Who Am I Anyway?: Non-Self and the Gospel

Last time, we explored the core Buddhist teaching of impermanence and how it relates to Christian teaching. Today we’ll see that that same understanding of pervasive instability extends even to the person itself. This is the concept of anatta, ‘non-self’. It’s an oft misunderstood idea, so will need some unpacking before we can responsibly look at how it might reflect back on Christian faith.

Non-Self in Buddhism

Anatta, non-self, is one of the “three marks of existence” according to Buddhist thought, along with dukkha (suffering or unsatisfactoriness) and anicca (impermanence). On the surface, it’s a confusing and seemingly contradictory idea: after all, we certainly experience a ‘self’, and if there is no self, then what is it that is conditioned by the action of karma? But it isn’t really denying a ‘self’ or ‘soul’ as much as it is its stability and permanence. The ego, the ‘I’ that acts, is changeable, inconstant, and unreliable:

[T]here is no unchanging, permanently existing self that inhabits our bodies. In other words, we do not have a fixed, absolute identity. The experience of “I” continuing through life as a separate, singular being is an illusion, [the Buddha] said. What we call the “self” is a construct of physical, mental, and sensory processes that are interdependent and constantly in flux. (Andrew Olendzki, “What’s in A Word? Anatta,” Tricycle)

If we work out the logic of this, the three marks of existence are interrelated: The illusion of permanence extends even to the self and this ties us to suffering because we spend so much time and energy into protecting and enhancing our self and self-image. It also means that the ‘self’ is not an integral part of ourselves, but is rather a concept created by our minds, a concept that is just as prone to error and delusion as any other. So, ‘I’ do ‘see’ a bird, but how I understand the ‘I’, the ‘sight’, and the ‘bird’, are all conditioned by the context, my language, mental framework, and worldview, and my faculties. (The experience of seeing a cardinal in a bush is very different if we’ve seen a cardinal before, or if we come from a culture in which cardinals carry special meaning, or if we happen to be red-green colour blind.) We don’t have a great way of talking about this in English, but Ancient Greek helpfully had a word for this ‘organ’ or ‘faculty’ of perception, nous (often translated ‘mind’, even though it does not have the cognitive (thinking) connotations ‘mind’ has for us). But the idea here is that the ‘I’ that I experience in seeing is as much a construct of the nous as the ‘bird’ that I see.

In light of all this, I wonder if a more helpful way of understanding it is actually to think of it as the rejection of identity rather than selfhood. Our identities are so grounded in the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, and these stories are always partial and in flux. The harder I grasp on to my idea of my ‘self’, the less contradictory evidence I’m able to accept about how I actually am in the world (in Jungian terms, pushing more and more into shadow, where it can do great harm in the world), and the more knots I’ll have to twist myself into to hold onto that idea. Amidst all this changeability and mess, Buddhism holds that there is “no agent .. in control of what happens, … no one to whom it all belongs” (Oldendzki).

We do not have a mind, in other words, but are a mind. “The truth is the mind holds ‘us’ within it” (Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self Deception). So, Buddhism concludes that “Every act of volition, including all effort, control, avoidance, denial, and resistance, is an internal reaction against the meaning the mind has invested in the experience,” full stop (Smith). We might even say that the ‘self’ is always a verb rather than a noun: there is no ‘self’, only a continuous process of ‘selfing’.

To the bigger metaphysical question of whether there is actually a self or soul ontologically speaking, later Buddhists took all this and concluded that there is no such ‘self’, but the Buddha himself refused to answer, as he often did to metaphysical questions he felt had no beneficial answer.

Christian Response

On the surface, there is little less resonant with the spirit of Christianity than the idea that the soul or self does not exist. But as we saw, this is a bit of a misunderstanding of the Buddhist teaching on non-self. While some later Buddhists did go to this extreme, the Buddha himself remained intentionally silent, refusing to participate in a debate he thought was pointless. As he saw it, it doesn’t matter if something like a ‘true self’ exists or not because it’s inaccessible to us because of our attachment to our delusions, false beliefs, and stories about ourselves. Thought of in this way, the teaching of non-self begins to ring some Christian bells.

Christianity shares Buddhism’s suspicion about the human mind’s ability to understand itself. As we’ve seen already, the New Testament talked about all this by borrowing the language of Stoic philosophy, which acted as the pop-psychology of the day (just as you don’t need to be a Freudian to use terms like ‘ego’ or ‘projection’ today, so could people then use terms like ‘the passions’ or ‘the nous‘ without being Stoics). According to this view, we sin because our interpretive faculty (the nous) isn’t working right and so we are unable to properly understand ourselves, our drives or appetites (generally called sarx, ‘the flesh’), and the world around us. ‘I’ may want to lose weight but still eat fast food because of a craving for fat or a desire for something simple at the end of a long day; ‘I’ may love exercising but still not do it because ‘I’ am feeling lazy; ‘I’ may love my family but lash out because ‘I’ had a bad day and have no healthy way to cope with it. Nowhere is this inability to access any true self better expressed than in Paul’s letter to the Romans:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Romans 7.14-20)

Who am I, then, really? Do ‘I’ even exist when I’m full of such contradictions and variability? As Thomas Merton put it:

There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him. The obstacle is in our “self,” that is to say in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will. It is when we refer all things to this outward and false “self” that we alienate ourselves from reality and from God. It is then the false self that is our god, and we love everything for the sake of this self. (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 21)

For this reason, Jesus urged us to renounce ourselves: “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:24). The more we are attached to life as we know it, the harder we grasp on to life, whether physically, psychologically or spiritually, the more deluded, selfish, and prone-to-sin we become, and so the more true life will slip through our grip. Like everything in life, Jesus teaches, we need to hold our very selves with an open hand instead of a clenched fist. This attitude is known theologically as kenosis, ‘emptying’, and involves a consistent renunciation of the ego, with all its desires and delusions of grandeur.

As contemporary Christian spiritual writer Cynthia Bourgeault puts it:

Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity. The person I normally take myself to be—that busy, anxious little “I” so preoccupied with its goals, fears, desires, and issues—is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life. This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his “life” (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing. Beneath the surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller ‘I’ with its insatiable needs and demands.” (Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, 10)

So then, here, as with the teaching on impermanence, for Christianity, recognition of variability of the self is a means to an end: We give up on life, or the self, as we know it, in order to gain a bigger, truer, life ‘in Christ’. In Paul’s words, we die to the old life, ‘the flesh’, and sin, and so are raised to a new life, the spirit, and faithfulness and peace.

We don’t then reject the ego so as to better detach and gain equanimity, as in Buddhism. Emptiness for Christianity is not the point. Rather we empty ourselves in order to be filled again, with a truer, Spirit-led, Christ-oriented self:

But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of His actuality and find Him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in Him: that is, I shall find myself. I shall be “saved.” (Merton, 37)

Conclusions

Once again, we see that Christian thought agrees, at least in spirit, with Buddhism in one of its basic teachings, but takes it to a very different place. For Christianity, the emptiness of non-self is a means to the end of receiving the gift of a true self. While the New Testament often speaks of this as a one-time, ontological change at conversion or baptism, two thousand years of Christian experience suggests it’s more complicated than that: that, yes, these decisive moments are critical, but also that they are not in and of themselves ‘enough’ to promote the true change the Gospel proclaims. Rather, we need to be continually renewed in repentance and death of the false self ego and its deluded attachments, and continually be raised again into the new life, new creation, in Christ. And in that way, it meets the Buddhist teaching again, as it becomes not just a theological proposition but a sacred practice.