Madhyamaka Buddhism on the doctrine of Anatta: Beginnings of an East-West dialogue

Duncan Gillard

In the past couple of decades many western theorists working in the spheres of consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology have been influenced by Buddhist philosophy and practice. This is perhaps most notably found in the doctrine of Anatta (no-self). Furthermore, and interestingly, striking parallels in the views of self/no-self may be found between contemporary western and Buddhist ideas even when authors fail to recognise them or make them explicit. Whilst interpretations of Anatta are manifold, both between Buddhism and the contemporary west, as well as within Buddhism's various traditions and schools, one just about unanimous point of concurrence is with the fallacy of what Ryle (1949) has famously dubbed 'the Ghost in the Machine'. To embrace the idea that there is some form of a spirit being dwelling 'inside' the body/brain would appear to necessarily force one into the camp of Substance Dualism¹, a camp headed up by that most infamous of 17th century philosophers; Rene Descartes. However, Buddhism, along with virtually all contemporary western philosophers and scientists, holds that Substance Dualism does not work, primarily because of the problems of causal connectedness that such a position evokes: if a thought can affect the physical universe then it cannot be purely mental - it must be made of matter somehow, otherwise it would simply 'pass through' that which it was intended to affect. That Buddhists and the contemporary west largely agree upon this still leaves much room for debate. This debate remains very much alive and an analysis of some aspects of its current status is the basis of my intention for the present article. To keep our scope manageable within the present context, the focus will remain primarily upon the views of the Madhyamaka school, broadly considered the highest philosophical school of Buddhism (Seegers, 1996), and recent theories expounded by Dennett (1991, 1989) and Strawson (1997, 1999), as their works have had a notably deep impact on recent western thought.

Nagarjuna, perhaps the most noted exponent of the Madhyamaka (middle way) philosophy, lived around the end of the first to the beginning of the second century CE. Though there is some dispute as to which texts Nagarjuna was responsible for, he is reported to have authored several. Few, however, would dispute the claim that he was responsible for the Mulamadhyamakakarika (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), which is a central text of the Madhyamaka school.

The characteristic method of the Madhyamaka is a critical analysis of phenomena and their relations. This method, called reductio ad absurdum, is a kind of negative dialectic, the purpose of which, as the name implies, is to reduce counter-arguments to absurdity by exposing their inherent contradictions (Santina, 1997). Nagarjuna uses this method to expose the absurdity of the notion of self-existence through an examination of Pratityasamutpada (dependent origination). This is a doctrine that deals, in essence, with the nature of cause and effect relationships. It emphasises the dynamic interrelationship of all phenomena, as opposed to some kind of a linearity of distinct causes and effects. As Watson (2002) points out:

In this model everything is interdependent and interconnected, nothing is absolute and independent and the emphasis is shifted from individual things to process and relationship. Mind and body, belief and action, object and environment are seen in reciprocal relationship, all constituent parts of a dynamic and mutually causative whole (p.71).

According to Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka school then, this interdependence and interconnectedness is extended to the selfhood experienced by human beings. All things, including human selfhood, are ultimately empty of self-nature. This emptiness, however, is not considered to be nothingness, but rather dependent origination itself - the truth of existence is emptiness precisely because all phenomena originate dependently, not independently. In other words, by saying that humans have no self, it is not meant that there is nothing at all to one's existence. As Nagarjuna put it:

Although (the term) 'self' is caused to be known (of, about), and although (a doctrine or teaching of) 'no-self' is taught,
Buddhair natma na canatma kascid ity api desita
No "self" or any "nonself" whatsoever has been taught by the Buddhas
nivtam abhidhatavya nivtte cittagocare
(http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/mulamadhyamakakarika, 2006, p.7).

This is the essence of the Madhyamaka philosophy as applied to the doctrine of Anatta. The middle way is essentially an attack on extremes, such as existence and non-existence or cause and effect (Fenner, 1995). Thus the ultimate truth, if one follows this middle way, is neither "self" nor "no-self" - it is, rather, both of these and neither of them; it is unnameable. A general view however, across schools of Buddhism, is that of the self as consisting in five aggregates, or skandhas: rather than being an entity that is fixed and separated from its experiences, it is merely an abstraction from form (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (samjna), volition (samskara) and consciousness (vijnana) (Santina, 1997). Yet for the Madhyamaka, emptiness extends to the skandhas also, in that each skandha is empty of its own nature, containing within it elements of all other skandhas - each, again, is unnameable.

In considering this, it is easy to see why many western authors have criticised Madhyamaka philosophy on the grounds of its apparent nihilism. But Nagarjuna does not stand in opposition to all western philosophers, contemporary or otherwise, in his view that meaningful language cannot faithfully reflect existing objects or metaphysical reality. As Watson (2002) points out, a view much like this can be seen in the philosophy of Wittgenstein who argued, in his early work, the Tractatus, that claims about the nature of self are beyond the scope of what can be meaningfully communicated with language. As Wittgenstein beautifully puts:

My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one…In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it (cited in Watson, 2002, p.208-209).

It is this question of the extent to which, if at all, language may accurately reflect the true nature of reality that would be one of the Madhyamaka's primary critiques of contemporary western theories of self. Despite much Buddhist inspiration, few, if any, address this problem sufficiently. Instead they assume that if their words are chosen carefully enough, and if their conceptual analyses are considered enough, they will somehow apprehend the nature of the self, metaphysically speaking. As one source aptly puts it:

[Western philosophy] tries to find an explanation, analyses the experiential data and attempts to develop a dialectic around it…[whereas] in the east, philosophy endeavours towards a coherent scheme around which multiple soteriological practices can be weighed, evaluated and structured…It is not so much the 'absolute truth' that counts, but the effectiveness of a given system or practice (http://www.akshin.net/philosophy/budphilprelude.htm, p.1, 2002).

