Chapter
Eighteen
Waking up
ways of finding out the truth. We can now ask whether it is the same truth that
they find.
ILLUSION, NO-SELF,
NO DUALITY
From the science and philosophy of consciousness, we have learned that the
visual world might be a grand illusion, that the stream of consciousness is not
what it seems, and that both self and free will may be illusory too. Buddhist train-
ing is aimed at demolishing illusions. So let’s look more closely at the Buddhist
concept of illusion to see whether it fits with those scientific and philosophical
discoveries or not.
The Buddha taught that ordinary experience is illusory because we have wrong, or
ignorant, ideas about the nature of the world. We see things, including ourselves,
as separately existing entities, when in reality all phenomena are impermanent and
empty. This ‘emptiness’, much spoken of, is not about ‘nothingness’ or ‘voidness’. It
means that things are inherently empty of self-nature, or empty of inherent exis-
tence. Take a car. This collection of bits and pieces comes together, and for a time we
call it ‘my car’, even if it gets a new engine and replacement exhaust pipes, and then
it dissipates into bits again. There is no inherent car-ness there. The illusion is the
tendency to treat things as permanent and self-existing. So if someone experiences
emptiness during meditation, this does not mean they go into a great void of noth-
ingness; it means that they experience everything that arises as interdependent,
impermanent, and not inherently divided into separate things.
This is relatively easy to accept for cars, tables, books, and houses, but much harder
when it comes to one’s own self. Central to Buddhism is the doctrine of anatta,
or no-self. Again, this does not mean that the self does not exist (the common
English translation is misleading), but that it is conditioned and impermanent like
everything else. The Buddha urged people to see things as they are,
to see that what we call ‘I’, or ‘being’, is only a combination of physical and
mental aggregates, which are working together interdependently in a
flux of momentary change within the law of cause and effect, and that
there is nothing permanent, everlasting, unchanging and eternal in the
whole of existence.
(Rahula, 1959, p. 66)This is why Derek Parfit (1987) refers to the Buddha as the first bundle theorist.
This theory of no-self went dramatically against the popular beliefs of the Buddha’s
time, and it goes against the tenets of all the major religions since. Most religions
claim that there is a permanent, everlasting entity called a soul or spirit or atman.
This may survive death to live eternally in heaven or hell, or may go through a series
of many lives until it is finally purified and becomes one with God or a universal soul.
The Buddha denied all of this and debated the issue with the best thinkers of his time.
Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying
the existence of such a Soul, Self, or Atman. According to the teaching
of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no
corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’,‘egolessness or non-self
[. . .] is not an article of
faith, but a discovery of
mindfulness’(Mikulas, 2007, p. 32)‘is the self like a unicorn,
a mythical being whose
representations exist
but who is actually
imaginary?’(Hanson and Mendius, 2009,
pp. 208–209)