A few thoughts on Buddhism

What are we to make of the famous Buddhist notion of no-self?

The Buddha teaching the Four Noble Truths, from a Sanskrit manuscript, Wikimedia.

A number of years ago I went through a mid-life crisis. Nothing that is not experienced by plenty of people. An unexpected divorce. My father dying of cancer. To those two events add getting a new job, which meant selling my house, buying a new one in the new location, moving across a good chunk of the country, and acquainting myself to new colleagues and a new environment. All in the span of a few months.

Frankly, I got a bit shaken and disoriented. I need a compass by which to navigate those vicissitudes, a framework that would help me steady myself, reorient goals and priorities, that kind of thing. Since I had just finished my PhD in philosophy I figured surely the love of wisdom would help me figure out the answer!

Of course, nothing I’d read in my graduate level textbooks—on subjects ranging from Descartes to Kant, from the analysis of concepts to the varieties of formal logics—was actually of any use during the crisis, as intellectually stimulating as all that stuff had been.

So I decided to turn to practical philosophy—not an oxymoron! My first stop, after the advice of a number of friends and acquaintances, was Buddhism. By far the most successful and apparently useful philosophy of life of the past two and a half millennia might provide me with handy advice, or so I hoped.

It turns out, however, that there were two stumbling blocks to my embracing of Buddhism: its culturally remote language and its metaphysics. The first one was indubitably my limitation. Buddhist texts and concepts did not resonate with me in part, I’m sure, because I grew up in Italy and not in India or China. The second one, though, may reflect either (or both) my failure to grasp difficult concepts, or perhaps the fact that such concepts are indeed problematic, perhaps even incoherent.

After a while I let go of my attempts to study Buddhism and turned to the more easily resonant Greco-Roman philosophy. The rest is, as they say, (personal) history.

Recently, though, I have had a new opportunity to look afresh into Buddhism thanks to one of my ongoing reading projects: going through every volume of Peter Adamson’s A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps book series, based on his podcast by the same title. Peter is a charming and brilliant historian of philosophy, and has in fact argued that philosophy in a very important sense is the history of philosophy.

The book series so far includes six volumes: Classical Philosophy, Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, Philosophy in the Islamic World, Medieval Philosophy, Classical Indian Philosophy (with Jonardon Ganeri), and Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy. So far I’ve read the first four, am in the middle of the fifth, and the sixth is patiently awaiting its turn on my e-reader.

Chapter 8 of the volume on Classical Indian Philosophy is entitled “Suffering and smiling—The Buddha,” and makes for compelling reading for anyone seriously interested in practical philosophy or eastern traditions. It managed to rekindle my interest in and admiration for Buddhism. Though, unfortunately, it did not provide any better answer to the metaphysical issues.

As many readers will know, the core of Buddhist ethics hinges on the famous Four Noble Truths, which are:

• The fundamental problem of life is suffering (dukkha);

• The cause of suffering is desire: lusting for pleasure or possessions; also, fear of death;

• Suffering ends when we let go of our desires;

• The way to be able to confine our suffering and desires is the Noble Eightfold Path:

1. Right Understanding

2. Right Thought

3. Right Speech

4. Right Action

5. Right Livelihood

6. Right Effort

7. Right Mindfulness

8. Right Concentration, or meditative awareness

The eight-spoke Dharma wheel that symbolizes the Noble Eightfold Path, Wikimedia.

There are a number of similarities with Greco-Roman philosophy here, and particularly with Stoicism, Cynicism, and—to a lesser extent—Epicureanism. While the Stoics wouldn’t put it in terms of suffering per se, but rather of lack of wisdom (first truth), they would certainly say that the constant seeking of pleasures and possessions is the cause of human unhappiness (second truth). They would also agree—together with the Epicureans—that fear of death is an unnecessary and misguided obstacle to eudaimonia, a life worth living.

It follows that letting go of our attachment to “externals” is indeed a path toward progress (third truth). Regarding the fourth truth, most of the branches of the Eightfold Path would also be agreeable to the Greco-Romans: we need to develop our understand of things (first branch), direct our thoughts in the right way (second branch), speak wisely (third branch), act prosocially (fourth branch), engage in socially productive activities (fifth branch), avoid unwholesome states of mind (sixth branch), engage in mindfulness (seventh path), and engage in meditation (eighth path). The major differences concern the last two terms, since “mindfulness” and “meditation” mean very different things within the Stoic and Buddhist frameworks. Still, the degree of overlap is impressive.

One way to make sense of the first Noble Truth is to look at the historical context. At the time, in India, most people’s lives were, indeed, largely a matter of suffering, as was the case shortly thereafter—during the Hellenistic period—throughout the Mediterranean world. Not to mention, unfortunately, widespread suffering still today in far too many places on the planet.

That suffering, in turn, is caused by the fact that our desires are unfulfilled. Moreover, we continue to suffer even when they are fulfilled, either because the things we obtain turn out not to be enough, or because we are afraid of losing them once we have acquired them. Here too, there are clear echoes of both Stoicism and Epicureanism.

While the cause of suffering is desire, the latter is in turn caused by our ignorance, a Buddhist notion that closely reminds me of Socrates’ contention that it is our ignorance that causes us to do things that do not make us happy. In the case of Buddhism, though, the goal is not happiness, but a final state of liberation from all suffering known as nirvana.

