Introduction
In the post on the four noble truths, I referred to four Buddhist ideas often regarded as foundational:
The links are to Wikipedia articles about these ideas. In this post I’m going to try (as well as I can!) to explain in my own words what I understand by these concepts. The focus is on definitions, not ramifications, and I will draw out more about each concept in subsequent posts.
Buddhism is full of ‘numbered groups’: three marks of existence, four noble truths, five aggregates, and so on. For some reason, the four concepts above don’t seem to be discussed in a numbered group of their own, and yet to me they are strongly interlinked and belong together. The closest numbered grouping I could find was the four dharma seals, which includes impermanence and emptiness, alongside dukkha and nirvana.
I am a pure mathematician by education and inclination, if not by profession, so I like to work from the abstract to the concrete, starting with ‘axioms’ and deriving results from them. Under that approach, interdependence and emptiness are more at the axiomatic end, with impermanence and no-self arguably being consequences of these axioms. The Buddha himself was concerned with alleviating human suffering, and for this purpose, no-self is arguably the most important concept, with the other three being ideas that help to understand no-self.
Compressed to bare essentials, with expansion under each heading below, the four concepts flow as follows:
- All phenomena are dependent on, and arise from, other phenomena. Thus all phenomena are mutually interdependent upon each other.
- As such, nothing exists purely by itself, and so all phenomena are empty of intrinsic existence and meaning.
- Further, no phenomenon exists permanently; every phenomenon is impermanent and in flux, changing in response to changes in the phenomena it arises from.
- In particular, the ‘self’ of human consciousness is a phenomenon, and so, there is no self that has an independent and permanent existence. Instead what we think of as a ‘conscious self’ is continuously arising from varying conditions, and as a result is constantly changing, without a permanent identity.
The idea of no-self is profoundly counter-intuitive to everyday experience and takes quite a bit of getting use to, so please bear with me while I gradually build up to it via the other three concepts.
Interdependence
Interdependence is also referred to as (inter)dependent origination and (inter)dependent co-arising and is a translation of the Sanskrit pratiysamutpada (Pali paticcasamuppada).
Interdependence means that all phenomena are dependent on, and arise from, other phenomena. In some Buddhist texts, this is expressed as ‘when this is, that is; this arising, that arises; when this is not, that is not; this ceasing, that ceases.‘ This idea underlies the reasoning of the Four Noble Truths: by removing the causes of suffering, suffering ceases.
I’m using phenomenon here as a translation of the Pali sankhara (Sanskrit samskara), which can also be translated as ‘compounded things’, ‘formations’, and ‘things that have been put together’.
In this technical sense, a phenomenon is anything that is capable of being perceived. Another way to think of it is that a phenomenon is something formed from parts. Even atoms are phenomena under this definition, since they have nuclei and electrons, and the nuclei consist of protons and neutrons. Possibly the quarks of which protons and neutrons consist are not phenomena in this compounded sense, but then it seems that quarks can’t be perceived individually but only as part of larger particles.
Anyway, for practical purposes, anything we interact with in everyday life is a phenomenon. Crucially for no-self and the Four Noble Truths, that includes mental processes and formations, as well as material things. Thoughts and emotions arise based on sensory perceptions, and other mental formations. In fact, in Buddhism, thinking and emotions are treated as a sense alongside sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.
The definition above is for interdependence in an abstract, ‘wide’ sense. There is also a more specific ‘narrow’ meaning in which there are twelve links that give rise via mental formations to suffering. Exploring this would take us too far out of the way in this post, which is focused on defining the four foundational concepts, but suffice to say that mindfulness and other forms of meditation are a key technique to ease the suffering arising from interdependence in the narrower sense.
To try to make the idea of interdependence somewhat less abstract, think of what had to happen for you to be reading these words. A vast network of causes and conditions gave rise to you the reader, me the writer, the thinking I am trying to understand and re-express from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, the words themselves, the (possibly different!) meanings we each attribute to them, the technologies by which they are communicated and which you are using to read the words, the way in which you discovered this post and made the decision to read it, and so on. It’s too much to comprehend fully, particularly because human nature tends to want to reduce things to a single cause wherever possible. (As an aside this is often for social or emotional reasons, for example so that praise or blame can be attributed.) Interdependence says things aren’t as simple as that.
There is a beautiful way to visualise interdependence called Indra’s Net in which there is a jewel at every place two cords of the net intersect, and every jewel is reflected in every other jewel. As Alan Watts put it:
Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.
