CHAPTER
11

The Fundamental Misunderstanding

In This Chapter

As discussed in the previous chapter, you are not completely at the mercy of the changing fortunes of your life. While you may experience difficulty and consequently feel grief or pain, you can choose to let go of the grasping or aversion that leads to the additional suffering called dukkha, or the conviction that things are not as they should be.

The irony is that the ability to just let go is always available to you. You don’t need to do Zen practice to access it. However, chances are good that you will find letting go quite difficult, even if you can convince yourself to try it. This is because, naturally, you want to protect and take care of yourself. When you’re trying to look out for yourself, it doesn’t make sense to let go of reaching for what you want or to stop pushing away what you don’t want.

However, according to Zen, your efforts to protect and take care of yourself are likely to cause stress and suffering until you correct your fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of self. Once the true nature of self—and subsequently all things—is understood, it becomes much easier to transcend self-interest and let go. This is why Zen Master Dogen said that to study the buddha way is to study the self.

Your Self-Concept

The fundamental reason you don’t let go of grasping and aversion is because you believe you have an inherently existing, enduring self-nature. The first time you felt hungry or cold as a newborn baby and you weren’t fed or warmed immediately, the idea started to form in your mind that it was you versus the world. Over time you learned that “you” consisted of certain elements that were in some way separate from the rest of the world: your body (separate from other bodies and objects), your experiences (which no one else exactly shared), your ideas (which others didn’t automatically know or understand), and your desires (which the world didn’t always cooperate in fulfilling).

Most importantly, your self included the element of consciousness—the awareness of continuity in the existence of all of your self elements. Along with memory, this consciousness resulted in a unique narrative about your life that was all your own. In Buddhism these self elements are called the five aggregates.

DEFINITION

The five aggregates, or five skandhas, are the elements that compose the self: physical form, sensations (or feelings, particularly sensing things as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral), perceptions (or cognition, naming and identifying things), formations (volition and associated conceptions and mental habits), and consciousness (awareness of all of the elements and the world).

Given all of these self elements, you made the assumption—along with all of the human beings before you—that somewhere in the middle of all of these elements there was an enduring essence that tied them together over time. If it changed, your existence wouldn’t make any sense. You’d be a different person at age 16 than you were at age 6. Obviously, some things change over time, but if everything changes over time, what does it mean to be a person? This self-essence also had to be inherent, or independent of the existence of other things or beings, and fundamentally unaffected by changing conditions. After all, that’s the whole nature of a self—an individual, unique and separate from other individuals.

Subsequently, almost your entire life has been spent in the service of the inherent, enduring self-nature you presume you have. From day one you have sought to keep it happy, maintain its boundaries, and monitor its territory. When you were 5, you cried because you wanted an ice cream cone but didn’t get one. As you got older you defined who you were by your preferences, then by your friends, then by your opinions, and later by your accomplishments, talents, skills, and possessions.

With more maturity, perhaps you identified more with your sense of being generous, kind, or possessed of common sense. Through it all, there has been your body and a sense of consciousness, so chances are you have never doubted you exist. You may have wondered about the nature of existence, but never doubted there was a you to ponder it.

The Real Nature of Self

There is a wonderful analogy that illustrates the Zen view of the real nature of self. In an ancient Buddhist text titled The Questions of King Milinda, a sage named Nagasena addresses the king’s question of whether or not Nagasena can be said to exist. Nagasena asks the king whether he had arrived that day in a chariot. The king says yes. The sage then asks him if the axle is the chariot, or the wheels, the framework, the yoke, or the reins. To each of these propositions the king answers no, because none of them taken in isolation can be called a chariot.

Then Nagasena asks whether the mere combination of all of these pieces (picture them piled up in a heap) can be called a chariot. Again the answer is no, although the king also agrees that no chariot can be found apart from the pieces. Nagasena suggests that no chariot can ultimately be found, although in a sense it clearly exists because it was able to convey the king to the site of the teaching. Therefore, “chariot” is merely a useful designation, not something that can be said to truly exist in and of itself, and the same can be said of “Nagasena.”

