I recently finished two books: What the Buddha Taught, by Walpola Rahula, and The Great Shift, by James Kugel. What the Buddha Taught is an introductory text to Buddhism, The Great Shift is a book about changing senses of self and God in biblical and second-temple Judaism. I picked up the two books on different occasions and became interested in their respective topics for different reasons. As it happens, What the Buddha Taught and The Great Shift have some converging themes, so I thought I’d write a joint review of the two books and use that as a springboard to talk about the “idea of self” in Buddhism and biblical Judaism.
I.
First, a brief sketch of the two books. In The Great Shift, Kugel traces the development of how the Bible writes about individuals and their encounters with God over the course of the biblical timeline. Kugel notes that initially, biblical characters are mostly portrayed as acting, rather than thinking. We are not explicitly told of the motivations of Abraham, the doubts of Joseph, etc. Instead, biblical stories are told from a third-person omniscient perspective that focuses on the actions of the biblical characters and their consequences. Kugel suggests that this is not simply a literary choice; rather the lack of internal dialog of biblical characters might reflect the way that people thought of themselves in biblical times. In contrast to the familiar idea that people generate their own thoughts, people’s sense of themselves in biblical times may have been quite different. People in biblical times might have believed that their emotions and thoughts originated from outside themselves, possibly in the form of spirits that could enter a person. Kugel draws from anthropological research claiming that in many cultures, especially in the past, the idea of the individual, bounded self was very different than the Western notion we have today. The accounts that Kugel cites to this effect come off as bizarre to the Western reader, such as the Dinka people who have no concept of “mind” or “memory”.
Kugel claims that biblical characters, in particular those who had prophetic or revelatory experiences, held that the self was “semi-permeable”. In other words, one’s experiences could be taken over or influenced by external forces. Moreover, the distinction between thought, imagination, and reality was blurred; to the ancient man images produced by the mind might have been considered part of the “undifferentiated outside”. Thus, visions of conversations with God, wrestling matches with angels, and burning bushes were very much a reality to ancient biblical man. And in a world with little scientific understanding of reality, both the existence of deities and the idea that they would communicate with man was eminently plausible. So it is conceivable that the personalities of the Bible - assuming they existed - actually believed they were communicating with God and angels.
As time went on, however, the individual sense of self began to congeal in the Bible, leading us to characters like Jeremiah and Job who do introspectively reflect on their emotional state. Together with the crystallization of the self emerged a distancing from God, in the sense that people no longer had direct “sensory” experiences of encountering with the Divine. As history progressed, this led to a focus on law and prayer as opposed to sacrificial service at the Temple, which was predicated on a more experiential conception of God. No longer part of lived reality, God became distant from man, to the extent that religious people talked about a “re-establishing of God’s sovereignity” on Earth as opposed to the old assumption that God was ever-immanent.
II.
What the Buddha Taught also touches on the sense of self, albeit in a different way. Rahula describes Buddhism as a system of thought and practice dedicated to eradicating dukkha, usually translated as “suffering” but actually have a broader meaning referring to the impermanence of material things (c.f. The term הבל, usually translated as “futility” in Kohelet, but literally means something like “smoke” and ostensibly refers to a similar concept of impermanence or transience). In the Buddhist way of thinking, man is constantly confronted by suffering due to the unreliable nature of the material world, whether it be in the form of sickness, old age, death, or any of the myriad ways in which life can go wrong. Buddhism’s solution to dukkha is the idea of anatta, or absence of self. The only way that person can extricate himself from the suffering that arises from the impermanence of the world is to negate the self itself. In other words, Buddhism prescribes viewing the “self” as indistinct from any other sensory information (AKA “one with everything”, which is apparently what the Dalai Lama orders when he goes to a pizza shop).
Anatta in Buddhism is a practical challenge in addition to being an intellectual claim. Even if it is true that there is no such thing as the self, that is a very difficult thing to feel experientially. The solution to this practical problem that Buddhism recommends is meditation. When one meditates, he can observe thoughts emerging and dissipating with the attitude of an objective, disinterested observer. As a person advances in his meditation practice, he gains the ability to dissociate his awareness from the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that he is aware of. When one can fully dissociate awareness from the objects of awareness, and realizes in both in an intellectual and experiential sense that the “self” is simply a conglomerate of mental objects (i.e. memories, sensory experiences, emotions, etc.), he will have achieved the state of nirvana. In this state, a person will be free from all forms of desire and lust for the material, resulting in the ultimate bliss. In this way, nirvana is a recipe for both happiness and morality. In that immoral behavior stems from material desires and biological urges, being able to free oneself from the “self” allows one to act completely selflessly, devoting his thoughts to the love of all creatures and his behavior towards the betterment of the lives of others.
[Aside: As a neuroscientist (uh oh, here we go) I have a strong sympathy for the idea of anatta. I think neuroscientists would generally agree that thoughts, emotions etc. are coded in the brain and are brought to awareness by deterministic(ish) neural dynamics. We haven’t solved the hard problem of consciousness, of course, but the information relayed to consciousness - the spikes that eventually become qualia - are ostensibly present for everything that you think and feel. There isn’t a categorical distinction between sensory information and self-information like emotions and memories; in the brain it’s all just spikes. So in principle the observation that self-thoughts aren’t that different from sensory perceptions and that the “self” is really just a conglomerate of a variety of sources of information is well-taken in the modern scientific view.]
III.
So where am I going with all this? First of all, I think there’s an argument to be made from both What the Buddha Taught and The Great Shift that Western people take the idea of self too seriously. I’m not sure there is a right or wrong answer to what the self is, but at least from a scientific and philosophical standpoint, the Buddhists might actually have a better framework for thinking about the question than the Western world does.
Beyond that, though, there seem to be very real psychological ramifications for how we contextualize our ideas of self and individual identity. In biblical times, if we accept Kugel’s view, a fluid sense of self could result in “real” encounters with the divine in a manner that even very religious people have a hard time with today (at least in the absence of psychedelic drugs, which further argue for the idea of the malleable self). And if the Buddhists are right, annihilating the self will lead to eternal bliss (and there seems to be at least some evidence that meditation has some positive effects for anxiety and depression).
Amusingly, both Buddhism and Judaism would seem to be in favor of the abnegation of a strong sense of self, albeit for different reasons. In Judaism, a weaker sense of self might make possible the lived experience of divine encounters. And in Buddhism, of course, the absence of the sense of self is the terminal goal. I’m not sure either of these visions are ones which we should adopt, but at the very least it would be worthwhile for the modern West to question whether we should really take the self for granted.
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