According to
the Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, Anatman means, “non-self,
nonessentiality…that no self exists in the sense of a permanent eternal
integral and independent substance within an individual existent…in Hinayana
this analysis is limited to the personality; in Mahayana it is applied to all
conditionally arising dharmas.”
I talk a fair
amount to people of other faiths, and of all of the distinguishing features of
Buddhism, anatman is the one that seems to be the one that presents the
greatest difficulty. People can come to
understand emptiness by way of analogy to quantum mechanics, can revisit their
prejudice that the Buddhism is a cult obsessed with suffering when the ideas of
compassion and joy and the four immeasurable minds are explained, and can even
come to recognize non-attachment as the corollary of universal love. But anatman, no soul, is a big one.
“So where do
you go when you die?” people ask, then realize they have to rephrase the
question as, “So what happens when you die?” and they start to squirm. In a recent talk I tried a familiar tack and
told the questioner that this was the wrong question, but it was later
suggested to me by their spouse in the friendliest way that he heard this as
cutting off conversation. Why is
understanding anatman so hard for non-Buddhists, and why does this principle
set Buddhism so far apart, the only religion in the interfaith gatherings I
regularly attend for which the prayers and statements of gratitude to the
universal deity don’t work?
I have long
looked outside myself and my religion believing I needed to find a way to
educate the world about a concept which has been so useful to me, but am
increasingly revisiting my approach. As
a general truism, if I am in a room with a thousand people who all experience
life one way, and I experience it a different way, perhaps I should stop and
look at what I am experiencing to see if I am missing something. I have concluded that as it relates to my
understanding of anatman, for me this is the case, and suggest it is time for
Buddhism to do the same.
This sounds
radical and perhaps arrogant, but I hope that if you spend a few moments
reflecting on this, you’ll conclude that this is more ordinary than it might at
first seem. After all, Buddha was a
radical and revolutionary whose entire teaching challenged the normal ways of
thinking in his world, and he admonished us not to believe a word he said, but
only to examine our own experience, which he challenged us to examine very
closely. I think his very teaching told
us to constantly reexamine and not get caught in paradigms and concepts. If we are truly to believe in anatman then
this concept, too, should be open to scrutiny and examination, and we should
acknowledge the possibility that over time we have become stuck.
In my
understanding the person whose teachings became the new tradition of Buddhism
had no aspiration of forming a new religion; rather he was a reformist
Hindu. And what he was reforming was
pretty simple: over thousands of years the teachings and culture had become
calcified, and Buddha was particularly offended by the caste system and the
objectification of the Hindu gods. (As
an aside, this brace of objections by a radical teacher is analogous to those
of Jesus Christ.) So Buddha worked to
create a model society without caste and threw out the practices objectifying
the soul and the divinity with his doctrine of anatman.
This model
of throwing out a teaching in order to reform it is a familiar one. I believe it was Tokusan who burned all his
monastery’s copies of the Blue Cliff Record collection when he achieved his
awakening for he realized the monks were reifying those teachings. We do this
with our children to take them away from a partial truth on which they have
become stuck. And it is my belief that this is what Buddha was doing when he
threw out the idea of atman.
In Buddhism
we practice the Middle Way between extremes, which can be really hard, for it
is our human tendency to veer from one extreme to another, getting stuck and
then correcting. We are all familiar
with the conversations of the relative and the absolute, and of how easy it is
to misunderstand and miscommunicate about these, of the danger of falling on
one side or the other. I have read of
them as being like the opposite sides of a carpet, inseparable parts of the
same reality but apparently completely different and distinct, and impossible
to see simultaneously from the normal human viewpoint. I would posit that atman and anatman are
simply different words or perspectives on this same point.
I am going
to analogize emptiness with evolutionary theory or the laws of physics and the
Big Bang. Evolutionary theory does a
wonderful job of describing the mechanic of differentiation of species and
offers great predictive powers – the hallmark of good science. Similarly the laws of physics and the Big
Bang theory give us a great model of how the world works and allow us to build
refrigerators, rockets and atom bombs.
But neither of these explains “why,” let alone “what.” Evolutionary theory cannot deal with the
emergence of life any more than the laws of physics can give us any idea why
there are quarks and leptons and the like, of what they really are, or why the
important constants of relationship between them are just right for the
emergence of life – why we live in a Goldilocks universe, if you like, where
everything is just right for us.
