I am working on a few new essays, but in the meantime, I wanted to post some answers I sent to a student in response to his questions about Buddhism. It’s been an honor to be a teacher in many ways. One of the greater honors is when students have an unbounded curiosity for a certain subject, and they trust you to be able to give them a reliable answer. That is a very good feeling. The questions and answers are below. They focus on the Buddhist approaches to the concepts of “pain” and “self.” Since adult life is always busy and hectic, I hope these satisfy any curiosities you may have as well before I get any more essays written.
Q: Buddhists believe that pain is a part of life, and yet their key goals are to break that cycle of suffering and escape. So which is it? Do they accept pain as what will inevitably happen or do they reject it and try to escape?
A: Buddhists do believe pain is a part of life, but that pain is a part of life mostly due to an error in our perception regarding our subjective world views and attachment to a sense of individuality/self that separates us from the rest of the living things around us. While the first Noble Truth of Buddhism is usually “Life is Suffering,” the translation never really does justice to the original statement. Here are the first two noble truths as laid out by the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama:
1. Life is dukkha
2. Dukkha arises from/is caused by tanha
Now, the original use of these words is important because depending on how you choose to focus on them it can create either a positive or negative interpretation of Buddhadharma (i.e., Buddhist philosophy). Dukkha can be translated as suffering, but is more or less meant as “unsatisfactoriness.” Same with tanha – it can be translated as “desire,” but is more akin to the word “longing.”
If I long for something, I want it, and if I cannot have it, then I find my life to be unsatisfactory, or in my direct terms, I suffer. And even if I still do obtain that object that I desired, then I may still be unsatisfied with it, because the only reason I thought it would make me whole in the first place was because I did not have that object. But now that I do, I realize that it didn’t really help me feel any richer or more like myself.
The fact that you want anything at all, that we long for certain things and then are eventually disappointed by them, arises from what Buddhists perceive to be a false sense of self. Insofar as what the “self” is, the “self” is usually what humans think is this unchanging, definable trait that helps others pinpoint exactly who we are. However, Siddhartha disagreed with this. He said there is actually no lasting permanent self – our senses, consciousness, and form are always changing and in flux, never staying the same. For example, you never have the same skin cells – they replace themselves every five years or so. So, in essence, you have a different body. This can be supported just by the simple fact of growing up – people grow taller, they have less bones, they start to lose their hair, etc. Nothing that people usually hold onto as definable or immutable qualities stay constant.
This is where the process of meditation comes in. Meditation as a tool is supposed to help people realize the intensely dynamic and fluid nature of reality and our thoughts. Because our idea of “self” comes from an error in our perception of our world, meditation is a tool Buddhists use to try to approach the world from a more objective/compassionate/fair basis (or what have you). Once we extinguish the idea of a constant self, we are getting rid of the longing/greed/desire that causes suffering in the first place. It’s essentially a shifting of our balance, so to speak. Instead of thinking “This is what I need,” or “I want this because it’s what will help me,” Buddhists try to think in broader terms, relating ourselves back to the world and to each other. Which is one of the major principles of Buddhist philosophy: interdependent co-origination. No living being is separate from another living being; no thing arises independent of anything else. Total and complete connection and change – these are the two main things we can start to observe about the world after we learn to change our perceptions.
Buddhists go deeper and deeper into this type of thinking to get out of the cycle of birth and death (samsara) in order to attain nirvana (trans.: extinction). Most people think nirvana is a blissed-out state, but it’s essentially taking the concept/idea of self and completely rendering it null and void. Once we transcend our selfish and subjective view of the world, we have a more enlightened nature of the world around us. Now, there are two schools of thought as your history teahcher may teach you about: Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism. Theravada (translated as “Way of the Saints”) is the closest we have to the original form of Buddhism in some ways – they believe in meditating to totally take themselves out of samsara, attain nirvana, and then teach others this “path towards enlightenment.” Mahayana Buddhism is a later form of Buddhism that encapsulates such schools as Zen. Mahayana Buddhists believe that samsara = nirvana, nirvana = samsara. In other words, enlightened nature is not different from the world as we know it in it’s truest sense.
Therefore, the entire goal of Buddhism is to take that life is suffering, which in turn is caused by a sense of desire, and cut off the idea of self (I, me, my) that causes this sense of incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness in the first place. So there is no running from suffering or desire – it’s just that we must cut off the root of it if we do not want to continue suffering.
Q: Do Buddhists think the ONLY way to avoid desire is just to remove “self” entirely?
A:
Your question: Do Buddhists think the only way to avoid desire to just to remove “self” entirely?
Subsequent point related to the question: Appears to be the total removal of all personality and characteristics.
Logical quandary: How can one remove the self?