In spite of this difference in emphasis, Buddhist ideas have found an explicit home in the theories of some western writings on the self, and a less explicit, but nevertheless parallel, place in the work of others. One influential author, whose theory we might look at in relation to Madhyamaka philosophy is that of Dennett (1991). Although he fails to acknowledge the contributions of Buddhism to the problem of self, Dennett agrees that there is no single thing in the 'real world' to which the term 'self' corresponds: 'The self…is…an abstraction defined by…myriads of interpretations and attributions' (1991:426-427).

Attempting to explain why it seems as though there is such a thing, Dennett speaks of the self as a "centre of narrative gravity" (1991:418). According to his theory, the words and gestures of human experience are ontologically real and as much a part of the natural human environment as, for example, food and potential mates. However the illusion of a single and continuous self, he suggests, is given rise to by the weaving of these words into strings of narrative, at the centre of which we posit the existence of a substantial being - a self. For Dennett, however, at the centre of the strings of narrative there is no such thing.

Madhyamaka philosophy would certainly agree with Dennett in his view that the self is an abstraction from many things. Moreover, the view that he takes as to what, exactly, the self is abstracted from is much like (at least some of) the five aggregates. He argues, for example, not only that our attributions (surely akin to the aggregate; samskara) are an aspect of our experience of self, but also our appearance (from one point of view, akin to the aggregate; samjna, from another akin to the aggregate; rupa), including the clothes we wear, are part of the material of the woven web of self (1991). Nevertheless, Dennett contends that the words and deeds etc from which self-experience is abstracted are ontologically real and this is where Dennett and Madhyamaka philosophy would appear to part ways. The Madhyamaka are not concerned with describing reality, ontologically speaking, because it is ultimately unnameable. So for Dennett, whilst the term 'self' does not refer to anything in the ontologically real world, the words 'word' and 'deed' and clothes', from which selfhood is abstracted, actually do reflect something real and distinct. For the Madhyamaka, however, these phenomena are equally as empty of inherent self-nature as the human (experience of) self.

Another theoretical approach is advanced by Strawson (1997, 1999), who suggests that an attempt to answer the phenomenological question should precede any attempt to answer the metaphysical question. He proposes that the experience of self in everyday, human life consists in eight aspects: it is a mental (1) thing (2) that is single both at a given point in time (3) and across time (4), it is experienced as an ontologically distinct (5) subject of experience (6) with agency (7) and a certain character or personality (8) (Strawson, 1997). Conceding that many of these need careful qualification and may not be necessary in the minimal case of the human sense of self (SOS), Strawson eventually arrives at his model of the self as a 'SESMET' - a Subject of Experience that is a Single MEntal Thing (1999) - a combination of (1), (2), (3) and (6) from his initial list. The rest, he argues, are not necessary additions to the minimal case of the human SOS. Asserting that the SOS, in the human case, is not singular across time (i.e. diachronically considered) Strawson uses the metaphor of selves as pearls on a string, the string being analogous to time, thus terming his view 'the pearl view' (1999).

Perhaps the one aspect of the Pearl view that concurs with Madhyamaka philosophy is the notion that the self is not diachronically singular. As Hayward (2002) points out, meditative training, in 'tuning one into' the finer levels of perceptual processing generally reveals gaps between experiences of self where "there is no sense of self or of separateness from what is being experienced" (p.390). Strawson's notion, however, of the self as a 'synchronically singular thing' is greatly refuted by the Madhyamaka school. As previously mentioned, in embracing the doctrines of emptiness and dependent origination, their emphasis remains upon processes rather than things, and interdependence rather than independence or synchronic singularity. In the same breath, one cannot help thinking that Nagarjuna's response to such questions may have been something along the lines of "neither a thing, nor a process, and both of these!"

Both Dennett and Strawson, then, agree with Buddhism in their rejection of a Substance Dualist position and the notion of a Ghost in the Machine. Further, a number of parallels, only a few of which have been mention here, can be found between Dennett's notion of the self as a centre of narrative gravity and the Buddhist view of self as consisting of five aggregates. Conversely, Strawson finds support from Buddhist philosophy only in the sense that his model is of the self as diachronically multiple. The Madhyamaka view of phenomena as process-like and dependently originated is far from Strawson's distinct and thing-like view of selfhood.

In addition, Buddhism speaks of two truths: relative truth; the way things seem to be (samskara), and ultimate truth; the way things actually are (nirvana). Some schools of Buddhism teach that the former may be spoken of whist the latter is unnameable. Nagarjuna's (position-less) position, however, was that there is no difference between samskara and nirvana:

There is nothing whatsoever of nirvana distinguishing (it) from samskara
nirvaasya ca ya koikoi sasaraasya ca
(That?) is the limit which is the limit of nirvana and the limit of samsara
na tayor antara kincit susuksmam api vidyate
(http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/mulamadhyamakakarika, 2006, p.9).

In light of this, one of the most vitally important take-home messages of the Madhyamaka school is essentially epistemological in nature: before asking any questions about the nature of phenomena, such as the experience of self, one must ask what is the purpose of the tools that are used to answer such questions; one must question the achievable purpose of language discourse and the analytical mind.

Footnotes

1. The view that the mental and the physical comprise two different classes of objects: minds and bodies.

References

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