Empty of Inherent Self-Nature

You may react to this analogy by thinking that the self can be said to truly exist when all of its pieces are assembled correctly, in a way that they can perform their function. All the pieces together, in a particular configuration, result in a real, emergent phenomenon called the self. However, this means the existence of the self is dependent on the pieces. Remove one of the pieces and you no longer have a self. Perhaps some of the pieces can be removed—a limb, or a particular sense, or consciousness—while the remaining collection of elements retains its selfness. But if too many pieces are removed (say, brain function), then there is no self anymore. There is no clear line between self and no-longer-self when you look at the matter in terms of a collection of elements.

ZEN WISDOM

“Is there a real basis [for the notion of self] inside or outside your body now? Your body with hair and skin is just inherited from your father and mother. From beginning to end a drop of blood or lymph is empty. So none of these are the self. What about mind, thought, awareness, and knowledge? Or the breath going in and out, which ties a lifetime together: what is it after all? None of these are the self either. How could you be attached to any of them?”

—Zen Master Dogen (1200–1253), from his essay “Guidelines for Studying the Way,” as translated by Ed Brown and Kaz Tanahashi in Moon in a Dewdrop

The idea of your self-nature being an emergent phenomenon due to a particular configuration of elements is also unlikely to be what you really had in mind when you developed your self-concept, anyway. Do you really think of your very existence as being dependent on your sensations, or thoughts, or consciousness? Probably not. Instead, you tend to think, “I have sensations,” or, “I temporarily lost consciousness.” The pieces of your self appear to be in the service of an inherent, enduring self-nature.

The Zen teaching of emptiness simply points out that you are empty of inherent, enduring self-nature—that is, your self-concept is just an idea. If you look diligently for it, as Nagasena and King Milinda looked for the self-nature of the chariot, you can’t find it. Even more significantly (because you can’t prove a negative), when you drop the idea of having an inherent, enduring self-nature, you can easily recognize through your own experience that living without the concept is more in harmony with reality than holding on to it. You think you need your self-concept to survive, or even simply to be alive, but you don’t. The self as emergent phenomenon keeps on functioning without your favorite idea, and in fact it functions much, much better.

The Way You Really Exist

No one blames you for forming a self-concept; everyone does it, if they are mentally healthy, and it’s a useful concept for navigating the world. However, there is a big difference between recognizing something as a useful tool, which can be picked up and put down, and the way you usually hold on to your self-concept. When you personally understand emptiness, you can make use of your sense of self and its accompanying narrative in order to take responsibility for your life, but you don’t believe in all of it the same way you used to.

In fact, you have to make use of your self-concept, because while your self is empty, it’s part of a flow of causes and effects. To think you don’t exist at all—that everything is a mere collection of elements, there is no you that moves from moment to moment, so nothing really matters—is another fundamental misunderstanding of your self-nature. You do exist, just not in the way you think you do. You exist as a flow of causes and effects operating on and through your body and all the other elements of self. You are not the same person you were 10 years ago, or even yesterday, but you are related to that person, and you are the result of that person.

Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura compares this to a river: it makes sense to call the Mississippi the Mississippi, even though the water running through it is constantly changing. You are different from a river, however, in that your choices are going to form and affect your future flow and experience. When you look at things this way, you act carefully out of compassion for your future self.

You also exist as an emergent phenomenon arising in mutual dependence with everything around you. You would not be you without your relationship to everything else. You cannot be a mother without a daughter, you cannot be tall without things that are short, you cannot be a hermit without a society to withdraw from. You can’t even be Doug Smith without Doug Smith’s parents, all of the conditions that made Doug Smith who he is, people who recognize Doug Smith, and the air that Doug Smith breathes. In fact, change one tiny element in the world and you are no longer quite the same as you used to be.

ZEN WISDOM

“To speak about changes in our lives and communicate in a meaningful way, we must speak as if we assumed that there is an unchanging ‘I’ that has been experiencing the changes; otherwise, the word ‘change’ has no meaning. But according to Buddhist philosophy, self-identity, the ‘I,’ is a creation of the mind; we create self-identity because it’s convenient and useful in certain ways. We must use self-identity to live responsibly in society, but we should realize that it is merely a tool, a symbol, a sign, or a concept.”

—Zen Teacher Shohaku Okumura, from Realizing Genjokoan

Understanding No-self

In Zen, understanding the true nature of self is not an extra, optional endeavor. This is because holding on to the idea that you have an inherent, enduring self-nature is one of the primary causes of suffering. Remember the Four Noble Truths, and how liberation from dukkha could be achieved by refusing to let your preferences become imperatives?

