Richard F. Gombrich Exceprts
In many cases, the Buddha was not asking the same questions as his opponents, or indeed as the successors of his opponents in India down the centuries. He did not always follow the unspoken rules of what philosophy, or systematic thought, was supposed to be about. Naturally, this led to misunderstandings after his death, even well before Buddhism became implanted in countries beyond India. Another salient example may clarify this. The orthodox tradition, Vedic thought, was much concerned with ontological questions: what exists?
The Buddha said that this is a wrong question. But this was too much for his followers. One major school, the abhidharma, gave his teachings a realist interpretation; another, the Vijñãnavãda, an idealist interpretation; it is possible to derive both these interpretations from the early Canon, particularly if one highlights certain texts and ignores others. There are indeed also texts which, if taken in isolation, seem to be ambiguous on this matter.
The key terms in Buddhism--and probably in any system of ideas--do not refer to external objects.... They are abstractions.... Let me begin with the 'self'.... Throughout ancient times, in the cultures where it was known, the salient doctrine of Buddhism, its most distinctive feature, was held to be the doctrine of No Self or No Soul. Both these two-word English phrases translate S: atman and P: natta/anatta. When Buddhism was discovered by the West...it was being expounded by and to Christians, who were no less struck by Buddhism's denial of a supreme creator god; but for modern scholars too, the denial of a self or soul has been the most striking characteristic of Buddhism and of the teaching ascribe to the Buddha....
It will be easiest to grasp my argument if I come straight to the main point, and say baldly that all the fuss and misunderstanding can be avoided if one inserts the word 'unchanging', so that the two-word English phrases become 'no unchanging self' and 'no unchanging soul'....
[W]e are dealing with a [doctrinal] system [of the Buddha's anatta teaching] which is not merely coherent but interlocking. It is perfectly understandable, but to understand it correctly you have to know how the entire set of key terms is being used. [F]or the Buddha, 'the world' is the same as 'that which we normally experience'.
[T]o explain what is meant by 'normally'..., for the moment, suffice [it to] point out that the Buddha is not primarily concerned with what exists--in fact, he thinks that is a red herring--but with what we can experience, what can be present to consciousness. For his purposes, what exists and the contents of experience are the same. At this level, if we want a label, his doctrine looks like pragmatic empiricism....
The Buddha was influenced by the Upanasadic theory of 'being' on two levels. Firstly, he accepted the conceptualization of 'being' as the opposite of 'change' or 'becoming'. On a more abstract or philosophical level, however, he rejects the reification of 'being....' The Buddha does not see a single essence either in the world or in the living being....
Famously, the Buddha's approach to life's problems was pragmatic.... Today we see the world as in perpetual motion, and that reminds people of the Buddhist principle of impermanence. True, the Buddha saw our experiences as an ever-changing process, a stream of consciousness--the literal Pali equivalent of that expression does occur. But we are talking physics, whereas the Buddha was talking psychology....-- experience [as] a causally conditioned process....
[T]he three basic questions of early Indian Philosophy [are]: What exists? How do we know anything? What is it that continues from life to life...? The Buddha agreed with most modern philosophers in rejecting the first question as pointless or meaningless; he substituted for it: 'What do we experience ?; His answer was what we might also call his answer to the second question, an attempt to describe what experience is like. The answer lay not in objects but in processes. It was not an attempt to find the origin of consciousness, a quest which still baffles modern philosophy. The [third] question does not arise for western philosophers today, since they do not believe in rebirth. For the Buddha the answer was likewise to be found in a process: karma. The very word karma, if one goes back to its simple root, means doing rather than being, a process not a thing. The Buddha...singled out the process of ethical intention; and he made it the principle of continuity not just from on life to the next, but from one moment to the next throughout our lives....
