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

by Robert Wright

Control isn’t the only property that people tend to associate with the self, and it’s not the only property the Buddha examines in this discourse. When I think of my self, I think of something that persists through time. I’ve changed a lot since I was ten years old, but hasn’t some inner essence—my identity, my self—in some sense endured? Isn’t that the one constant amid the flux? The Buddha would naturally be skeptical of this claim, since he holds that everything is in flux and nothing is permanent. In the Discourse on the Not-Self, he applies this skepticism to each of the five aggregates. “What do you think of this, O monks? Is feeling permanent or impermanent?” Obligingly, the monks reply, “Impermanent, O Lord.” He continues, “Is perception permanent or impermanent?” And so on—mental formations, the body, consciousness: none of the aggregates is permanent, the monks agree. So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time—are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings. This is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not-self, and it’s commonly taken as the core Buddhist argument that the self doesn’t exist.