From a podcast of Alan Watts speaking
Arguably, nirvana itself is an example of something that exists that is not compounded. As such it lacks both interdependence and impermanence, and is not a phenomenon in the technical sense used above.
Emptiness
There is a settled translation of Sanskrit sunyata (Pali sunnata) as emptiness – other translations like voidness don’t seem to have caught on.
Emptiness is absolutely fundamental to Buddhist thinking. I discuss it after interdependence only because personally I find interdependence easier to relate to. When I first came across emptiness, I had to keep reminding myself ‘empty of what’, to which the answer is ‘of intrinsic or independent existence’. The intrinsic and independent qualifiers are important. Emptiness is not nihilism: Buddhists do not argue that nothing exists, only that nothing exists in and of itself, ‘in its own-being’ as the Heart Sutra puts it. Thus the definitions of interdependence and emptiness both rely on careful use of qualifiers (‘compounded’ and ‘intrinsic’, respectively) to make statements that are general, yet precise enough to lead to profound insights.
In modern Western thought, emptiness sounds quite negative, and yet emptiness is not about nothingness, but rather wholeness. The Heart Sutra famously says Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form. This is discussed beautifully here and shows emptiness to be humbling, inspiring and comforting.
Robert Wright, in Why Buddhism is True (which we encountered in the post about the Four Noble Truths) explains emptiness in terms of interdependence (using the marginally lengthier translation interdependent co-arising):
If you look at the logic marshaled by Buddhist philosophers on behalf of the doctrine of emptiness, you’ll see that it has much to do with a Buddhist idea that’s often rendered in English as “interdependent co-arising.” This basically means that things which may seem to exist independently of other things are in fact dependent for their existence and their character on other things. Trees need sunlight and water, and indeed are continually being changed by these and other things they come into contact with. … In other words: nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence.
Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True
Lack of intrinsic existence is sometimes referred to as emptiness of essence. There is also emptiness as a mode of perception, in which the aim is to see things as they are, adding nothing and taking nothing away. The link in the previous sentence discusses this very nicely, so all I will add in this post is a link to an excerpt from David Gemmell’s novel Waylander about catching a pebble in the moonlight, and how much harder that is in a state of fear when there’s more at stake (in the novel the example is the lives of the children of one of the characters). The immediate point being made is about conquering fear, but to my mind there is a deeper point about emptiness: catching the pebble in the moonlight is just that, no more, no less. Everything else, including fear, is added by the mind rather than being intrinsic to the act of catching the pebble.
For a less dramatic example of the emptiness mode, imagine sending an email to a close friend, who uncharacteristically doesn’t reply for several days. Some (many?) people might feel annoyed at the lack of response, or worried that something is amiss. There are so many different stories that we can tell ourselves in situations like this, and often they say more about ourselves and what we are projecting into the situation than about the reality. The emptiness mode helps us not to worry: until the facts are known, all we know is there has been no reply; and when we know the reason for that, we can deal with it on its own terms. Perhaps our friend has been having technical problems with email, or been deluged with other emails. Even if something bad has happened, fact-based compassion is better than fear-based worry.
Nirvana is not a compounded thing, and is not subject to interdependence, but is still empty. This means that emptiness is more ‘fundamental’ than interdependence, and so arguably should come first, but as I say I find interdependence much easier to relate to, and emptiness easier to understand in terms of interdependence.
Impermanence
Again impermanence appears to be a settled translation of Pali annica (Sanskrit anitya). The relevant quotation from the Heart Sutra is ‘all compounded things [phenomena] are impermanent‘. Impermanence is a natural corollary of interdependence: when the causes and conditions of something change, so does the thing itself, and everything (inter)depending on it. Nirvana is again an exception, since it is not compounded, and so is permanent once reached. What could be more positive than the idea that suffering is impermanent but the bliss of nirvana isn’t?
In my view, impermanence is like the first Noble Truth: on the face of it pessimistic, but when examined clearly, realistic and leads to thinking that helps to reduce suffering. An obvious example of impermanence is ageing and death, which few of us want to contemplate deeply. And yet as the Stoics pointed out, ageing and death are wholly natural, and suffering arises more from the attitudes taken towards them.
Impermanence has some affinities with the scientific concept of entropy, which are nicely discussed here.
No-self
This is variously referred to as no-self, non-self and not-self, all of which are translations of Pali anatta (Sanskrit anatman). The idea is that what we think of as a permanent independent self is an illusion, and instead our ‘self’, while it exists, is empty of intrinsic and independent existence, impermanent, and continuously arising from interdependent causes and conditions. As Wright puts it:
Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show.
Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True
Or as the philosopher Thomas Metzinger expresses it in his book The Ego Tunnel:
Strictly speaking, there is no essence within us that stays the same across time, nothing that could not in principle be divided into parts, no substantial self that could exist independently of the body. A “self ” in any stronger or metaphysically interesting sense of the word just does not seem to exist. We must face this fact: We are self-less Ego Machines.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel
Metzinger also points out that the self is a process rather than a thing: ‘we are “selfing” organisms: At the very moment we wake up in the morning, the physical system—that is, ourselves—starts the process of “selfing.”’ And he argues that this does not deprive us of free will: ‘The most beautiful idea, perhaps, is that freedom and determinism can peacefully coexist: If our brains are causally determined in the right way, if they make us causally sensitive to moral considerations and rational arguments, then this very fact makes us free. Determinism and free will are compatible.’
No-self is a natural corollary of the other three ideas, if one accepts that mental formations (thoughts and emotions, roughly speaking) are compounded things. Moving away from mental formations and just thinking of the brain itself as a collection of neurons and other cells, these cells are subject to interdependence, emptiness and impermanence, so no-self is a logical position to hold, at least for someone with a materialist view of consciousness.
Wright and Metzinger (among many others, including David Hume) put forward detailed and convincing reasoning in support of no-self, and marshal arguments from evolutionary psychology as to why things might have turned out this way. One of the main ideas is that there are different ‘mental modules’ which use emotions to try to get the conscious mind to pay attention to what they are saying. The propulsive power of emotions can be weakened via mindfulness meditation, allowing calmer and more conscious choices.
Despite all this, the idea of no-self is (at least initially) extremely difficult to accept, it just doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense. A key reason, in my view, is that evolutionary psychology doesn’t want us to accept it. Metzinger again:
Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill that constantly forces us to try to be as happy as possible—to feel good—without ever reaching a stable state. But as we can now clearly see, this process has not optimized our brains and minds toward happiness as such. Biological Ego Machines such as Homo sapiens are efficient and elegant, but many empirical data point to the fact that happiness was never an end in itself.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel
The hedonic treadmill that Metzinger refers to is pretty clearly connected with tanha and the Four Noble Truths. Rather than explore this further in what is now a very long post, I will finish with a few observations that provide some weak reasons to take no-self seriously, and start to show why, as a matter of logic as well as morality, one should act with compassion and kindness towards others in exactly the same way as one acts towards oneself:
- Many theories of psychology posit that the self is composed of, or can draw upon, multiple parts, for example the Freudian ego, id and super-ego, Jungian archetypes, the ego-states of transactional analysis, internal family systems, and so on. It can be objected that much of this relates to mind or personality, rather than self (and in this post I haven’t clearly defined any of these terms). But it is at least suggestive that so many theories think of mental life in terms of composed parts.
- My wife has a T-shirt that reads ‘I can’t go back to yesterday – I was a different person then.’ I think many people recognise the truth of this, even if it is on the face of it somewhat counterintuitive. And it is common in programming circles to write comments and other documentation for one’s ‘future self’, on the basis that in the future one is likely to be a different person, with a different set of memories, and what came naturally today may have to be re-learned, or at least refreshed, tomorrow. That’s mostly pragmatic, but there is a kernel of recognition that selves are impermanent.
- If our past and future selves are not the same as our self today, but we are motivated to treat them in the same way as our present self, why then should we not treat other people in the same way as ourselves? Put differently, why should variation in time be privileged over variation in space? (We could call this the ‘relativity theory’ of selves.) The late moral philosopher Derek Parfit expands on this point in some detail in his book Reasons and Persons. And the Christian injunction to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ is essentially saying the same thing.
Once we start to recognise that we don’t have selves in the way that evolution wants us to think we do, the barriers between people start to fade. Parfit’s words on this quoted in one of his obituaries are very moving, and it is notable that he used the word tunnel, as Metzinger does:
When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.
Derek Parfit
I can attest from fleeting experience that a beautiful feeling of interconnectedness arises when one starts to let go of the idea of a permanent self. This is not just interconnectedness with other people, or other living creatures, but with the whole world, and is sometimes referred to as interbeing. As a dear friend once put it to me, it’s like we are water droplets in the ocean, but all most of us can perceive is the boundary round our own droplet.
Conclusion
In this post I described four foundational ideas of Buddhism, culminating in the counter-intuitive but enlightening idea of no-self, and started to explain how this relates to the Buddha’s goal of liberation from suffering.