Before we start we need something we can work with, so I'd like to spend some time illustrating from exactly which concept of Buddhism we will be setting out on our quest for enlightenment. When you think Buddhism, what are the first things that come to mind? Temples, perhaps, big statues, Asian people, hand gestures rubbing bellies and closing your eyes as you just sit there meditating on whatever it is that Buddhists meditate on. Maybe you think of monks dressed in old clothes, wearing big reed sombreros and standing silently on street-corners with out-thrust cups. If you've taken a comparative religion course maybe you're arrested (or deterred) by the rank and file legion of deities that compose the four-cornered mandala of the Mahayana universe, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Arhats, guardian figures ghosts and local vengeful spirits assimilated into the larger Buddhist pantheon as it spread out from India across the Asian continent. This conception of Buddhism looks to the naturalist observer as an unworkable muddle of imaginative fantasy, and Owen Flanagan begins his challenging and insightful investigation of a Buddhist-inspired secular system of ethics, The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized by questioning whether it is even possible to speak coherently about Buddhism minus those supernatural appendages: "Could it be that if you subtract the hocus pocus about rebirth and karma, and bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves, and Buddha worlds, and nonphysical states of mind, and deities (although not a creator god), and heaven and hell realms, and oracles, and lamas who are reincarnations of lamas, there is no Buddhism left?" (Flanagan, 4) While I won't pretend to have taken even a single step towards Buddhist scholarship and therefore won't be tackling problems of theological taxonomy, I have seen enough in Flanagan's book and my other (admittedly sparse) readings of rationalist interpretations of some Buddhist thinking to be confident in the existence of core principles that provide valuable insights into the world and the self as they truly are at their most physical.
In our search for a Buddhism that cleaves most closely to observable reality, we would be prudent to seek out the words of it's nominal founder, Siddhartha Gautama, often called "the historical buddha" because, well, we have historical evidence of his actual existence. "It might be claimed that 'naturalistic Buddhism' is possible because it once was, or is now, actual," Flanagan says, pointing to Siddhartha's teachings as a potential example of just such ancient naturalism. What is it about the teachings of the historical Buddha, however, that separate his Buddhism from the more superstitionally profligate Mahayana Buddhism, say? A few months ago I read a spectacularly useful book by a practicing monk named Koike Ryunosuke called Buddha no Kotoba: The Buddha's Voice Reinterpreted in Modern Words, which purported to be exactly that: a reworking of Siddhartha's teachings for a modern audience in contemporary Japanese using contemporary concepts, often heavily steeped in the scientific language of brain chemistry and computer-inspired models of input and output that suggest a fundamentally materialist theory of mind. It's just one translation, but it seems as if you can get away with putting words in the Buddha's mouth that speak of the self as the non-supernatural result of fully physical processes, as gray matter interacting with gray matter to create a temporary and transient person who calls itself "I."
Which leads me to what I really want to talk about: a particular Buddhist conception of self. Books such as Koike's and a few others I perused, most notably two collections of Zen sayings with relevant commentary (one that actually does explain the sound of one hand clapping), and an introduction to mediation expressly written in an attempt to dispel the mystical connotations commonly attached to it led me to the doorstep of this concept of who we might be, but it was Flanagan's scholarly work that gave me the proper terminology. Have you, by any chance, ever come across the words "Atman" and "Anatman?" I certainly hadn't, but they are crucial to what I am trying to explain here. Put simply, "Atman" is the concept of personhood that posits an unchanging, eternal soul inside of and separate from the body, whereas "Anatman" exists without such a thing. Next time I want to discuss the possibility that we are all, in fact, "Anatman," and begin to contemplate what that means and where it might take us on our journey towards enlightenment.
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