As long as you haven’t recognized your self-concept as merely being a useful tool, as long as you think you really exist, you will feel compelled to act on your preferences with grasping and aversion. As discussed in the previous chapter, these activities lead to stress, dissatisfaction, and suffering. You can try very hard to make your behavior less self-centered before you understand the true nature of self, but it will be a little bit like trying to act sober while still intoxicated. Your self-concept will impede your efforts every step of the way.

According to Zen, your true self is no-self. This may not sound comforting, but the actual experience of no-self is quite a relief. As mentioned earlier, you don’t need to believe you have an inherent, enduring self-nature in order to live. In fact, that belief just gets in the way of living. Living with an appreciation of no-self also means that you can face both small and great difficulties with equanimity.

But wait a second, you might think—is Zen proposing that as long as you don’t believe your self-concept, you won’t care about pain, change, death, loss, or having a meaningful existence? Is the goal to become indifferent to everything that happens to you? Fortunately, the answer is, “No, definitely not!”

It can be quite surprising to drop your self-concept and realize how much remains behind. Your desires and preferences remain, as do your ideas, your passions, your talents, your memories—in short, everything except your delusion about self-nature. This means that you can engage with life and participate fully in the world without worrying about some inherently existing you. You care for your self elements, and take responsibility for the causal flow of your life, but you do it as a moment-by-moment dance with life, not because you are obliged to pit self against the world. With the realization of no-self, the perennial problems of humanity are not solved, the problems themselves are turned upside down.

CONSIDER THIS

Even when you have corrected your fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of self, most of the time you will still have a sense that you inherently exist. This is rather like one of those optical illusions where one line appears longer than the other; even when you measure the lines and realize they are the same length, one still appears longer. However, now you’re not going to bet money that it really is!

Medicine for All Suffering

In Zen, “the medicine for all suffering” is a personal understanding of how all things, including your self, are empty of inherent, enduring self-nature. It might not be immediately obvious why this would be the case. Here I present three different kinds of suffering that are caused (or made significantly worse) by holding on to your self-concept, and how an appreciation of no-self can help.

The Misery of I, Me, and Mine

The first way your self-concept makes your life difficult is that it requires you to interpret everything you encounter in terms of your self. How am I doing? Do I have what I need? Is this a threat or an opportunity for me? What does this person think of me? Am I enjoying this? Why is this happening to me? Almost every moment of your day is spent evaluating how each thing you experience—sensations, ideas, people, situations—relates to you. This obsession probably gets tiresome even to you, and means that it’s difficult to appreciate things in and of themselves, without reference to numero uno.

According to the Buddhist view, this way of relating to the world is a perfect setup for never-ending agitation and dissatisfaction. Everything that exists is constantly changing, so there’s no end to the worries about your self. The misery of I, me, and mine is the endless work you do on behalf of self: protecting, maintaining, competing, defining, strengthening, and identifying threats. You do this work not only for your body, but also for all of the things that the self identifies with, or feels ownership of, including opinions, possessions, status, and relationships.

Because everything changes, you can never reach a place of perfect happiness. Even if you achieve everything you desire—the perfect home, the perfect job, the perfect spouse, the perfect spiritual state—you know things are going to change, so you can never be completely at ease.

Fortunately, if you understand the true nature of self, worry can be transformed into gratitude. From the point of view of no-self, the stuff of your life simply comes and goes. When you’re enjoying health, or clarity, or fortune, you appreciate it. When these things change, you can let the self change with them. You may not like what’s going on, but you don’t hold on to an idea that your self must be protected from the experience of dislike. Efforts to improve your circumstances are simply a wholehearted response to conditions, not an imperative because your self is under threat.

Because of this wholeheartedness and lack of anxiety, you operate more effectively and learn to trust that your intelligence, determination, and ingenuity will take care of you without directions from your self-concept. You meet situations and people directly, not through the filter of your concern about how they are going to affect you.

Illness, Old Age, and Death

The second major drawback of a belief that you have an inherent, enduring self-nature is that it makes you dread illness, old age, and death. These are called the three divine messengers in Buddhism, because they remind you so acutely of impermanence. Buddhism freely acknowledges that the three messengers bring discomfort and pain, but discomfort and pain in themselves can’t account for the anguish that illness, old age, and death usually cause in people. It’s what the three messengers mean to your self-concept that’s so frightening.

