling good”, or the desire to “be completing a task”.
When we think of quenching thirst explicitly as an acquiescence to a biological imposition, we begin to see thirst as a compulsion. We are not voluntarily thirsty and taking a drink, but rather we are compelled to fulfill this other-arising desire — a desire that is coming from somewhere other than “ourselves”. Not quenching the thirst is not seen as an option — to ignore thirst would result in death. But is that enough to consider quenching thirst “compulsory”? Yes. When we think of something as compulsory, we imagine that it is being imposed on us by another entity upon threat of punishment. Traditionally, the worst punishment is death, and we find no issue with a sentence such as “he was compelled to pay his taxes under threat of death.” If the threat of death by another entity is enough to serve as compulsion, then the threat of death from our own entity should serve just as well. In essence, we are always compelled to drink “under threat of death.”
To understand the self, we need to come to understand all desire as thirst, and, consequently, to understand all desire as compulsion — as something forced upon us under threat of death. Indeed, to understand the self, we need to see all desire, and the creation of the self that is founded upon it, as a mortally dangerous problem. This is why the Dhamma is frequently referred to as a path leading towards freedom, as it is a path that uproots the compulsions that we use to define ourselves.
Direct Experience
But to simply conceptually think of our most cherished desires as compulsions is not enough — they must be experienced as such. Learning to see our desires more clearly is the purpose of virtue training. Under normal circumstances—especially in the modern, Western world—there is virtually no lag time between the arising of a desire and its satisfaction. If we want to watch a movie, we can find it with just a few clicks of a mouse. If we want a specific meal, it takes just a few taps on an app to have it delivered. This means that there is a limited amount of time during which we can observe the desire itself and its self-creating power. Even simply having a plan for how to achieve the object of desire is enough for us to start preemptively feeling the pleasure of gratification — we know that the object of desire is likely secured, and we relax into gratification on account of that, even if not completely. As in the case of thirst, this near instant gratification has led us to a place where it is particularly difficult to see the fear, danger, and unpleasantness inherent in desire — the desire simply goes away before we’ve ever had the chance to examine it. To be clear: this is an inherent part of human existence, not something uniquely related to contemporary society, but seeing it in relation to a modern context makes it a bit clearer.
If we want to experience desire as thirst, we can most immediately do so by threatening our eventual gratification, in the same way that the best way to feel the fear and danger of thirst is to imagine ourselves in a desert. The renunciate training rules serve this purpose: by denying ourselves the ability to engage in sensual pleasures, we cause ourselves to experience fear and suffering on account of not getting that which is desired. By experiencing this fear and suffering, we can see that desire/craving/thirst is suffering — we just don’t normally see it because we busy ourselves with scheming for our gratification instead of looking at it straight in the eye. In fact, even when we attempt to deny ourselves gratification, we often simply substitute in another gratification — instead of seeing the training rules as for the purpose of investigating suffering, we see the training rules as for the purpose of being followed. Seeing the training rules as simply being for the purpose of being followed, we try to make the suffering we feel on account of denied gratification simply go away, which further denies us the opportunity to investigate the suffering itself.
It should be noted here that this does not mean that causing ourselves additional suffering, for example by self-flagellation, starvation, or sleeping on a bed of nails, is useful either. The purpose of virtue training is not to produce additional suffering, but rather to let us see the suffering that is already there unnoticed. The virtue training restricts us just enough so that we can catch ourselves in our everyday actions and see how those are already contributing to suffering. Actively harming ourselves is something entirely separate, and is, in fact, just another type of everyday action that we lose ourselves in — there is a certain sick gratification in self-flagellation, which satisfies a craving, and thus covers the suffering up with that gratification, preventing us from really penetrating into the suffering that is always with us but hidden from view.
By investigating this suffering, we can trace its root: how does ignorance of not-self, impermanence, and suffering relate to the arising of these desires, which we can now see as unpleasant thirst? We can see the process only via experience. But for now, we can do so via simulated experience.
Imagine that you have a strong craving for a piece of chocolate cake. Normally, you find this desire pleasant because you think primarily about how good it will feel to have the desire fulfilled. But now, we’ll cut off the possibility of the desire being fulfilled — you will not be able to have a piece of chocolate cake. At this point, you will feel a sense of anxiety or displeasure arise, just as if you were lost in the desert without water. It’s important now to evaluate where the sense of anxiety comes from. What we will notice is that this anxiety feels like a definite object, like a mass or a tumor in our experience. It feels as if the mass will stay there forever until we fulfill it, and having this unpleasant experience forever is a scary thought. This is ignorance of impermanence: we take what is impermanent to be permanent, not realizing that the desire for the chocolate cake arose on its own, not of our own volition, and it will go away on its own as well.
