Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

if there’s no self, then what is the nature of the “he” that is liberated after all the things that aren’t self have been disowned? Who is doing the disowning? If you don’t exist, then how can you say of each aggregate, “This is not mine, this I am not”? If it makes sense to say that there’s something you don’t possess and that there’s something you are not, then there must be a you in the first place, right? How can the Buddha, on the one hand, insist that the self doesn’t exist, and, on the other hand, keep using terms like I and you and he and she? One common Buddhist response to these kinds of questions is this: Though in the deepest sense the self doesn’t exist, human language isn’t very good at describing reality at the deepest level. So as a practical matter—as a linguistic convention—we have to talk about there being an I and a you and a he and a she. In other words, the self doesn’t exist in an “ultimate” sense, but it exists in a “conventional” sense.