There’s a sense in which old age and illness are also a kind of death—the end of a particular configuration of self elements. With ill health you lose some of the vitality, energy, abilities, and appearance you have previously identified as integral parts of your self. With illness this loss may or may not be temporary, but with old age it definitely becomes permanent.

It’s natural for such loss to cause some grief and a period of adjustment, but you may feel additional suffering as your self-concept undergoes a radical shift. Who are you, now that you can’t do what you used to do? How can you know who you are when you don’t even recognize the person you see in the mirror? How can you maintain your sense of self when time seems to be whittling away at the edges of everything you have identified yourself with?

Finally, knowing that you will die someday puts you in a very difficult place. You can avoid thinking about it, which only works for so long. You can figure that after death there’s only annihilation, as far as you’re concerned, which is likely to be depressing. You can conceive of some kind of existence after death, but for many people it’s difficult to cultivate unshakeable faith in such a thing. No matter which of these routes you take, there are potential difficulties.

Understanding the true nature of self allows you to have a very different relationship to the three divine messengers. When you approach them from the point of view of no-self, they’re just change. Because you recognize how your self is a causal flow and exists in relationship to everything else, you get used to it changing and shifting.

This is a bit like learning to surf the wave of change rather than struggle against it. You still want to be healthy and live as long as possible, but when illness and old age come, you watch in fascination while this self you have gotten so familiar with changes before your eyes like the view in a kaleidoscope. When death becomes inevitable, you become dying and then you become death. There is no you separate from the process, so it can be embraced with curiosity and willingness.

Existential Angst

Some people aren’t possessed by a search for meaning; their lives feel rewarding enough that the painful parts seem worth it, or they have a philosophy of life that lets them put difficulty in perspective. If you are searching for meaning, however, this can be an all-consuming issue. Your success or failure in finding meaning can mean the difference between wholehearted enthusiasm and despair.

Whether you’re searching for meaning in your own life, or looking for the meaning of human life in general, you’re most likely starting from that same old assumption that you have an inherent, enduring self-nature. When you examine possible meanings, you relate to them the same way you relate to everything else: what does this meaning do for you?

Even when your concern is about the suffering in the rest of the world, ultimately it comes back to questions about you: what should you do? What can you do? How can you possibly enjoy your life when the world is like this? It’s not even that such questions are selfish in the ordinary sense of the word, just that they use the self-concept as their main reference point. Since this self-concept is empty, any system of meaning or purpose that uses it will ultimately be unsatisfying or unstable.

Existential angst also arises because you have an intuition about emptiness but still don’t understand the truth of it. Every moment you get clues that nothing in the world is permanent, and that your self-nature is also constantly changing and cannot be grasped. This seems like really bad news for your inherent, enduring self-nature! As discussed earlier, your life is spent protecting and maintaining that self, and emptiness can seem like an awfully big threat. Daily experience ends up being unnerving because you can’t locate your self-essence, your self is dependent on conditions, and you can’t stake out any permanent territory. This leads to the ultimate dukkha: the sense that things aren’t right with me. Who or what are you, really? The answer can be frustratingly elusive.

A self-concept is always relative, existing at a certain place and time, with a past and a future, and defined by being separate from everything else. Therefore, meaning for the self-concept will always involve comparisons, and sometimes things will look good and sometimes they won’t. This kind of meaning does not provide the inherent, enduring thing to rely on that you are looking for. Ironically, the one thing that is inherent and enduring is your ability to just be, this very moment. When you do this completely, without comparing your experience to anything, you are embracing the truth of no-self.

When you understand no-self and contemplate existential matters, the question of who you really are is answered by the fact that you are asking the question, and meaning is revealed in the way you draw your next breath. Without comparison to anything else, without any reference to a self-concept, life is unfolding through you. This experience is full and precious without any need for meaning conferred from outside. It becomes more than enough to meet each moment of your life as best you can, because it’s no longer about you.

Although not a Zen practitioner, Viktor Frankl beautifully describes this approach to life in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. He writes about his experience of being in a concentration camp during World War II, and how he and others avoided despair: “What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

The Least You Need to Know