Perceptions of Self & Not-Self

Ajaan Suwat used to like to point out a paradox in the Buddha’s teachings. On the one hand, there’s the teaching that, as we chanted just now, form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness, are all not-self. The six senses are not-self. The eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind are not-self. But then, as he pointed out, there’s the phrase another passage that we chant again and again, “I am the owner of my actions.” The question is, how to resolve the paradox.

We have to note that it’s there in the Buddha’s teachings as well, as in the the passage we chanted just now, where the Buddha talked about the aggregates being not-self . But then there are other passages where also talks about taking the self as your mainstay, as your refuge. Take the self as your governing principle. Remind yourself, if you’re ever tempted to leave the practice, that you got onto this path because you loved yourself. You didn’t want to suffer. You wanted to put an end to suffering. And if you abandon the path, is it because you want to continue suffering? Do you not love yourself anymore? If you have any concern for yourself, you want to stick with the path.

There’s also a passage where Ven. Ananda says that it’s necessary to have a sense of conceit, which basically means your sense that “I am.” Even though we’re here ultimately to put an end to conceit, we use conceit to do it: the sense that “Other people are capable of following this path. They’re human beings, I’m a human being. If they can do it, why can’t I?” You need that conceit in order to practice.

So what’s going on here? First, we have to remember that the Buddha never taught that there is no self. You can’t find that statement anywhere in the Canon. He talked about not-self, and he described certain things as being not-self. Secondly, he never called not-self a characteristic. Sometimes we hear that the Buddha taught the three characteristics of inconstancy, stress, and not-self. But he never called them characteristics. He called them perceptions.

That should alert you right there: Something is up. Self is a perception. Not-self is also a perception. And it’s not the case that one of those is a conventional truth and the other an ultimate truth. Everything you say is a convention, every perception is a convention, and these conventions have their uses at different times and places in the practice. It’s good to see the perception of not-self and the perception of self as value judgments. In other words, is something worth holding on to, worth identifying with? If so, when and where? How about things that are not worth identifying with? Again, when and where? After all, not all the Buddha’s teachings are meant to be used all the time.

There are only two teachings that he identified as categorical. One is the principle that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful actions should be abandoned. The other is the four noble truths. The first truth is the truth of suffering, which is clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. There’s a duty with regard to that truth, which is to comprehend it—in other words, to understand it to the point of having no more passion, aversion, or delusion around suffering.

The second noble truth, the cause or the origination of suffering, consists of three kinds of craving: craving for sensuality, for becoming, for not becoming. The duty there is to abandon the craving—in other words, to develop dispassion for it.

The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering, the fact that suffering does end when you abandon the cause. The duty there is to realize it—in other words, to have a direct experience of it.

And finally, the fourth noble truth is the path, the path that allows you to abandon craving. That’s the noble eightfold path. The duty there is to develop it.

These four noble truths are true all the way across the board.

The question is, when and where do the perceptions of self and not-self fit into those truths that are true across the board?

The first thing to notice is the definition of suffering: the act of clinging to those five aggregates that we chanted about. When they’re not clung to, they’re not going to create a burden on the mind. That means that the issue is the clinging.

You have to remember that the passage we chanted just now was delivered to a group of monks who had already heard the first sermon the Buddha gave, describing the four noble truths and their duties. So they were alert to the fact that the problem was the clinging to the aggregates. The problem was the craving. They still had some clinging. They still had some craving.

So the purpose of the second sermon, which is what we chanted just now, was to help undo that clinging, to undo that craving. Look at all the things you might cling to and realize they’re not really under your control. They change. They’re uncertain and inconstant. Sometimes that word, anicca, is translated as impermanent, but it’s not precisely what it means. It means to be inconstant. It’s unreliable. So your body is unreliable. Your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs, and your consciousness are all unreliable. So, if these things are unreliable, why do you want to continue to cling to them? The answer usually is, “What else is there? If you can’t hold on to them, what can you hold on to?” And the response to that, of course, is, “Why do you have to hold on to anything? How about a happiness that doesn’t require holding on?” As the Buddha said, when you see that that’s a possibility, you see that these things are not worth holding on to. You let go.

Then there’s the experience of the deathless. All those monks who were listening to this discourse had had that experience. They’d had their first taste of awakening, so they had that point of comparison. But they still had some residual clinging, so that had to be taken care of.

So the Buddha went over these five aggregates again, saying that even in their subtle forms, you have to let them go.

But as for the question of whether there really is or is not a self, that was a question the Buddha put aside.

He had a policy. There were four ways that he would respond to questions. One was to give a categorical answer to the questions that deserved that type of answer, in other words, an answer true across the board. Second would be questions that deserves an analytical answer, where he had to redefine the question before he could answer it. Third was cross-questioning. He questioned the understanding of the person asking the question before giving the answer. And then the fourth were the questions he simply put aside because they were not worth answering.

You probably know that passage in the Canon where the Buddha compares certain questions to the questions that a person might ask a surgeon. A man has been shot by an arrow in a battle. They carry him to the surgeon, who’s going to take the arrow out. But the patient says, “Wait a minute. Before you take out this arrow, I want to know who shot the arrow. I want to know what feathers it was made of, what wood it was made of, and who made it.” As the Buddha pointed out, if you try to answer all those questions, the man would die first. The questions simply get in the way of putting an end to suffering.