[T]he Buddha reacted to Vedic ideas and practices concerning fire, and...this...may have led him to what is perhaps his most important philosophical idea, the substitution of non-random processes for object.... t is not only our faculties but their objects and operations that are said to be on fire.... In...the Buddha's First Sermon, as it has come down to us, dukkha was defined as the five upadana-khanda, and that this compound noun is usually translated as something like 'the aggregates of grasping', which in normal English is meaningless. In fact, the term conveys the same message as the Fire Sermon, using the same metaphor....
The word upadana has both a concrete and an abstract meaning. In the abstract it means attachment, grasping; in this sense it is much used in Buddhist dogmatics. Concretely, it means that which fuels this process.... So when the context deals with fire it simply means fuel....
I...translate upadana-khanda as 'blazing masses of fuel', and consider it to be a coherent part of the same metaphor as the word nibbana....
Whether or not we agree with the Buddha in considering that consciousness must always be consciousness of something, there is no doubt that in separating ontology from epistemology he is taking a point of view with which we feel at home....
The Buddha sees consciousness as being like fire in that it is an appetitive process, which cannot exist without having something to feed on. Moreover, the analogy with fire can provide a model of how a process can be dynamic and seek out its objects without being guided by a seeker....
In life the five sets of processes khandha always operate together to create experience....
In sum..., the Buddha made the following uses of fire as a metaphor.
1. [F]ire can go out without having an agent to put it out, simply because the fuel is exhausted.
2. [F]ire cannot be separated from that which burns.... [T]here is no such thing as a fire without
a burning object, so there is no such thing as consciousness without an object of
consciousness. [T]he subjective and objective presuppose each other and all experience
requires both....
3. Most important of all...: [W]hat we can experience is only a process. This may be his most
important philosophical idea.
4. [L]ike fire, the processes which constitute experience are non-random.
5. The Buddha also ethicized Vedic thought.... Creating conditions in which the fires with which
we are all burning would go out was an enterprise at the same time ethical and
intellectual, for the fires were both emotional (passion and hatred) and intellectual (delusion,
stupidity). Egotism and belief in an unchanging ego were the fires' essential
fuel, so once they were got rid of, those fires would go out....
I certainly do not intend to claim that the Buddha anticipated all the main discoveries of modern psychology.... Nevertheless, the similarity between some of his ideas and the picture painted by modern cognitive psychology is certainly striking. Nowadays perception is regarded as an activity, a kind of doing. Moreover, 'perception is inherently selective' (FN 4: Ulrich Neisser, Cognition & Reality, 1976). Both of these propositions would have the Buddha's complete assent.
Modern psychology further holds that every action is an interaction with the world and affects the actor. The Buddha did not perhaps say exactly this about perception or cognition, but he certainly problematized the dividing line between actor--for him, the synergy of five sets of processes--and the environment.; we recall that in the first khanda, the rupa khanda, are included not only the senses but their objects.... This is as fundamental for the Buddha as it is for most of us; for were there no distinction between a person and the world, including other people, his entire soteriology would make no sense at all. We are the heirs of our own karma; my karma and yours cannot be the same. By the same token, if you achieve nirvana and I do not, it is I who continue to be reborn, not you. That these distinctions were blurred in Mahayana thought has misled many students of earlier Buddhism.
Yet in one way he made the fact that every act affects the actor the very cornerstone of his teaching. We are back to karma again. Every bad intention...makes you worse, every good intention makes you better.... [K]arma, morally relevant volition, is the dynamic that moves us through our lives..., and...provides the principle of continuity and coherence throughout those lives. In the context of that dynamic, karma is the same as sankhara, a term which refer both to the process of constructing (our lives seen in prospect) and the result of that process (our lives seen in retrospect)....
[T]he No Soul doctrine has led people to the diametrically wrong notion that the Buddha did not believe in moral responsibility or personal continuity, whereas in fact he had an even stronger theory of those things than any non-Buddhists accept today....
(pp. 2-3, 5, 7-9, 67, 73-74, 111, 113-114, 120, 122-124, 197-198. My bolds, underlines.)