- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
selfish desire, craving, attachment. [. . .] It is the
source of all the troubles in the world.
(Rahula, 1959, p. 51)
Even so, it is not easy to give up. A monk once asked
the Buddha whether people are ever tormented by
finding nothing permanent within themselves. They
certainly are, was the response. A man who hears
the teachings thinks, ‘I will be annihilated, I will be
destroyed, I will be no more’. So he weeps, mourns,
worries, and becomes bewildered (Rahula, 1959, p.
56). This idea of no-self was just as difficult for peo-
ple to accept millennia ago as it is now.
Another aspect of the false conception of self is
the idea that it can do things. The Buddha was
clear on this: ‘actions do exist, and also their
consequences, but the person that acts does not’
(Parfit, 1987, p. 21). The Sri Lankan monk and
Buddhist scholar Walpola Rahula explains this in
words that could have come straight from William
James: ‘there is no thinker behind the thought.
Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the
thought, there is no thinker to be found’ (1959,
p. 26). Does this mean that free will is an illusion?
The question did not arise in early Buddhist cul-
tures and languages in the way it has in the West. Even so, if everything is
conditioned and relative, and subject to the law of cause and effect, then it
is obvious that nothing can be independent and so truly free (Rahula, 1959).
Indeed, the fiction of an independent self that could have freedom is part of
the problem, and ‘The aim of dharma practice is to free ourselves from this
illusion of freedom’ (Batchelor, 1997, p. 95).
Relevant here is the Buddhist notion of karma or volition. Rahula explains that
although the term ‘karma’ means ‘action’ or ‘doing’, in Buddhism it refers only to
willed or voluntary actions. These arise from the false idea of a self who thinks
and acts, and it is only these kinds of actions that can have consequences that
are good or bad. When the false view is dropped, people continue to act, think,
and do things, but they no longer accumulate karma because they are free from
the false idea that they are a self who acts. Escaping from the wheel of birth and
death is, therefore, nothing like the popular idea of reincarnation in which you
are rewarded for good actions and punished for bad in a whole series of future
lives. Nor is it like being someone who leaves the world of samsara and goes to
a spiritual realm called nirvana. Rather, it means being without the illusion of the
self who acts. This is why neuropsychologist Peter Fenwick says that ‘The charac-
teristic of enlightenment is a permanent freeing of the individual from the illusion
that he is “doing” ’ (1987, p. 117).In his classic book The Way of Zen, Alan Watts explains how it is just to walk on,
wholeheartedly engaged in every action. Yet ‘we cannot realize this kind of
action until it is clear beyond any shadow of doubt that it is actually impossible‘the fundamental subject/
object structure of experience
can be transcended’
(Metzinger, 2009, p. 33)
‘thought is itself the
thinker’
(James, 1890, i, p. 401)
WHAT IS THIS?‘The characteristic of
enlightenment is a
permanent freeing of the
individual from the illusion
that he is “doing” ’
(Fenwick, 1987, p. 117)
FIGURE 18.5 • Blast-off!