Not-self Q & A

1. When the Buddha talks about not-self, what does he mean by the word, “self”?

However you define what you are. The Canon lists many ways in which people of his time defined the self, such as having form (body) or being formless; as finite or infinite; surviving death, not surviving death, or as identical with the cosmos. These and any other way of defining what you are—such as separate, individual, or interconnected with others—would count as “self.” But the Buddha said that questions like, “What am I?” “Am I?” “Am I not?” were not worth paying attention to, which means they’re not worth answering. More important than trying to define what you are is knowing the process of how you go about defining what you are.

2. Why is it important to know that process?

Because it’s a prime example of how you cause suffering. If you can master the skill of not engaging in the process, you can free yourself from suffering.

3. So what is the process of defining your self?

You start with the raw material provided by five activities called “aggregates.”

• The form of your body as you sense it from within. This is an activity in the sense that you constantly have to assemble your sense of the body from sensations like energy, heat, cold, solidity, and space.

• Feelings: feeling tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain.

• Perceptions: mental labels—visual images or words—that identify things as to what they are, what they mean, and how important it is to pay attention to them.

• Thought fabrications: intentional thoughts, urges, and emotions.

• Consciousness: awareness of the activities of the aggregates and of the six senses and their objects—counting the mind as the sixth sense.

From this raw material you assume a sense of yourself as:

• identical with one or more of the aggregates,

• their owner,

• being inside them, or

• containing them within you.

For example, you might identify yourself with your body or with your thinking. Or you might identify yourself as your individual consciousness, and at the same time think that you’re the owner of the other aggregates. Or you might think of your self as a little being inside your body, making it function. Or you might identify as a cosmic consciousness that contains the other aggregates and all the beings of the world within you.

4. How does this process of assuming a self cause suffering?

Once you build a sense of self around any of the aggregates, you cling to that aggregate. And that’s the Buddha’s definition of suffering: clinging to any of the five aggregates. You suffer when you do this because you don’t want the aggregate(s) to which you’re clinging to change in any way outside of your control. Yet none of these activities lie fully under your control. They’re inconstant and unreliable.

At the same time, the act of clinging is, in and of itself, suffering as well because it, too, is inconstant and it contains the hunger of craving within it.

This is why it’s important to understand “self” in the term “not-self” as meaning any possible way of defining your self, because no matter what “I” or “my” you come up with, you’re going to cling to it. The Buddha wants to help you to put an end to every possible way of clinging.

5. So the Buddha’s not-self teaching is telling me to stop assuming a self?

Yes, but not so fast. “Not-self” is a perception that plays a role in the Buddha’s larger strategy for putting an end to suffering, which is more effective than just telling you to stop.

His strategy is laid out in the four noble truths:

• The first truth: Suffering (or stress) is clinging to the aggregates.

• The second truth: Suffering is caused by craving.

• The third truth: Suffering can be ended, and an unchanging happiness can be found, when craving is totally abandoned.

• The fourth truth: Craving can be abandoned through the noble eightfold path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

The strategy lies in the fact that each of these truths carries a duty: If you want to put an end to suffering, you have to—

• comprehend suffering to the point of having no passion, aversion, or delusion around it;

• abandon all passion for craving;

• realize that suffering ends when craving is abandoned; and to do that, you have to

• develop the path.

6. How does the perception of not-self relate to these duties?

There are two stages:

First you follow the duties of the four noble truths to prepare the mind to be ready for the perception of not-self.

Then you use the perception of not-self to complete the duties.

We can break these two stages down into four:

• You begin by developing right view about all four truths, and especially the third. If you believe that suffering ceases when clinging ends—or even better, if, like the five brethren, you’ve already gained a glimpse of that cessation—you’re more likely to listen to the Buddha when he says that the clinging inherent in assuming a self is making you suffer. If you don’t believe this point, if you think that your happiness depends on identifying what you are, then you won’t be swayed by his reasons for perceiving the aggregates as not-self no matter how persuasively he argues his case. This is why you have to develop at least some basic right view about all four noble truths at the start of the path.

• Then you develop the other factors of the path to get the mind in right concentration. In particular, as you develop right effort and right mindfulness, you get hands-on experience in manipulating the aggregates. You see how you have to get some control over the way you breathe, over your feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and acts of consciousness if you want the mind to settle down with a sense of ease.

• Then you refine your right view by reflecting on what you’ve done. Once you’re in right concentration, the stillness it provides allows you to see that it, too, is made up of aggregates. If you’re focused on the breath as the topic of your concentration, the way you breathe counts as form; the pleasure and equanimity that come as the mind settles down count as feelings. Then the perceptions that hold you with the breath, the intentions that keep you focused on the breath, and your consciousness of all these things cover the remaining aggregates.

By developing the path in this way, you begin to comprehend what the aggregates are. This is an important step toward comprehending the first noble truth. You see for yourself that the Buddha was right about the fact of how aggregates play a role in shaping your experience.

In addition to the facts, you see how the Buddha was right about the value of the aggregates. A state of concentration yields the highest happiness the aggregates can provide, but it has its drawbacks. It’s always ready to fall apart, so you have to keep working to maintain it. It also involves subtle clinging and craving.

