Dhamma Q&A with Students from Puget Sound University
Photo: Buddhadāsa Indapañño Archives C00781
“I’m a little more confused now when you talk about getting rid of the self. The way I saw it before is, though you rid yourself of the self, you are still a part of this world, and things in the world still affect you. As such, it seems that things like war or the destruction of the environment will still affect the aggregates that compose an individual. Though you do not have a self, the first duty to survive is threatened, and these problems must be addressed.”
~ Response by Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu ~
Yes, there seems to be some confusion about not self. The thing to understand is that with the body in contact with the world, feelings arise, perceptions and evaluations about those feelings and experiences take place, there’s thinking about all that, and there’s the basic sense consciousness to which we are aware of things – all of these are not self. These five natural functions of a human being are all not self. When none of these are taken to be a basis of self – when there’s no ignorant clinging to the body, the feelings, the perceptions, the thinking, and consciousness as being self – then there’s no problem. When there’s no self, there’s no basis on which to set up or build the problem. This is the first thing to understand. This is what Buddhism is about – how to eliminate the foundation for the problem by recognizing that the five khandhas are not self.
Because we understand incorrectly, because we act improperly, we go and take this body and mind to be self. In fact, the body and mind are the five aggregates, are just nature, but through our wrong actions we take them more and more to be self. Then when there’s this self, there is selfishness. When there’s a self, we act selfishly, and this creates all the problems in the world. But when we understand that all of these things are just nature, and stop clinging to any of them as being ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ when we recognize that it’s just nature, it’s not ours, it’s nature’s, then there’s no self and no selfishness. And when there’s no selfishness, there won’t be any war. There’s only war because of our selfishness.
So the fact that the five khandhas are not self is the essence of Buddhism, whether Theravāda Buddhism, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Vajrayāna Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Thai Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, or whatever. The heart of every school of Buddhism is that the five khandhas are not self. The five khandhas are void of self and belonging to self. So please investigate these, study, train in them, and then you will understand Buddhism. There’s just this body, and in the body there are eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and the sense of touch on the skin. There’s this nervous system, and when it’s stimulated then there is consciousness, and then we feel – there are feelings, positive and negative feelings arising towards experience – and then we perceive or we recognize and evaluate those experiences as being positive and negative, and then we think about how to get the positive things and how to get rid of the negative things. There’re these five khandhas, these naturally occurring functions, and they just happen naturally. It’s the nature of these kinds of bodies in this kind of world, and all of them are not self. You ought to study these carefully and deeply, and then you will understand Buddhism. You’ll be able to live with five khandhas but without a self. The more you study them, the more you’ll see that in the five khandhas there is dependent origination, there is the stream of dependent origination. If the five khandhas function with ignorance, then they dependently originate dukkha. But if the five khandhas function with mindfulness and wisdom, they don’t turn into dukkha.
To study this you don’t need books or teachers or anything. You just study it within one’s own body with one’s own mindfulness and intelligence. But because you don’t know how to study it, you have to go looking for books and teachers to explain to you how to study the fact that the five khandhas are not self. If you knew how to study this, you wouldn’t have to come to Thailand, you wouldn’t have to come to Suan Mokkh, you wouldn’t have to go to India, or wherever. If one knows how to study the five khandhas, one doesn’t have to go to any of these places looking for books, teachers, and so on. But because you don’t know how to do this, then you have to come to places like this. So please learn how to learn! Learn how to learn that the five khandhas are not self, and then you won’t have to spend so much time reading books.
Please study the five khandhas within yourself. There’s this body and its nervous system, and when the nervous system is stimulated, consciousness arises. When consciousness arises, there’s seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and mental experiences. And there’s feeling about these experiences, and then perceptions, conceptions, thinking. This is all happening within the mind. This is all happening within ourselves. So the classroom in which to study this is in our own minds. The lesson is in our own minds.
If one knows how to learn, then one doesn’t have to go reading books, finding teachers, enrolling in universities, and all the other things that are popular these days. The Buddha insisted that the place to learn is in these bodies, these six-foot-long bodies, together with consciousness and experience. But you don’t have to believe the Buddha. You can just find it out for yourself and you’ll know for yourself that it’s all happening in here, and so one has to study it in here rather than in books or in lectures or whatever. So learn this inside, learn this within. It’s not necessary to read lots of books.
We call this ‘nature seeing things for itself.’ Nature is understanding things itself. There doesn’t have to be a student or a learner or a see-er who understands these things – it’s nature is understanding it all for itself. So there’s the studying, the investigating, the learning, the experiencing. All of this happens naturally. Nature does all this. There’s no self to take the credit.
The word aehng is very important. Aehng can be translated ‘self,’ but it’s just a grammatical form, the reflective when you say ‘myself, yourself.’ It’s that meaning of ‘self’ – ‘oneself.’ This is very important that one studies within oneself. One studies by oneself. One studies for the benefit of oneself, for the highest benefit. So this ‘oneself’ is very important. It must be in oneself, by oneself, for oneself.