Upon seeing the impermanent nature of the craving, we have an opportunity to see the self poke its parasitic head out. Indeed, the Buddha defines self in terms of impermanence in SN 22.59 (emphasis mine):
"What do you think of this, O monks? Is feeling permanent or impermanent?"
"Impermanent, O Lord."
"Now, that which is impermanent, is it unsatisfactory or satisfactory?"
"Unsatisfactory, O Lord."
"Now, that which is impermanent, unsatisfactory, subject to change, is it proper to regard that as: 'This is mine, this I am, this is my self'?"
"Indeed, not that, O Lord."
(trans. Mendis, 2007)
We can make quick sense of how what is impermanent is not self, but aniccā and anattā are two different things, not one and the same, so impermanence itself is not enough to explain self. But to understand how self figures in, we need to ask a further question: assuming that this unpleasant feeling of desire were never to be fulfilled, and that it were to continue forever if not fulfilled, why would we have any feeling of compulsion to make it go away? This missing element is explained earlier in the same sutta:
"Feeling, O monks, is not-self; if feeling were self, then feeling would not lead to affliction and it should obtain regarding feeling: 'May my feeling be thus, may my feeling not be thus'; and indeed, O monks, since feeling is not-self, therefore feeling leads to affliction and it does not obtain regarding feeling: 'May my feeling be thus, may my feeling not be thus.'
(trans. Mendis, 2007)
What we see here is that self is also related to a sense of control. In fact, it may be better to translate “self” as “agent” or “agency”, rendering “not-self” as “no-agent” or “no-agency”. Our sense of self is related to a sense of agency in the world: a sense that we are responsible for fulfilling these desires because they are me.
Not-self, then, is simply the negation of this — it is cutting off this process of appropriation by which the desire is related to the self, on the basis of which we feel a sense of agency to sculpt the world to our liking, and consequently a sense of compulsion to exercise that agency. When we see these phenomena as outside our domain of agency, we no longer feel compelled to alter them. Without feeling compelled to alter them, we no longer crave for their attainment, and we no longer suffer with their arising. If the process is taken to completion, then all desire fades, and so does self. It is for this reason that the Buddha says that “there is no being here” when referring to himself — without desire, there is no future self founded upon it, and since we see self as synonymous with “being”, there is no being remaining. In turn, the extinguishment referred to as Nibbana is simply the complete cessation of this circular and bidirectional cycle of ignorance leading to craving leading to self. Nibbana does not come before or after death, but when death is no longer a possibility as there is no self that can die.
It is important to see that “seeing” not-self, as the Buddha instructed, is not as simple as just saying “not-self” when noting phenomena in our experience. Although it may be explicated in those terms, that is not the end goal, in the same way that the instruction to ride a bike, “left then right, balance”, is not the same as actually moving your left and right feet while balancing — riding a bike consists in riding the bike, not verbally labeling various actions according to biking instructions. While the instructions are necessary, they are not the thing being instructed on. Someone can ride a bike perfectly well without internally verbalizing their movements, and someone can understand not-self equally well without ever applying a term to it. The terminology is only necessary to help others approach the same experience of “not-selfing” (perhaps this is where the distinction between paccekkabuddhas and buddhas, in that the former can discover these phenomena on their own, but only the latter can verbalize and axiomatize it enough to transmit it to others).
Conclusion
There is often talk in Buddhist circles about staying away from “conceptual thinking” in favor of relying on direct experience. This is often misinterpreted as exhorting one to not think at all or remove oneself from all verbal inquiry. Instead, these types of recommendations are attempting to lead one to avoiding verbal speculation about a concept that they lack in their own experience. In that sense, basing your research into the color flarg by speculating about what it might look like before you’ve seen it would be the wrong approach when someone is giving you instructions for how to see it with your own two eyes. Following this, we can see how the myriad interpretations of not-self are not necessarily incompatible when they are approached with a grounding in the phenomenon itself, but they can appear divergent on the surface. In the same way, descriptions of the color red that are as diverse as “the color of apples”, “the color of roses”, “angry”, and “romantic” are not at odds with each other — someone who is grounded in the lived experience of seeing red will recognize them as various facets of the same thing. On the other hand, someone who has not seen the color red could very easily construct complex conceptual arguments demonstrating the incompatibility of “the color of apples” with “romantic”, ultimately losing the forest for the trees and falling into the thicket of views.
Citations
"Anatta-lakkhana Sutta: The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic" (SN 22.59), translated from the Pali by N.K.G. Mendis. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 13 June 2010, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.059.mend.html .
“Mūlapariyāya Suttaṁ: The Root of All Things.” (MN 1), translated from the Pali by Bhikkhu Bodhi. SuttaCentral, suttacentral.net/mn1/en/bodhi.
Many thanks to Cattasallā, who so thoughtfully helped me improve this piece.