Now, one might think that escaping the cycle of birth and rebirth (samsara) is something that is within everyone’s grasp: at some point, we all die, and that will be it. Indeed, the Stoics often think of death as the ultimate source of freedom, as well as what gives true meaning to our lives. But here is where the (metaphysical) trouble begins. Death—according to Buddhists—is not going to liberate us from suffering because we are keep being part of the samsara through reincarnation, the specifics being determined by karmic retribution. Good karma in the current life will get you a more favorable rebirth. Bad karma will set you back. Since I don’t believe we survive death in any meaningful way (other than the trivial one: my atoms and molecules will be recycled back into the cosmic pot), I have to part company with the Buddhists at this point.

Burmese style Buddha, Shwedagon pagoda, Yangon. Wikimedia.

Nevertheless, let us continue our investigation for the sake of argument. According to Buddhism the only way out of samsara is to understand that there is no self, and therefore nothing to set free from desire in the first place. An obvious question here would be: if there is no self, then who or what is enduring the suffering in the first place? Who or what is doing the desiring?

It turns out that the doctrine of no-self (anatta) is more complicated than it appears at first and, if you forgive me the presumptuousness, very misleadingly named. Anatta was the Buddhist response to the preceding Brahmanical tradition of the Upanishads, the Sanskrit texts that provide the basis of the Hindu religion. The fundamental idea articulated in these texts is the that of a permanent, unchanging self (atman), which is the thing that survives each cycle of reincarnation. Call it a soul, if you wish to go Platonic.

It makes sense that Buddhism arose in part as a reaction to the tradition that preceded it, and that therefore a central concept of Buddhism is explicitly meant to be antithetical to a central concept of the preceding tradition. Nevertheless, there actually is significant doubt about what exactly the Buddha said, because his teachings were passed on orally until they were written down centuries later, in the earliest known Buddhist documents, known as the Pali canon.

Despite this dearth of original sources, we can still ask what anatta really means. Although the Buddhists were rejecting the Brahmanical concept of an eternal and unchanging self underlying cognition and awareness, it doesn’t mean they were not thinking of some sort of dynamic self. After all, as Adamson and Ganeri point out, you are, right now, pretty much the same person that started reading this essay a few minutes ago. That’s why you are aware of yourself reading.

In the classic Buddhist text Milinda-pañhā, a sage named Nāgasena talks to the Hellenistic king Menander and explains the concept of a dynamic self by way of an analogy with a chariot: the chariot is made of nothing above and beyond the wheels, the axle, the yoke, and so forth. Even though there is nothing apart from the individual constituents, we can still meaningfully talk about a chariot as a unit: “You are nothing other than your bodily states, your feelings and perceptions, all of which are present only momentarily, existing for a fleeting moment only to be replaced by other khandhas (heaps) of the same kind.” (p. 53)

Does this sound familiar? If Buddhists think of the self as a flowing stream with no fixed identity we have strong echoes of Heraclitus, the Presocratic philosopher who influenced the Stoics and famously said that panta rhei, everything changes, which is why we can never walk into the same river twice. It’s not the same river, and we are no what we were.

This appears to be better than the initial suggestion that there really is no self at all. Nevertheless, the devil is in the details. How can I be part of a cycle of birth and rebirth if there is no permanent essence of me, that is if my consciousness doesn’t survive from death to rebirth? The Buddhist answer is supposed to be that causal continuity replaces personal identity as the relationship that holds across lives. At least, that is Adamson and Ganeri’s reasonable suggestion. Even so, if “I” will have no memory of what I did in previous lives, why should I suffer as a result of my predecessor’s low karmic score? Or, for that matter, benefit from her high karmic score, should I be so lucky?

Causal continuity isn’t going to cut it because it sets the bar too low. My atoms and molecules will be dispersed around after my death, and at least some of them will in time come to be part of new living organisms—humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and so forth. That’s causal continuity, but it’s dispersive (my atoms will certainly not all somehow concentrate again into a single body) and too weak (atoms don’t carry consciousness, unless you are a panpsychist—which you shouldn’t be). Also, who or what is keeping that karmic score anyway, and how?

Adamson and Ganeri do their best, but they end up not being particularly helpful: “[Buddhists] denied that ‘he who experiences the fruit of the deed is the same as the one who performed the deed,’ but also denied that the two stand in no relationship whatsoever.” (p. 54) Which sounds to me like twisting oneself into a logic pretzel in order to have one’s cake and eat it too, if you forgive me the use of a mixed foods metaphor.

Another attempt to make sense of the combination of reincarnation and no-self comes when the authors invoke something like the famous ship of Theseus: while at sea, individual parts deteriorate and need to be replaced, which the crew duly does using whatever materials are available. After a while, not a single plank of the original ship remains, and yet we might still want to say that it is the same ship that left port originally.

Clever, yet there is an obvious disanalogy here: during our life our cells and sub-cellular components are indeed replaced gradually, very much as the planks of Theseus’ ship. But that’s not what happens when we die. In the latter case our body disintegrates completely, and only its basic constituents are recycled into the biosphere. It’s easy to see why gradual changes during one’s lifetime can be said to preserve some sense of continuity and personal identity. But it’s just as easy to see how death definitely breaks such continuity, thus erasing personal identity.

I was comforted to discover that I’m not the only one to have issues with the above metaphysical jumble. Apparently this has been a serious discussion even within Buddhism, for centuries. The minimal position is that talk of someone being “the same” across karmic cycles is a mere convention. But if it is, then the whole edifice seems to crumble into incoherence. Other Buddhists—the school known as Puggalavāda—then proposed the existence of an underlying subject that can undergo rebirth. But their critics immediately pointed out that this essentially (ahem) collapses into the Brahmanical concept of atman, thus giving the whole game away.

The Buddha himself was of no help. He was once asked whether there is a self or not. He did not answer.