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Becoming and Un-becoming: the theory and practice of Anatta

The doctrine of anatta, selflessness, is at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching, and it ties together metaphysical, ethical, meditative, and devotional facets of Buddhism. Like many spiritual and philosophical traditions, Buddhism rests on the idea that wisdom is liberating, but unlike most other traditions teaches that the wisdom that must be sought is not about oneself, but about one’s selflessness. Western philosophers, habituated to Christian, Platonic, and Cartesian ways of thinking, and to a substantialist, unrepentantly self-centred grammar, may find anatta difficult to understand, to accept, to imagine. Actually, anatta is so simple that it can hardly be called a doctrine: it is a denial, a denial that ‘I’ really exist. The Buddhist philosopher’s challenge is not to argue or to prove that there is no such thing as a distinct, enduring self—in any case, the truth of anatta only becomes meaningful (i.e. liberating) in practice, when it is experienced—but to account for the phenomenon of selfhood. What is this ‘I’ who, it seems, experiences and remembers things; worries, loves, hopes, suffers, grows old; seeks wisdom; practices Buddhism, and so on? The phenomenon of self-identity is not only, or even primarily, an outcome of introspection: if we deny the reality of the self, we need to explain how it is that we are able to know and understand another person; to recognise an old acquaintance, even from a distance, after many years of absence. How does a Buddhist philosopher account for the continuity, consistency, and stability of a human being through time, without recourse to concepts such as substance and essence? For some time now I have been developing an account of selfhood that is based on the concept of habit. For reasons that will soon become clear, this focus on habit is very useful, and rather well suited, to the European Buddhist philosopher I find myself to be. Many thinkers in our western tradition have emphasised the role of habit in human life: for example, Aristotle and Aquinas regard habit as a second nature, which develops through actions and shapes