The first stage is to look, to look within oneself. And if one looks, then one sees, one sees oneself. But if you don’t know how to look, of course you won’t see, but by looking within, one sees. If one can’t look, one doesn’t see. Then after seeing, one understands the thing one sees. So there’s looking, seeing, understanding. The fourth is to investigate and analyze the thing that is seen. And the fifth is to know what should be done, and then finally to do it. When you know what needs to be done then just do it correctly and the problem is over.
So this is the meaning of the word ‘study,’ or ‘seuk saa’ in Thai (the Pāli word is sikkhā) in Buddhism: to look within, with oneself, look within oneself and then see. And by seeing then one comes to understand, and then the thing understood is analyzed, investigated to know what to do about it, and then we do that, and problems are finished. In Buddhism, study has these five stages and they all happen within oneself. So the meaning is that all five of these must be by oneself, through oneself, with oneself. The school, the lesson, and the examination are all within oneself. We teach ourselves, we test ourselves, we even grade ourselves. We examine ourselves, we test ourselves, and we grade or judge ourselves.
All of this is for a single result – the one result of knowing that it’s all anattā, that all these things are not self. If one asks, “What does Buddhism learn?,” Buddhism learns that all things are not self. Without any exception, everything is not self. When there’s no atta, no self, then there’s no selfishness. Problems disappear. When there’s no selfishness, there’s no war, there’s no pollution, there’s no crime, or any of all the complicated and terrible problems confronting modern society. If there isn’t selfishness, none of these problems would exist.
Even the problem of drug abuse and drug addiction, as well as some of the very nasty diseases which are killing many people, all of these exist solely because of selfishness. Because people go and do things they shouldn’t be doing, then these problems develop because of the selfishness of people.
You can see that when we have ended our own problems, then we can help others to end their problems. To look in the other direction, which is quite saddening, that the more development there is, the more selfishness. The more progress and civilization there is, the more selfishness. And then with the problems as our societies progress and develop, there’s more and more selfishness. As the selfishness grows and grows, then there are bigger and bigger problems, but we call it ‘development’ and ‘progress’ and ‘civilization.’
The more one learns, the more clever one is. The more we learn, the more clever we become, and the more clever, the more selfish. All our learning nowadays is increasing the selfishness because our education is incorrect. All it does is engender and support more and more selfishness. We need to rearrange, we need to redo the education we’ve got so that it doesn’t just increase selfishness.
Why not study Dhamma? Why not learn about Dhamma? The more one understands Dhamma, then the less selfishness there is. The more one understands Dhamma, one is free of self, and then there’s no basis for selfishness. And when there’s no selfishness, the problems are gone like that. The problem is really very small – it’s just this one little thing. Because of illusion there is self, and because of self there is selfishness. The problem is right there. You can try and make it all complicated with lots of theories, but the real problem is just this one little thing.
If we look at another kind of truth, or another truth, the world is developing with selfishness. The world is developing true selfishness. The employers are selfish, the employees are selfish. We used to say the communists were selfish and the capitalists were selfish, but there aren’t so many communists anymore, but the capitalists are still selfish.
In our universities the professors are selfish and the students are selfish. Now the doctors are selfish, the teachers are selfish, the judges are selfish. And then what about in congress where they’re supposedly serving the country? Can you tell us there’s no selfishness in the congress or the administration, which is always acting in the interests of the people? Of course it’s even worse in congress and in the administration – the selfishness is even more rampant.
And so the war that is happening today is happening solely because of selfishness. If it wasn’t for selfishness there wouldn’t be a war. And it requires the selfishness of both sides. It’s not that one side is selfish and the other isn’t; it’s that both sides are selfish. It takes two selfish sides to make a war.
One’s selfishness might be too good. If they curse us, we don’t curse back. If they hit us, we don’t hit back. If they attack us, we don’t attack back. But that might be too good. So it’s about time that we have peace by being unselfish. It’s about time that we had some peace in this world.
We’ve been talking for more than two hours. We ask to call it quits at this point. Thank you for being good listeners. So walk back to wherever you’re staying without a ‘walker.’ Wherever you’re walking, walk back without a ‘walker.’ Do everything without a ‘doer,’ and then there will be peace, at least a little peace in this world. And then you’ll see for yourself whether this is correct, and you won’t have to believe anyone. We ask your permission to end today’s meeting.
(From Dhamma Questions & Answers with students from Puget Sound University, State of Washington, USA as translated from the Thai by Santikaro)
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Dhamma Questions & Responses sessions were offered by Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu in 1990-1991 to foreign meditators attending Suan Mokkh International Dharma Hermitage courses.
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