Answer to the quandary: There is no self to remove.
What we are dealing with here appears to be a logical paradox – Buddhists want to get rid of the notion of self, but insofar as they recognize there is a self to vanquish, they are admitting as to the inherent existence of a self. Which is an argument that people have used in the last two centuries, especially Western philosophers and theologians, to negate Buddhist philosophy. However, Buddhism recognizes life to be inherently paradoxical. The fact that we believe in a self does not in-and-of-itself substantiate the claim of the self, only of our perception and opinion that there is a self – an opinion/perception that is inherently wrong. To negate self is not to negate something that inherently exists, but to negate the perception of it. Think of the notion of a self as a sort of mist/haze that blinds us to the existence, feelings, and lives of other human beings.
This mist/haze that is the idea of self is essentially cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. Buddhism can be said to approach cogito ergo sum in two ways: 1) Of course you think and therefore have a sense of self, the self is inherently an idea, and as long as you hold onto the perceptions, thoughts, and emotions we believe define our static notion of self, you will always believe in it and 2) To substantiate your sense of existence inherently on sense is to presuppose that there is actually no permanent self. Only as long as you can interact with a small simulacrum of the world will you ever be able to think you exist; once we stop interacting with the world, there is nothing. And, in it’s paradoxical fashion, Buddhism says no to both of these things, because both of these approaches boil down to what is referred to as solipsism – you can only ever know your self exists and nothing else outside of it.
So, given either interpretation, we are blinded to what Buddhists see as our true nature by stating: 1) Our thoughts create an illusory sense of self because we are overly attached to what they represent and 2) our sensory experience of the world can also be clouded by our perception and attachment to certain phenomena and what we associate with them. In essence, we have to realize that, simply because we see a snowflake as white with our eye, does not mean it is white. Snowflake = white. A = A. Just in the same way, we may see a piece of coal as black. Coal = black. B=B. However, whenever we think of a different animal that may have a larger spectrum of colors they are able to see, then the game changes. Let’s say a bird has a greater range of ultraviolet light able to be absorbed into it’s cornea and can see more colors than a human. To that bird, maybe the snowflake looks black. And all of a sudden, the piece of coal appears to be white. The equation is flipped. Snowflake = black. All of a sudden, A=B.
Which brings us back to the mist/haze of the self. We believe in the concreteness of the self insofar as we believe in the concreteness and absolutism of our experience as an individual being. We see the snowflake as white, therefore it must be truly white. I hold onto these thoughts, feelings, and memories as to who I am, therefore they must make up this person I know as Ryan. In reality, the color of the snowflake and the thoughts-feelings-memories we hold onto are both a type of mist/haze. As long as we are not able to look beyond the limit of our experience, we are thus continually mired in this illusory sense of an unchanging, unmovable self. Whereas all along the self never existed because it was an illusion created by an attachment to our experience of the world and of what makes up our mindstuff (scientific term right there).
This is where the Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) comes into play. As we exist, things are inherently empty and void of any traits that could be said to define things as greater or lesser than the whole. In a way, sunyata has a lot to do with the Christian concept of kenosis (self-emptying). Kenosis is the idea that we have to empty ourselves of the notion of self before we are able to let the divine will as defined b Christian belief have a greater part in our understanding of the world. It is based on the self-emptying of Jesus Christ’s own nature at the Crucifixion – Jesus emptied himself of his divine nature to take on a fully human form (which, if you think about it, is itself a paradox of sorts: a man at once both fully human and fully divine. It would technically be considered impossible. Luckily, the faith tradition of Catholicism you participate in does have a lot more to say about this). Even in this sense, there is not a complete sense of self Jesus Christ himself has to hold onto – if his nature is fully divine as well as fully human, not only is he participating in his own pain as an individual person, but he is also participating in the drama of the universe as it continually unfolds and folds back upon itself – for if the divine is eternal, it would have to be even beyond a sense of self because it is beyond the phenomenal constraints of our universe.
Both sunyata and kenosis make one thing clear: our idea of self-nature and of true nature are beyond a rational sort of thinking. This is where the Zen Buddhist tradition of the koan comes into play (we can talk more about that later). But, to wrap it up nicely, both of these ideas find their middle ground in theologia negativa or negative theology. The best thing you can do to picture negative theology is to imagine a stained glass window with an image on it. The image is colorful and pretty and depicts a scene from a story, but it is not the actual nature of the stained glass window. So to better understand what the window is, you start to pick apart the painting that makes up the stained glass window. Bit by bit, you are left with nothing but a clear window with a bright light coming through it and reflected by it. And that’s what we are looking for by discarding the notion of self, of I-my-me – the bright light that is the truth behind the picture and the story it depicts.
Zen Millennial 
Very nicely put. 🙂
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