Bringing
this back to anatman and emptiness, we have created great explanations in
Buddhism for the way the world works, for cultivating an approach to our life
in which we come to terms with our non-self and interconnectedness with
all. But in throwing out atman I wonder
if we haven’t thrown out the baby with the bathwater. In moving away from atman we have moved away
from an appreciation of what is, from the miracle of creation, of where the
world came from and what it is, and we focus on the emptiness of things. We tend to concentrate our practice on the
dark side of emptiness rather than the bright side of beauty and wonder. When I stop and really reflect on the
existence of space and time and the Goldilocks universe, I realize my Buddhist
practice has a wide, gaping hole.
In Hinduism,
where the concept of atman arises, there is lower-case-atman, the individual
equivalent of a soul, and upper-case-Atman, the universal. I once heard Brother
Shankara, the resident priest at the Vedanta Center in Tucker, say, “Atman is
that in which all exists,” and a light bulb turned on. I realized that this is just the other side
of anAtman – and I’m saying the upper-case version. We do have this in Buddhism – we call it
Buddha-nature – but we tend to put this aside as incapable of examination. I don’t deny that emptiness is true – in fact
I emphatically agree with it – but for me it is only one side of the truth, and
to remain here and only here is to risk missing the beauty and wonder of life,
the universe and everything.
In Islam, “Allahu
Akbar” means “God is greater,” meaning that no matter how great we conceive Him
to be, He is always more than that. I
understand that many of us recoil from the ideas of worship, deity, and
prophets, but why? When is the last time
any of us really looked at that aversion?
For me aversion generally comes from fear, and often from fear that I
might be wrong. I have prayed with Muslims
many times in the last few months, and have received so much from this practice
that I am learning the prayer ritual to incorporate it in my own daily morning
practice. I am finding that something
miraculous in this ritual practice of submission, which is the root meaning of
the faith name and the core of its practice.
In Buddhism
we cultivate insight and wisdom, believing from our own experience and that of
our ancestors that as this leads to the dissolution of the ego we will reach
truth. But we also read of Zen sickness,
of those who follow this path and fall into emptiness, losing touch with the
world. If our path takes us to that
place and only years later brings us back into the world, it suggests to me
that it is a lop-sided practice.
The approach
of Islam is to surrender the ego five times daily, to recognize that we do live
in the relative world as mortal human beings who get sick and grow old and die,
and to focus on that side of existence. This
feels to me like one approach to the other side of the universe. I am finding that the practical application
of the principles of emptiness and non-ego in this relative world lead to a
deep and spiritual recognition that the existence of this universe and each
life within it is incredible, dare I call it a miracle, and that we are
powerless in the grand scheme of things.
This approach to non-ego leads to a radical surrender of self and
requires a self to surrender and the principle of a Divinity, a Creator, an
Atman to whom to surrender.
I believe Buddha
threw out the idea of atman simply because the people of his time had become
overly attached to deity worship and were using divine creation to explain the
mechanic of the world, not because they were wrong about the wonder of the
universe. I believe this is why he did
not throw out the stories of deities and he continued to subscribe to the idea
of reincarnation. But in the seventh
century Shankara reincorporated Buddha’s principles of Buddhism into Hinduism –
and in particular the practice of Advaita – and Buddhism died out in India, not
so much because it was cast out, but because it no longer had reason to exist
separate from Hinduism.
I have experienced
something akin to Shankara’s turning around in my own practice. It has manifested in part through the ideal of
the bodhisattva in Shantideva’s classic work, and in part through the metta
practice of Sharon Salzberg, but it is more than either of those. These two are practices that bring me back to
the relative world of real people and real suffering, and they help me see my
relationship with myself and with others, but they aren’t designed to give me
an appreciation of what the world actually is, to cultivate a sense of humility
and wonder.
My view of
anatman, then, is that it is absolutely correct but incomplete. In the same way we, Red Clay Sangha, as a
community, have been discovering the wonder of cultivating compassion and
giving and joy, I have found great happiness in cultivating a sense of the
relative world and taken great joy in really getting to know it in all of its
diversity and beauty. The opportunity to
know the world in this lifetime is too precious to squander.
I am coming
to realize that a world without this richness of experience is no more real
than a world without the recognition of emptiness, and it is important for me
that my practice is as intentional about cultivating and experiencing this as
it is of cultivating insight into emptiness, personal happiness and compassion
for others. It is time for me to take to
heart the words of Shakespeare, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of
in your philosophy,” and to live a life of deep appreciation and experience
of this world of wonder.
[This was originally delivered as a dharma talk to Red Clay Sangha on October 7, 2012]
