Concept tag
#anatta
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If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
I drive a bus in Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. This week's lecture was on Buddhism, and the speaker said two things that seem to contradict each other: there is no permanent self, and there is rebirth. If there's…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies204 views -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies158 views -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I'm a poet and a literature postgraduate in Kochi, new to formal philosophy. I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies196 views -
A thousand years of Buddhists and Vedāntins arguing about the self: failure or success?
I guide trekkers on the Annapurna circuit, and on long evenings I read. A monk gave me a commentary on Nāgārjuna when I was nineteen, and I've been arguing with it ever since. Something I read recently put it starkly. Vedānta says…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies242 views -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies280 views -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
I'm a physician in internal medicine in Cairo. I've been reading comparative accounts of the self: a created soul accountable to God in Islam, the self identical with brahman in Vedānta, no permanent self in Buddhism, a rational soul in the Greeks,…
Started by Omar Farouk6 replies230 views -
Taking the meditation without the metaphysics is fine: most people never wanted the path
I'm a startup founder in Mumbai, recently burnt out and reading my way back. Meditation helped me more than anything else. I did it with an app, then a weekly class. Nobody mentioned rebirth, and nobody asked me to accept that there…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies188 views -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies159 views -
The chariot and the bundle: why anattā is not Hume’s theory of the self
Hume looked for a self and could not find one. The Buddha's teaching of not-self is often called the same discovery. It is a different kind of claim, made for a different reason.
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī0 replies72 views