Essay #25:  The Anatta Doctrine

My mind is like a canopy
That casts a shadow on the ground.
It covers what it would not see.
Its judgments make no sound. 

What is the mind?  Normally, we say that we “have a mind” or that we “think with our mind.”  But what is the mind, really?  Is the mind something that we have or possess?  Obviously, we do not have a mind in the same way that we have an arm or a leg.  We could do without those and still carry on pretty well.  But hardly anyone would claim that they could carry on well if they had lost their mind.  The very idea of “losing one’s mind” is commonly considered the worst kind of disaster.  Interestingly, nobody goes about saying “I found my mind.¹”  Evidently, being in constant possession of one’s own mind is taken as a kind of prerequisite for living a normal life, or for living any kind of life at all.  We don’t go around losing and finding our mind on a regular basis, at least we hope not to.  In what sense, then, are we in constant possession of our mind?

Some would say that our mind is our self or individuality.  This would include our personality, meaning perhaps the unique set of ways that we respond to other things, events, and other people.  It might also be said to include our private thought patterns and the ways we view ourselves and the world around us.

Others would go further and claim that our mind is ultimately our “soul.”  For many, the soul is a life force dwelling within but independent from the body.  It is believed that the body depends on the presence of the soul to stay alive.  Once the soul departs, the body dies.  The soul is sometimes also believed to carry consciousness with it after death to another realm, where life continues.

What all these views seem to have in common is that the mind has substance.  The mind is the ground or foundation for living a normal life.  To be a normal person is commonly equated with “having all one’s marbles,” and similarly “having a screw loose” is shorthand for not being a normal person.  Of course, the word “normal” begs to be defined, but suffice it to say that it stands for a collection of expectations.  However these expectations may be culturally or historically determined is beside the point.  There is a general consensus among most humans that a properly functioning mind is something one needs to have in order to be a whole person.  Mind has weight.  It has shape.  It is important.  It has substance.

But what is it?

It may not be customary to go around saying, “I found my mind,” but has anybody ever actually found it?  Soil is a substance.  About that most persons would agree.  Most would also agree that it is possible to find a patch of soil, scoop it up with one’s hand, hold it, examine it, and give it to somebody else to look at.  Mind, however, does not seem to be a substance like that.  If it has weight, its weight is evidently not the kind that a scale could register.  We could weigh a human brain on a scale—and many brains have been weighed—but removed from their skulls and lifeless not many persons would call them “minds.”  Is a living brain, then, a mind?  What is the difference between a living brain (a mind) and a dead brain (not a mind)?  Would it be the presence of a soul?  Not many who believe in the existence of souls also believe that souls have weight.  Souls would seem therefore to be an unsubstantial kind of substance.  “Immaterial” would probably be preferred.  Or suppose that a mind is a brain—a brain in a particular state and order, which we would call “alive.”  Then what is this order?  Does order have weight?  Is order substantial, or is it the thing—in this case the organ—so ordered that has substance?  Yet if the order itself has no substance, then how does it lend substance to the organ that has it?  In other words, why would a brain organized in one way (for example, in a skull) be alive and organized in another way (for example, outside of a skull) not be alive?

None of these questions are meant to be answered here.  Rather, they are intended only to demonstrate that what we call “mind” and consider so fundamental to normal life is indeed much harder to identify than we may have realized.  We usually consider it substantial, but we cannot point to it in the same way that we can point to a thousand other things we consider substantial.  Those who identify the mind with the soul usually do not claim either to be able to see or to point to either their own soul or the souls of other people.  They may take the existence of a soul on faith, but this is far different from knowing it exists or knowing what it is.  Similarly, those who would equate the mind with the brain face the daunting task of showing how all the bits of matter collectively considered “the brain” not only account for but are all the various qualities people normally associate with the mind, e.g., personality traits, mental skills and abilities, emotional strengths and weaknesses, preferences, habits, addictions, and memories, to name a few.  Then again, they also need to explain how persons considered by medical science to be “brain dead” sometimes do recover consciousness and take up normal lives again.  Some even report thoughts and experiences that occurred to them while they were supposedly “brain dead.”

Perhaps the question, “what is mind?” should be approached differently.  Buddha also looked into this question and offered a fresh and startlingly different answer.  His answer was that the mind has no substance at all.  In other words, there is no self or soul to be found, just a collection of thought-forms and qualities unattached to an entity or self.  It is possible to observe these thought-forms and qualities.  It is even possible to observe the observing in the process of observing.  However, it is not possible to find any self or entity doing the observing—just the observing itself.  This is what is referred to within Buddhism as the “Anatta (No-Self) Doctrine.”  It is simply the statement that neither in the realm of the gross nor the infinitesimal, whether material or psychical, is there to be found any self or abiding personal substance.  This doctrine is not the same as an “article of faith.”  Nor is it some kind of moral or practical dictate.  Rather, it is the distillation of the most careful observation by an enlightened awareness.  Not to be taken on faith but replicated though thorough investigation, the Anatta Doctrine is thus a teaching tool meant to guide one’s meditations.  Among other things, it teaches us to begin with what we can observe directly.  Taking nothing for granted—including our assumption that the mind is substantial—we are invited to begin with the very thought-forms and qualities that we associate with “mind.”  These includes the thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and intuitions that comprise the “canopy of the mind.”  In other words, they include everything under the umbrella of our attention and also everything that is just beneath our attention, which we would call present but “unconscious.”