• When you’re ready in this way, the Buddha teaches you to apply the perception of not-self to everything you experience to complete the duties of the four truths: to comprehend that clinging is suffering, to genuinely feel dispassion for the objects of craving, and to fully develop the path. You’re ready to realize the cessation of suffering.

7. Does this mean that, up to this point, you’ve been using perceptions of self to develop the path?

Exactly. The Buddha states outright that he simply points out the way. You have to follow it. It won’t happen on its own. To follow it, you need a healthy sense of self to develop the skills it requires. Here the Buddha gives advice on how to develop that sense of self as a strategy: You create it to help do the work, and when the work is done, you let it go.

But instead of defining what this healthy self is, he describes how it functions. These functions fall into three categories:

• The self as agent, one who takes on responsibility for your actions and is confident that you can follow the path.

• The self as consumer, one who anticipates enjoying the results of the path as they ripen.

There’s an interesting passage where the Buddha recommends cultivating a sense of self in this way even in connection with the perception of not-self: Your letting go of what’s not you or yours will be for your long-term happiness and benefit.

• The third function is the self as commentator, who monitors the actions of the agent and consumer to make sure that you, as agent, are actually bringing about the results you want, and that you, as consumer, are aiming at the highest possible happiness.

Even though the aggregates are, in and of themselves, empty of self—that’s one of the original meanings of the word emptiness in the Buddha’s teachings—you can exert some measure of control over them, which you can use to develop the path to the end of suffering. So to whatever extent you have to create a strategic sense of self to exert that control, in the long run it’s worth any stress or suffering it involves.

In this sense, both “self” and “not-self” are value judgments as to whether something is worth laying claim to. With some things, at some stages of the path, the answer is Yes, even though at a later stage of the path, when you no longer need those things, the answer will be No.

8. Does the perception of not-self play any role before it’s applied to all experience?

All along the path. When you learn to identify with the right factors of the path, you’re at the same time dis-identifying with any actions opposed to those factors. For instance, when you take on the precepts and practice concentration, you regard as “not-self” any desires to break the precepts or to follow distracting thoughts.

9. Is it possible to apply the perception of not-self in an unskillful way?

Yes, as when you use it to deny responsibility for your actions. There was a case in the Canon where a monk reasoned that, if all the aggregates were not-self, actions were not done by your self and there would be no self to be affected by them. This would mean that it didn’t matter what you did, for you weren’t responsible, no one could claim that they had been hurt by what you did, and there was no “you” to reap the consequences. The Buddha said the monk was a fool: “immersed in ignorance and overcome with craving.”

10. When students were ready to apply the perception of not-self across the board, how would the Buddha teach them?

He advised that if you want to benefit most from listening to the Dhamma, his teaching, you should gather your mind into one and pay attention to see how what he was saying applied to what was actually happening in your mind.

His most common and effective way of teaching the perception of not-self was to start with a questionnaire.

Taking each aggregate in turn, starting with form, he would ask: Is it constant or inconstant? — Inconstant.

If it’s inconstant, is it easeful or stressful? — Stressful.

If something is inconstant and stressful, is it proper to regard it as, “This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am?” — No.

He would then repeat the same formula, going deeper and deeper into the mind: to feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. This covers all the possible objects of clinging and craving in the present moment.

The purpose of the questionnaire was to get you to let go of each aggregate in question as it appeared in your awareness.

But even if you let go of the aggregates in the present, you might possibly hold on to the expectation of happiness from aggregates in the future or on some higher plane of being. That’s why the Buddha would follow the questionnaire by noting that this same reflection applies to all aggregates: past, present, or future; near or far; blatant or subtle. The conclusion that the aggregates aren’t worth regarding as “me” or “mine” or “my self” applies to every possible aggregate throughout space and time.

In this way, the Buddha tried to cover every possible way that you could hold on to the aggregates.

11. What would be the result of listening to this teaching?

As we noted above, this teaching would work only if you believed in the third noble truth—that an unchanging happiness is possible. If you didn’t, the facts of inconstancy and stress in the aggregates wouldn’t faze you. If you saw them as offering your only hope for happiness, you’d keep holding on to them despite their limitations.

However, if you did believe in the third noble truth and were able to let go of your attachment to the aggregates as the Buddha recommended, he said that you’d incline the mind to the deathless, a dimension free from inconstancy and stress. As a result, you’d either—

• gain full awakening or

• cling to your perception of the deathless, which would lead to a lower level of awakening.

In the first case, you’d need no further instructions.

To deal with the second case, the Buddha would go beyond saying that the aggregates are not-self, stating that “All dhammas”—all phenomena—“are not-self.”

This teaching functions in two ways.

First, because “dhamma” covers fabricated or conditioned experiences, like the aggregates, as well as unfabricated experiences, like the deathless, this teaching warns you that even a realization of the deathless has to be regarded as not-self so that you’ll remember to let go of any passion for it.

