Apologies to eliron but I ended up writing the following response to one part of his comment that he left me. I hope I’ve clarified some points in this but I apologise for jumping the gun on responding to him. Think of this as a supplemental post.
Taken from eliron’s comment:
In my post and replies I repeatedly affirm that Buddhism and Buddhists do in fact advocate love and compassion. I hope this is clear. However, I do also affirm that these virtues cannot co-exist with the notion that the self is an illusion. For it is the self that decides to exercise these virtues, to the benefit of other selves.
I tried to address this to some extent in my response to ‘the goal of Buddhism is self-extinction‘. As a first point, for Buddhists at least, the whole of the body of Buddha’s teachings are internally consistent. Perhaps my own comment that the self is illusory is unhelpful as I didn’t elaborate on it. Buddhism is not saying that the self does not exist at all; that would be an extreme view. One of the key elements is the teaching on anicca, anatta, and dukkha (impermanence, non-self, and unsatisfactoriness). By the Buddha espousing such teachings as the Brahma Viharas as well as the general point that we must develop ‘skillful’ desires and intentions, then obviously there is the assumption that there is a process at work of such things as perception, decision, intention and desire taking place within an entity we can call self. Remember, the Buddha tried to ‘deny the self’ prior to his enlightenment, and found it a hopeless and fruitless task. The three marks of existence (anicca, anatta, and dukkha) are the true nature of all phenomena; the Buddha discovered this through direct observation. These three things are not something that he thought up logically or through intellectual conjecture or even divine inspiration. So what this means for the ‘self’ is that its true nature is anicca, anatta and dukkha.
Now you might be thinking “hang on, he just said the self is not-self, so he’s contradicted himself!”
Stay with me on this one, I’m not done yet!
Let’s put this another way. As affirmed, we are saying that anicca, anatta and dukkha are the true nature of the self, and in fact all phenomena. Of course this is not immediately evident to us at all. This is perhaps why people find it a bizarre or negative sounding teaching: “You mean I’m impermanent, not-self and unsatisfactory? Get out of my face!” Or words to that effect.
However, what this actually means is that (drum roll) the way the self appears to us does not correspond to the way in which it actually exists. I hope this shouldn’t be too great a leap of conceptualisation.
Many things that appear to us to be a certain way often turn out to be actually very different to what we assumed. For instance, for millenia many believed the earth was flat, and that seemed a reasonable assumption at the time. People’s direct observation of the world around them told them that the earth was a flat expanse. It certainly had valleys and mountains but there was no way it could have been a sphere. However later on humans gained a new perspective of the earth and came to realise its true nature, that it is a sphere. On a less cosmic level perhaps we have at one time been deceived by someone. We thought we knew this person well, and that they were a good and kind person but in the end we found out that they had deceived us and we see what actually happened.
Perhaps these examples are a bit too pedestrian but I’m trying to make the point that the assumptions we make about the nature of ourselves and the world around us, even in this day of modern technology and science and psychology, can often be flawed. In essence that is what Buddhism is saying about the nature of the self.
There’s more to say on this still. As Buddhists we are not being asked to ‘believe’ in anicca, anatta and dukkha. Even if the idea of this teaching appeals to us and we feel it holds water, we absolutely must be very careful in how we treat our understanding of it. The reason I say this is because I’ve met Buddhists who have read about these things or sunyata (emptiness) as it is referred to in Mahayana tradition, and who have taken it as gospel truth and then tried to apply it to their lives as a kind of moral or psychologically ideological standpoint.
What I mean by this is, for example, people who profess to be Buddhists and who have some ‘book knowledge’ of these topics and then, when faced with difficulties in life say things like “well, my boss called me an asshole today at work but it doesn’t matter because everything is impermanent and not self and unsatisfactory, but I still went home and cried myself to sleep”, or “I woke up this morning and my girlfriend had left a note saying she’d dumped me for another guy and I feel awful and terrible and I don’t know what’s going on in my life; I guess that just shows that everything is impermanent and unsatisfactory and I know I should get over it because everything is not self”. Taking this as a ‘moral standpoint’ could even lead to horrific justification for moral outrages: “I can kill whoever I like because ultimately everything is impermanent, not-self and unsatisfactory”. So, to reiterate, we need to be careful. The Buddha himself said that the dhamma was not straightforward, he’s going to make us work for it. What I’ve tried to show in these examples is that if we adopt anicca, anatta, and dukkha just as a ‘belief’ or ‘principle’ we uphold, because perhaps we like Buddhism, then there is a danger that we just use it as an excuse to either not deal with our own problems effectively or even to harm ourselves or others. Clearly, this is not what the Buddha would want us to do.