If we begin with these things, and these things only, then something interesting pretty quickly becomes clear.  As many thoughts and feelings as the canopy of the mind may contain, there will always be others that it does not contain.  For example, if we prefer certain tastes over other tastes, then those preferences and not others will be present.   Likewise, if we have hopes for certain outcomes and events, then those hopes and not hopes for contrary events will be present.  Taken collectively, there will be a vast array of thoughts, preferences, expectations, assumptions, and emotions that will not be present at any one time inside the canopy of the mind.  Thus what lies outside of the mind can actually be understood to be a very much larger territory than what lies inside.  In terms of our illustration, the canopy of the mind can be understood to cast a shadow that is immensely larger than itself.  Some parts of the shadow will be more dimly lit than others.  That is, some parts will be in such darkness that the mind has no awareness of them and is unaware of even its own ignorance.  Of other thought-forms the mind may have some slight awareness—unconsciously perhaps—but no actionable awareness.  Then again, there may be thoughts and feelings that have indeed once entered the mind but passed again into the shadows in one degree of darkness or another.

All the while as the thoughts in the mind’s canopy spin round and round in the light of attention, they also collectively cast this shadow of unawareness.  The more that attention becomes fixated on the thoughts in its canopy, the denser and darker the shadow becomes beneath.  It may be normal for us to remain occupied and even preoccupied with the life that is ready-to-hand—with our families, our daily tasks and obligations, our work, and the many preferences we have and the choices they guide in so many areas of our lives.  However, the deeper and more unquestionable these involvements become for us—the more attention these various thought-forms command—the larger becomes the shadow we cast by dint of our inattention.  What our mind does not see it leaves in darkness.  What it would not pay attention to it covers over by means of its very attentiveness to other things.  With respect to itself and its concerns, it may seem only to be expressing its own interest and serving its own needs.  However, with respect to all that it chooses to claim as its own and to identify with in contradistinction to what it keeps covered and shadowed, it is passing judgment.  Most of the mind’s judgment goes on day by day unconsciously, without a sound.  All of the mind’s preferences, considerations, and activities seem to justify themselves.  At least, they do so as long as the activity of observation is not separated in the canopy from the activity of choosing whatever is being chosen.  Indeed, there is a kind of inertia or momentum that choices have and a way of spawning other choices.  Nevertheless, observation and awareness can arise in the mind relatively separate from its choices.  In fact, it is the presence of at least a little awareness that begins to awaken a broader perception of choices and preferences than just the particular operating choices and preferences themselves.

As we noted in Essay #24 in our discussion of dependent origination, qualities always arise in opposite pairs.  This applies also to choices and preferences, since these are composed of thoughts made up of particular qualities.  Once awareness arises in the mind—as opposed to unawareness—then it similarly wakens qualities opposite to those contained in the mind’s operating preferences and choices.  That is, one begins to sense not only that one is choosing thus and such by which to run one’s life but also that one is judging that which one is not choosing.  There may be some preferences like ice cream favorites that a person chooses without in any way judging those that were not chosen.  However, by and large, there are a great many choices which make such a large claim on the attention that their opposites are indeed rejected as unacceptable or worse.  Where there is little or no observation or awareness present alongside such choices, then rejection and judgement are relegated to the shadow beneath the mind’s canopy.  However, when awareness is present then the mind begins to wake up from its torpor and to suspect something of the deplorable state that it is in.

It is often in becoming aware of the opposite of what the mind has assumed to be true or desirable that it begins to wake up.  Thus Siddhartha in traveling outside his palace and witnessing the opposite of material wealth and privilege began to question the viability of his lifestyle and his assumptions about what was real.  No longer consciously or unconsciously resisting poverty, he sought it out.  He renounced his wealth and took up alms.  He became aware that by relegating opposite or unwanted qualities to the shadows he was denying himself access to reality.  He knew that he not only had to allow for opposite qualities, he had to embrace them lest they keep him divided from himself.  This is just basic knowledge of the nature of the universe.  For once we understand that the opposite of every quality—and every preference—is contained within itself, we know that we already have the seed of that in ourselves.  We know that even pleasure and pain themselves are part of a larger oscillation over which our choices do not have complete control.

The first part of waking up is to realize that we have been living life asleep.  We begin to sense that we have been casting a huge shadow everywhere we have gone.  The choices, attachments, and aversions of our “waking life” begin to appear more like the stuff of dreams or of illusions crafted under the tent of a circus magician.  Then once we get the sense that we may be living life inside a tent, we become more open-eyed.  We are ready to catch the ray that may come through a crack in the door, pierce the shadows, and beckon us to take a look outside.

 

Notes:

1. Sometimes we do say things like, “I have come to my senses” or “I must have lost my mind.”  These, however, imply the ability to re-think a problem or situation and therefore–despite their wording–a presence of mind at least in the background.