Second, once this teaching had functioned in that way, the fact that it, too, is a dhamma reminds you that it, too, has to be abandoned after it’s done its work. After all, “not-self” is a perception. If you don’t let go of it, you’ll still be holding on to an aggregate, and that will get in the way of full release.

To use an analogy that’s admittedly not from the Canon, the message “all dhammas are not-self” is like the recordings in Mission: Impossible that self-destruct after they’ve delivered their message.

12. But doesn’t the teaching, “All dhammas are not-self,” mean that nibbāna is not-self?

The Canon makes a distinction: The realization of nibbāna, or unbinding, is the highest of all dhammas, or objects of the mind. It’s an action. Nibbāna itself is the ending of all dhammas. No actions, no aggregates are found there, which means that perceptions of self and not-self aren’t found there, either. So they don’t apply.

This doesn’t mean there’s no awareness in nibbāna. The Buddha describes a consciousness that’s not known through the six senses, and that lies beyond the word, “all.” It’s like a beam of light that lands nowhere and so isn’t reflected by any surface. It can’t be detected by others, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

13. You say that the Buddha put aside the questions, “What am I?” “Am I?” and “Am I not?” But couldn’t you draw the logical conclusion from the statement, “All phenomena are not-self” that there is no self?

What purpose would that serve? You’d end up with a theory to adhere to and to debate, one that wouldn’t induce you to let go of it. Unlike the teaching, “All phenomena are not-self,” the view “There is no self” doesn’t tell you to let go of it. Instead of being a tool to put an end to clinging, it becomes one more thing to cling to.

The Buddha classified his teachings into two sorts: those that should have inferences drawn from them, and those that shouldn’t. For the purpose of putting an end to suffering, teachings of the second sort are just right as they are. And it’s in this second sort that the perception of not-self falls: Think of the case of the monk who inferred that there’s no self to act or to experience the results of actions. If you try to draw logical conclusions from teachings of this second sort, the Buddha said that you’re slandering him. This is especially true if you use these teachings to answer questions he refused to answer.

14. But didn’t the Buddha denounce people who refused to answer questions, calling them “eel-wrigglers”?

Eel-wrigglers were people who wouldn’t answer the questions that the Buddha said every legitimate teacher should answer: What’s skillful? What’s not skillful?

He himself refused to answer many other questions, but in each case he would explain why: Any attempt to answer the question would be unskillful—either irrelevant to putting an end to suffering or an actual obstacle. If you answer the question of whether or not you exist, you end up with the view “I have a self” or with the view “I have no self.” Either view, he said, was “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views.” Bound by a fetter of views, you’re not freed from suffering and stress.

15. What about people who say that they’ve had experiences in their meditation that prove that there is no self?

The Buddha wasn’t among them. And it’s hard to imagine what kind of experience, in meditation or out, could legitimately prove an assertion like that. Meditation is good for helping you see that when you do a certain action, you get certain results. For instance, it can prove that when you truly stop assuming a self, you experience happiness. But it can’t prove either that there is a self or there is no self.

What often happens in cases like this is that meditators see the aggregates they identify as “self” falling away. For instance, if they identify with their internal conversations, there are states of concentration where those conversations fall away. If they identify with their consciousness, there are states where consciousness falls away. Yet even to see this happening doesn’t prove there’s no self. All it proves is that those aggregates can’t be their self. But if they’ve been taught that seeing the “truth” of no self is an important spiritual milestone, they’re likely to interpret their experiences in line with that view. What they’ve done, though, is to drop one object of clinging only to latch on to another. They fall into the thicket and fetter of views that the Buddha warned against.

16. I thought not-self was a characteristic of all existence, on a par with inconstancy and stress. How can it be just a strategy?

The Buddha never described inconstancy, stress, and not-self as characteristics. He called them perceptions. He also said that perceptions are insubstantial, like mirages. At best, they can give a partial sketch of the reality they represent. This means that, to end suffering, you try to use for skillful purposes whatever truths they contain, as strategies to help you arrive at the reality of awakening. Then you have to put them aside, because even their truth can’t contain that reality.

All the Buddha’s teachings are strategies. As he said, to gain any stage of awakening, you have to develop the factors of the path—including mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—and then escape from them through dispassion. That’s so that the perceptions and thought fabrications going into those path factors don’t hold you back.

He compared the path to a raft. You’re at the bank of a river. The side you’re standing on is dangerous; the other side is safe, but there’s no bridge or boat to take you across. You make a raft from twigs and branches on this side of the river, and hold on to it as you swim to the other side. Once you’ve reached safety, you can let go of the raft. You don’t have to carry it around on your head.

As the Buddha states explicitly, this side of the river stands for self-identity. The other side stands for nibbāna. What’s implicit in the image is that you have to construct the path out of things you identify with: skillful versions of all the aggregates, including perceptions of self and not-self. You cling to them strategically as you cross the river. Then you can let all strategies go.

As for how you continue on your way after reaching safety, the Canon says simply that you still use the concepts of “I” and “me” without clinging to “I am” or “I am this.” How you would manage to do that, it doesn’t explain. But the image of the raft strongly suggests that when you’re not weighed down with thoughts of self and not-self, you’ve been relieved of a burden. You’re free.