Searching for the Disappearing Self

"Do you even exist, bro?"

There is a type of pseudo-Buddhist with whom it is impossible to hold a conversation. You try to tell them about how you went to the grocery store and got a great deal on fresh halibut, and they take a drag from their cigarette and say, “There is no self.” 

My friend Marlon had a habit of saying that. He was a German artist who had once spent six weeks writing a play while living in a tree house he’d built outside of a theater. We lived in the same decrepit, mural-covered squat called Muna House by the Ganga River in Varanasi, India.

Muna House was a refuge from the burning heat of the day, and at night I would open my window and let the cool breeze from the river wash over me. Monkeys roamed the roofs and occasionally snuck into my room while I was inside, pilfering mangoes and loaves of bread before I even sensed their presence. 

I first met Marlon in the common area of the building, a large cement room ringed on three sides by doors with one side open to the river. Marlon was a dark and handsome man wearing short hair, designer jeans, and a field jacket. Even while living in our dirty building, he smelled of shaving cream and crisp white soap.

I invited him to share the meal I was cooking on the little canister stove I’d rented, and he spent the time critiquing the way I chopped onions and my timing in adding the carrots. 

Marlon had come to India to heal after a messy divorce with the woman he’d thought was his soulmate. His glowering presence was a necessary counterbalance for my young, sky-searching heart. I would make pronouncements I’d just thought of, like, “I’m only going to wear clothes made with love” and he would take another drag of his cigarette, scowl at me, and say nothing. 

One day, sitting in plastic chairs in Shiva Cafe (the one with the bread rolls that tasted nothing like bread rolls), trying to pick up an errant wifi connection, I noticed him eyeing a slender blond Swiss woman. 

“Why don’t you go talk to her?” I asked. 

Marlon blushed and looked down. “I wouldn’t know what to say.” 

“Ah, I know. But you’re an interesting guy, you’ve done a lot of soul searching… why don’t you just say hi and try to be yourself?”

“There is no self,” he said. 

The Buddha and “No-Self”

Some Western people are exposed to a little Buddhism and conclude that Buddha was a nihilist and that nothing exists after all. The phrase “There is no self” (which is a common mistranslation of the word anatta) is taken to mean that you don’t exist, and neither do I. This is very convenient for those who happen to be contemplating dropping out of college (“It’s okay mom, nothing exists anyway”). 

The assumption is that when we become enlightened, we melt into a sort of nothingness-soup. Or bliss-soup, if you’re optimistic. Either way, it’s an easy misinterpretation to make. 

I’ve made the “no self” pronouncement a few times, too, only to realize later that I hadn’t really understood what that meant. 

Buddhist teacher Thanissaro Bhikkhu says that the phrase “there is no self” is “the granddaddy of fake Buddhist quotes.” Buddha himself never used the phrase “no self.” He used the term anatta, meaning not self. Here is one of the better definitions I’ve found: 

The term anatta means “that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon. While often interpreted as a doctrine denying the existence of a self, [anatta] is more accurately described as a strategy to attain non-attachment by recognizing everything as impermanent, while staying silent on the ultimate existence of an unchanging essence.”

So, anatta doesn’t mean I don’t exist — just that I don’t exist in the way I think I do. 

Where Are You, Really?

Here’s a thought experiment: let’s figure out where I end and the rest of the world begins. 

I usually think of my organs as being part of myself, since they’re inside my skin and I wouldn’t be able to live without them. Easy, off to a great start. But what about the sun and its violent fusing of atoms that spills light and heat onto the earth? What about the earth’s atmosphere and the plant life exhaling the oxygen we breathe? These things happen outside my skin, sure, but I would die just as soon if they decided to take a vacation. Might we include those, too, in the definition of “me”? 

On the other side, the functioning of my body depends on an ecosystem of trillions of microorganisms, eating, reproducing, and dying with the same fervor as life in a rainforest. My body contains more bacterial organisms than it does human cells. Are those also “me”? Would I still be “me” if they suddenly disappeared? I certainly wouldn’t be alive if they did. 