And it turns out that of those four types of questions, the question of “Is there a self or is there no self?” was a question the Buddha put aside. It wasn’t worth answering.

He did that twice: once, when he was asked directly by a wanderer from another sect, and then another time, when he was talking to a group of monks, saying that questions of “Who am I? What am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist?” are all not worthy of attention. Then the question, of course, is: Which questions are worthy of attention? The answer is: those that deal in terms of the four noble truths. What is suffering? What’s the duty with regard to it? What is its cause? What’s the duty there? And so on. So those are the questions that the perceptions of not-self and the perceptions of self are supposed to help answer.

There was a time when the Buddha was talking about not-self, and a monk came to the conclusion, “Well, if form, feeling, etc., are not-self, then what self is going to be affected by what’s done by things that are not-self?” In other words, he changed the teaching to a metaphysical one: There’s no one doing the action, no one to receive the results of the action. The corollary to that, of course, is that you can do anything you want, because you can’t be held responsible, and there’s no one there to complain about how you treat them.

The Buddha came down really hard on that monk. That was not the proper use of the teaching on not-self. Instead, its purpose is to help develop dispassion, to help let go of your clinging.

We’re not here to decide whether or not there is a self. We’re here to cure the problem of suffering. As long as you need a sense of self to develop the path, you use it. You use the perception of not-self to dis-identify with things that would pull you off the path. Like you’re doing right now: You’re responsible for doing the concentration. You can’t say, “Well, the concentration is not-self, so I’m not responsible. I’m just watching it happen.” You have to do it. It’s something you develop. That’s the duty there. So you accept that responsibility.

The self, along the path, functions in three ways. There’s the self as the producer, who actually does what needs to be done. That’s the agent. Then there’s the self as the consumer, the one who’s going to reap the rewards. Finally, there’s the self as the commentator, who comments on what the producer’s doing and judges whether it’s good enough or could be improved. These are the selves that you have to rely on, that are your mainstay as you practice.

But as you get better and better at the concentration, better and better at discernment, there comes a point where you begin to see that these perceptions of self are no longer needed. That’s when you apply the perception of not-self even to elements of the path.

Both perceptions are strategies for the sake of putting an end to suffering when you use them right. Even in everyday life, your sense of self is a strategy for happiness, and you already have a sense of not-self that you use strategically as well. There are certain things you just don’t identify with. A thought comes into the mind, it’s something that you wouldn’t want to do, and you know it gives bad results, so you say, “That’s not anything I want to get involved with.” That’s a perception of not-self. As for things that you do want to do and you know will give good results, you identify with them: “That’s a thought I want to take on. I want to adopt that thought.’ So, you’re already using these perceptions as you need them.

There comes a point in the practice, though, where you don’t need the perception of self anymore. That’s when use the perception of not-self across the board. But that doesn’t mean you arrive at the truth that there is no self. After all, not-self, too, is a perception. It’s something you’ve got to let go of. It’s one of those aggregates that, if you cling to it, is going to keep you suffering. So, ultimately, you let go of both perceptions.

There was a time in Thailand, years back, when there was a controversy over whether nibbana was your true self or not. The controversy started in monasteries, and then it spread, if you can imagine, into the newspapers. It was everywhere in the country. Imagine a tabloid newspaper in the United States debating the issue of whether nibbana was self or not-self: *The New York Daily News, The New York Post. *Well, that’s what you had in Thailand.

So someone asked Ajaan Maha Boowa whether nibbana was self or not-self, and he said nibbana is nibbana. When you get to that point, you don’t need the perception either of self or not-self, because they’re just perceptions. You’ve got to let go of them.

Or as Ajaan Suwat once put it, when you arrive at nibbana, you arrive at the ultimate happiness, and it’s so total that you don’t even care to ask the question of whether there’s anybody experiencing it or not. The experience itself is so total, so satisfying, that it puts an end to all questions of that sort.

So we’re not here to see that there is no self. Sometimes you have experiences in meditation where you can convince yourself that you’ve seen that there is no self, but what kind of experience would actually confirm that? What you can see is when you use the perception of self, what happens? Is there suffering? Is there not? When you use the perception of not-self, is there suffering? Is there not? And to what extent do these perceptions help you develop the path, help you take on the duties of the four noble truths, and get rid of whatever clinging you have?

No matter how you identify yourself around the aggregates—as a permanent self or an impermanent self, a separate self or a connected self, an infinite self or a finite self: Any way you might identify self around those aggregates will eventually cause suffering. But sometimes you have to take on some of the suffering of holding on to an idea of self in order to do the path. But then, when the skill is mastered, you can let it all go. After all, that’s what we’re here for: not to answer the question of whether or not there is a self, but to answer the questions of why is there suffering and what can be done to put an end to it? Those are the questions worth asking.

It’s through the meditation that you answer them. And you’ll know for yourself when you’ve had that experience when everything falls away, outside of space and time, something that can be touched as you work here in the present moment, and opens up outside of the present moment. That can confirm, yes, there is no suffering there. That’s a question you can answer.

So, to whatever extent you need the perception of self to get there, use it. When the time comes to put it aside, use the perception of not-self, and then put that aside as well. That’s when you’ve accomplished what the Buddha’s teachings are all for.