Let’s recap a couple of relevant points. First of all the teaching of anicca, anatta and dukkha is the true nature of the self, but this does not mean that the self does not exist at all. This isn’t contradictory as it’s literally a matter of perspective, a wider perspective gives a different view. The Buddha discovered these truths and what he asks is for us to try and see them directly ourselves, through meditation, not to adopt them as a ‘belief system’ or ‘principle’. This is why at the end of the Satipatthana Sutta he tells us to practice jhana (meditation) so that we don’t later regret wasting our time.
Anicca, anatta and dukkha are something we see when our perspective changes. Our normal perspective is, in Buddhist terms, one of ignorance (avijja) of the true nature of ourselves and the world around us. With this view we see a permanently and continuously existing self that operates and interacts in the world with other selves. However because of avijja we experience pain because we believe this self to exist as a concrete thing. The Buddha’s discovery was that the self is impermanent, in fact he classified it into the five aggregates which although come together temporarily to form a person, break up upon death. Again, I hope this isn’t too great a conceptual leap.
Furthermore, in seeing the inherently impermanent nature of all aspects of those things we classify as being part of the ‘self’ he saw that ultimately, in their true form, they are not-self, precisely because they are constantly changing. The view that the ‘self’ is a permanently existing thing is purely a very convincing illusion, ultimately. Furthermore, because these things are not ultimately permanent and therefore not ultimately ‘self’, they are unsatisfactory, because they are by nature impermanent and will eventually undergo change.
However, this does not mean that we cannot and do not function as people or ‘selves’ in a normal everyday sense. The Buddhist teaching (as I see it) is that we can still begin to come to a direct awareness of these truths while still functioning as a thinking, loving, desiring, decision-making, action-taking, opinion sharing entity. It’s merely a matter of gradually widening our perspective, that comes to us gradually through meditation.
Going back to the ‘flat earth’ analogy, once the human race understood that the earth was a sphere it didn’t change the nature of the earth but it changed our perspective and gave us a better idea of the earth’s place in the solar system and how different parts of the earth relate to each other in terms of geography and distance, although those places on the earth themselves didn’t actually change. Similarly, once we gain a new perspective of the true nature of ourselves, it doesn’t render those things destroyed or useless, it means we have a greater understanding and power over them as we have a wider more objective viewpoint. I’m not sure that’s the best analogy but I hope it helps. Anyway, on that basis, engaging in the sila, morality, aspect of the path of Buddhism is fine and we can still decide to love and care for others.
As I tried to make clear in my initial responses to eliron’s criticisms, the morality aspect of Buddhism is part of a kind of ‘holy trinity’ of Buddhist practice: morality, concentration (or mental tranquility) and discernment (or wisdom). By the Buddha asking us to observe anicca, anatta and dukkha directly, rather than adopting them as ‘principles’ or a ‘belief system’ we can get away from the dangerous ground of mis-using this teaching to either beat ourselves up or justify moral outrages. By tying in morality and the development of loving kindness with the development of vipassana (insight – which comes from observing anicca, anatta and dukkha directly) we balance our minds to benefit not just ourselves but those around us. On that basis, developing love for others whilst coming to an understanding of the illusory nature of self are compatible.
Please remember and keep in mind, the Buddha categorically did not teach that the self does not exist at all. If you hear this from someone who says they’re a Buddhist, at the risk of getting myself in trouble I would say they’re just plain wrong. Playing devils advocate briefly, if one were to say that ‘selves’ are completely non-existent, then of course, from a moral viewpoint we could potentially do whatever we wanted because there would be no-one to be hurt or suffer from our actions and we ourselves would never face any consequences. However, this is not what the Buddha taught and in fact contradicts his teachings directly.
To add a final footnote, so to speak, this response I’ve written is by no means exhaustive in terms of all Buddhist teachings. It does not address why we would even want to try and come to see that in fact everything is anicca, anatta and dukkha. That’s another post.
Click here for an introduction to anicca, anatta and dukkha.
Shut up and meditate 
July 10th, 2010 → 9:40 am
[…] You left me an initial response to my lengthy counter-posts. I dealt with one part of it in this post. I’ll look at the others […]