India's Boldest Idea: The Illusion of the Self

The Buddha and Buddhism on the Illusion of the Self

Who are you?

The answer seems obvious. You have a body, a mind, a personality, a history, a name. You remember your childhood, make plans for the future, and feel yourself to be the same person from one day to the next.

The Buddha thought otherwise.

More than two and a half thousand years ago, he advanced one of the boldest and most unsettling ideas in the history of philosophy: that the self we spend so much of our lives constructing, indulging, and defending is, in an important sense, an illusion. This is not to say that we do not exist. Rather, the person we ordinarily take ourselves to be is far less fixed than we imagine. Understanding this, taught the Buddha, is not a cause for despair but the beginning of freedom.

The Middle Way

Two early insights that led the Buddha to enlightenment are the doctrines of the Middle Way and Dependent Origination.

According to the doctrine of the Middle Way, we are more likely to achieve insight and wisdom if we avoid the extremes of self-gratification and self-mortification. According to the doctrine of Dependent Origination, or Interdependent Arising, life is a continuous process of change, and every instance of change has manifold causes and effects. Everything is conditioned by everything else; nothing exists in complete isolation.

Suffering arises from our craving for permanence. Yet permanence is itself an illusion, and our attempts to cling to it can only end in pain and disappointment. Although nothing exists permanently, it is equally mistaken to say that nothing exists at all. This, too, is a middle way.

Does the self exist?

In one sense it does. In another, it does not—which is why, when asked the question directly, the Buddha, as was often his way, simply remained silent.

The Illusion of Self

How is it that the self can both exist and not exist?

According to Buddhism, the self—or rather the not-self (anatta)—is composed of five elements (skandhas): body, sensation, perception, will, and consciousness. These five skandhas are in a constant state of flux, yet together create the illusion of integrity and continuity that we mistake for a permanent self.

This explains why, when I turn my attention inwards, I can become aware of such and such a sensation, such and such a perception, or such and such a thought, but never of any actual, enduring self.

Try it now for yourself.

There are thoughts.

There are feelings.

There is awareness.

But where, exactly, is the self?

Nagarjuna on Emptiness

The Middle Way and Dependent Origination pervade all aspects of Buddhist thought. After the Buddha, the most celebrated Buddhist philosopher is Nagarjuna (d. c. 250 CE), who founded, or perhaps re-founded, the Madhyamaka (‘Middle Way’) school, an important strand of Mahayana (Great Vehicle) Buddhism.

In his Root Verses on the Middle Way, Nagarjuna argues that between the extremes of permanence and nothingness lies emptiness, or shunyata. Although phenomena exist, they are ‘empty’ insofar as they lack permanence and autonomous existence.

This sounds pessimistic—and Nagarjuna has often been accused of nihilism—but it is precisely this emptiness and fluidity that make change, freedom, and creation possible. In Zen Buddhism, a more dynamic alternative to the koan, or riddle, is for the master suddenly to slap his student, literally shaking him out of who he thinks he is and what he thinks he’s doing. This, however, would probably not be legal today.

Rebirth and Release

The death of the bodily self leads to the disaggregation of the skandhas and to their re-aggregation into another not-self, which is neither identical to nor entirely different from the previous one, but forms part of a causal continuum with it. A traditional analogy is that of a flame, fuelled by desire, passing from one candle to the next.

The cycle of rebirth can only be broken if the self is able to transcend its subjective and distorted image of the world, built around the ‘I am’ conceit. This is nibbana, or, in Sanskrit, nirvana. As I see it, nirvana rests on the understanding that consciousness is not one continuous, unbroken entity but a succession of conscious moments.

Western Parallels

If all this sounds rather mystical, consider that the Scottish philosopher David Hume independently arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion:

…when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

Two thousand years after the Buddha, Hume found no permanent self behind experience, only a ceaseless stream of perceptions.

Why It Matters

Our ego defences as broadly conceived—that is, not only our ego defences proper but also our habits, customs, culture, and other ties—may provide us with an illusion of self, but they also define us as such and such, and, in so doing, constrain our range of thought, feeling, and action. Paradoxically, the very elements that furnish us with our sense of self are also those that prevent us from fulfilling our true promise and potential as human beings.

As I argue in my book on the psychology of self-deception, it is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his defences and committing symbolic suicide, that a person is able to open up to different modes of being and relating, and transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to us, mere mortals.

And so, if we are to live, we must first learn to die.