Baishui Zen

Self is an inherently slippery concept, tied up with the idea of mind, which is what we focused on last time. Self is part mind, part body for us normal human beings. It’s kind of like the glue that fuses our consciousness with our physical form, and gives us a sense of who we are. Let’s take

In the book we are roughly following, Approaching the Buddhist Path, his Holiness points out that mental processes cannot be distinguished from one another just by looking at physical processes in our brains. For example, we cannot distinguish between a correct thought, an an incorrect thought, just from seeing neural activity on a scan. Perhaps we can distinguish certain types of brain activity at best. There is an experiential level, and a metacognitive level too which give us the ability to examine the contents of our own minds, and these reflections are an essential part of recognizing the Self. Buddhists believe these separate functions, which are not reducible to each other, are therefore distinct. Body and mind are separate classes of existence, which are capable of existing without each other, but together they can be a human being, or any other sentient being.

This is the core belief needed to understand the literal version of reincarnation. Buddhists believe that mind, as an independent entity, is like light. Each moment of its existence propagates forward, like a wave, into the next moment. Since mind is different from body, when the body dies, this wave must continue spreading forward, and eventually coincides with a new body, beginning a new life.

A very common question on this point is, if mind carries forward after death, why can we not remember past lives? Some people do claim to be able to recall past lives, but personally, I don’t find these claims to be very plausible. It seems that most of them remember past lives of being famous or important, when most of us, at every point of human history, would have been ordinary people. To answer this question, Buddhists believe in a spectrum of mental faculties which each bring about each other, from the most fundamental mind, which is like the deepest subconscious, down through emotions, which are less fundamental but originate from here, all the way to sense experience and logical thought. The interrelations between the different layers are spelled out in different texts, no need to try to unpack the whole theory here. Let’s suffice to say, according to Buddhist views of reincarnation, only the deepest and most fundamental level of mind has this wave like property. Other functions arise from it, and so if someone does not have the mind training of a Buddhist to be aware of this fundamental mind, it is very unlikely that when it propagates to the next life, much memory or other functionality will come with it. Nevertheless, this is their explanation for why some people do retain information from apparent past lives. The memory may come from childhood, where we are more pure and more innately in tune with reality, and thus, dharma, or the past life may have had more presence of mind.

Another common question about reincarnation is about population. How can the population of not just human beings but all sentient beings increase if minds are “recycled?” Buddhists believe in many different worlds where sentient beings can reside, depending on the school of Buddhism. In Pure Land Buddhism, there are an uncountable collection of realms where minds can be born, some with Buddhas in them, some consisting entirely of Buddhas (so-called buddhalands) and some filled with beings hostile to the dharma. Most Buddhists believe in some degree of rebirth in higher or lower realms, as karmic consequence for behavior in past lives. This is not entirely without analogy to Christian conceptions of heaven and hell, but we should be careful not to project too much of our own ideas onto theirs. For example, since karmic consequences can extend beyond one or even many lifetimes, a Buddhist does not necessarily feel like rebirth is directly tied to actions here and now. There can be karmic debts, for example. In any case, the answer to the question of population is that the beings come from and go to other worlds. There will almost surely come a day when there are no humans or sentient beings in this world at all, if only because we know from physics that the earth will not be eternal. All the minds will have gone to these other realms then.

Let’s return to the self. We have a physical body, as well as a mind. There is a core mind which is like a wave, and joins with the body to create life. This also gives rise to the other mental faculties which we think of as comprising our personality. For this reason, the concept of self in Buddhism is somewhat different than we are accustomed to thinking about. Our personality cannot be our self, full stop, it has to come from this fundamental mind. This is crucial to the Buddhist view because it must be possible to modify the personality somewhat, in order to eliminate the afflictive emotions. Thus, the mind that is spoken of is the fundamental mind, not just the feelings or thoughts we have. This should square with our experience to some extent, because almost all of us will have had the experience of an impulsive thought or feeling that seems to come from nowhere, not fully within our control. If the Self truly belongs to us, and is comprised of mind, those impulses must come from somewhere, and it’s that more primordial source that we refer to.

On the other hand, let us not make it sound like the Buddhist concept of Self is merely to divide into mind and body. In Buddhism, statements of this type often run into impasse, and the Buddha taught that we should neither believe nor disbelieve in statements like this. Self has these components, but it is not reducible to just these components either. Self cannot be just body, or just mind, as we’ve seen. It cannot also be merely the sum of these parts. We are dependent on a whole host of causes and conditions that have to be just right for us to exist. We can see this when there is an issue with the body or brain that causes some sort of dysfunction. Causes and conditions are lumped together in Buddhism as part of the nature of existence, called dependent origination, which we’ll talk more about soon. For now, let’s understand that in Buddhism, we do not regard things as existing independently from the context in which they exist. That context is part of the existence, and for this reason, all wholes are more than the sum of their parts, including our concept of Self.

The upshot for this discussion is that the context we place ourselves in is always changing and in flux. Thus, while we have our sense of Self, which persists from moment to moment and place to place, this Self cannot really be truly located anywhere or in anything. It doesn’t have one single source of its essence. In the west, Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” A Buddhist would respond with, “I?”

Of course, practically speaking, we use this kind of language all the time anyway. When sick, we say “I am sick,” and when healthy, “I feel great.” But we understand that these are linguistic shortcuts to avoid the underlying nature of our self as in flux. Viewed in this way, it becomes significantly easier to detach from other transitory states. The suffering we feel passes just as much as the pleasurable things do. Even further, much of the suffering we feel comes from the wrong view of self in the first place, of thinking of it purely as mind or body. Of course, coping with the suffering and discontentment of life is central to Buddhist philosophy, and we have more on that coming soon.

So, to summarize: there is a Self, but it’s much more complicated than our basic instinct informs us. It has a mental and physical component, but cannot be reduced to either of these. It is convenient to talk about having a Self sometimes, and convenient to talk about having no such thing as Self in other times, depending on the nature of the discourse at hand. As we find correct views of the Self, practice them, and reflect on them, we gain more correct views of the world, which allows us to avoid bad feelings from the world and experience more joy.

For a more detailed discussion of this talk of self vs no-self, an interested reader might check out the posts on the Nirvana Sutra. This double nature of the Buddha’s teachings on Self is one of the first topics, about which some brief notes have already been posted. The original Sutra can also be found at the link as well.