When we really look, we find that the boundaries between ourselves and the rest of the world are not so clear. Perhaps they’re no more than a useful idea. This passage by Thich Nhat Hanh gets down to it:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.”

When the Buddha was asked whether there was a self, he refused to answer. Thanissaro Bhikkhu explained that the Buddha, when later asked why he didn’t respond, “said that to hold either that there is a self or that there is no self is to fall into extreme forms of wrong view that make the path of Buddhist practice impossible.”

So Buddha was not a nihilist (in fact, he condemned nihilism as a dangerous philosophy that leads to greater suffering). Perhaps it is our own culture’s nihilism that so many of us project onto the Buddha. However, he did not believe in the kind of immutable soul that Abrahamic religions are known for either. His non-answer rings like a bell, beckoning us to peel back the veil, and see for ourselves. 

Glass Clouds Upon the Earth

I don’t have any special knowledge about anatta, only a fascination with it and a tendency to explore things through writing. 

One day last week, I was walking the baby around town trying to keep him asleep while my wife had a much-needed acupuncture appointment. Downtown was dirtier than I’d remembered, with trash in the gutters and abandoned campsites in the alleyways. Two used condoms sat beneath a tree like deflated balloons, and graffiti colored the peeling paint of the buildings like flowers in the cracks of a sidewalk. 

Something flashed at the edge of my vision, and I heard an inner voice say “pay attention.” 

It was a window lying on the grass between the sidewalk and the road. Not the see-through kind, but the type that’s reflective on one side. In it was the crisp reflection of the blue sky studded with puffy white clouds like floating sheep. I stopped for a moment to look into this portal to the sky lying like a puddle on the ground. Is this the same way I exist? I wondered. 

It occurred to me that while the image in the window exists, it only does because the window is lying on the ground at a certain angle, and the sun is shining, and I am there to observe it. 

Not to mention the weather patterns that made the clouds, the geological processes that made the sand that made the glass, the life forms that decayed and turned into the oily soup that fed the truck that transported the window here from the factory. Or the man who worked in the factory, armpits wet with sweat, thinking of his wife and four children at home. Not to mention his mother, without whose bloody birth he wouldn’t be able to work in the factory. Or the meteor that set the earth ablaze and made way for mammals to evolve into human beings who make windows. Not to mention my being there at that moment. 

If any of these factors were not present, the image wouldn’t exist. So it does exist, but only as a result of everything else. It doesn’t have inherent existence, which would mean that if someone took the window away and the sun set and I went to bed, the image of the sky would still be there. The image only exists because the whole universe conspires to make it so. 

This is the same way that we exist: only in relation to everything else. Only we believe there is an “I” that exists on its own. But in the same way that you couldn’t squeeze rain out of the clouds reflected in the window by cutting the window apart, if we really look for the “I” apart from everything else, we can’t find it. 

Perhaps there is something that is unchanging. But we can see that if there is, it’s not the same thing as what we refer to as “me.” 

Boundless

Some weeks after sharing that first meal with Marlon, we were together in a boat along the Ganga River. I looked out at the city I’d been living in, spied the hotel I’d stayed in when I first arrived, and saw myself from the outside. A flood of compassion and fierce love flowed from my heart to that younger self who had struggled so much in his first month in the city. And it didn’t stop with me, it flowed out to Marlon, to the boat man, and to all beings everywhere. I saw each of us as perfect and whole as our flawed, human selves, exactly as we are. 

When we docked the boat, the boat man refused to give us change from the large bill we handed him, and Marlon got cross with a group of children asking him to buy them soda. The feeling faded. 

If my separate, individual self is only as real as a reflection in an old window on a dirty city block, then what is beyond that? What is left when it’s gone? Clearly, it’s nothing that my mind can grasp. Perhaps that’s why the Buddha didn’t answer the question. But I suspect it has something to do with that boundless love I felt that day in the boat with Marlon.  

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Note: some conversations are composites of multiple conversations over a period of time. All dialogue is my best recollection, often simplified. Names have been changed.