The Karma of Self & Not-self
May 19, 2024

The Buddha called himself a kamma-vadi, which means someone who teaches action. One of the central points of his teaching is that we choose our actions, our actions are real, they give consequences, and those consequences depend on the state of mind with which we do the action.

So the Buddha had a tendency to look at everything in terms of an action. For instance, when you hold to a view, he didn’t look simply at the view. He would look at the way you hold to it, what happens when you hold to it—what the action of holding to it does and leads you to do.

Even your sense of who you are, he said, was an action. He called it the action of “I-making and my-making.” It’s something we do all the time. It’s a strategy based on a judgment: What’s worth holding on to? What’s not worth holding on to? Those two questions go together. When you have an I or a sense of self, there’s always going to be a sense of not-self as well. There’s a boundary line. Self is inside the line, not-self is outside the line.

For most of us, the problem is that we take on one identity at one point in time, and pretty quickly after that we can take on another identity, and then another. We have a whole crowd of identities in our mind. These different identities that we create can often be at cross-purposes. You’re one person today, another person tomorrow, and the person you are tomorrow wants to destroy what you did today.

So our question sometimes becomes, “Who’s the real me in here?” But the Buddha saw that that was not the right question. The right question is: How can you create some order among your different senses of self and not-self so that you can find true happiness?

That was the whole purpose of his teaching. We have this power, through our ability to act in ways that have consequences, that we can train the mind to act consistently in ways that lead eventually to a happiness that’s not fabricated, not conditioned—something that doesn’t change.

That, of course, is going to require bringing some order in to your senses of self: the way you create your sense of identity, how you use the concept of not-self, and when and where to use these different concepts so that they really do lead consistently to true happiness.

We hear so much about not-self, not-self, that people tend to forget that the Buddha also said, “The self is its own mainstay.” You use your self as your governing principle. In other words, when you’re tempted to leave the path, you remind yourself that you got onto this path because you saw that you were suffering and you wanted to put an end to suffering. If you abandon the path, does it mean you don’t love yourself anymore? That you don’t care about the question of whether you suffer or not? You realize that it’s for your own good that you follow this path. That’s one of the reasons you want to stick with it.

Altogether, the Buddha has you nurture three kinds of skillful selves. First there’s the self that feels competent to follow this path and actually makes the effort to develop the skills that are needed. Then there’s the self that’s going to enjoy the results. You want that self to be a real connoisseur of what happiness is, so that you don’t settle for second best, or third best or fourth. And then there’s the self that watches these other two selves and passes judgment. This self has to be trained, too, so that it passes judgement in a way that’s really conducive to staying on the path, not getting you discouraged but, at the same time, not letting you just get away with not doing your best.

We use these different senses of self to get on the path, to stay on the path, and to improve our performance on the path. As I said, once you create a sense of self, there’s a boundary, and outside of that boundary is not-self. While you’re trying to stay with the path, things that would get in the way or pull you off the path, you have to brand as not-self. You have to perceive them as not-self.

In both cases, your sense of self and your sense of not-self are strategies. They’ve been strategies all along. Now, however, you want to create a more consistent strategy, a wiser strategy.

For instance, with the precepts: You hold on to the precepts. You identify with them. They become part of your identity: You’re the kind of person who holds to the precepts. That identity can help you when you feel tempted to break the precepts. You realize that you would be stooping to a lower level, something that’s not really appropriate for you. Anything that would tempt you to break the precepts or any action of breaking the precepts, you have to label as not-self.

For example, the Buddha says there are five kinds of loss, three of which he says are not serious. When we listen to his list of things that are not serious, we find that a lot of things on that list are ranked by the world as very serious: loss of wealth, loss of your health, loss of relatives. But as the Buddha said, you don’t go to hell from losing those things. And when you lose them, you get them back—as you have, many, many times in the past.

What’s serious, he says, is loss of virtue and loss of your right view. These are areas where the world says, “Oh, those things are not important.”

So you can see the Buddha’s values are very different from most people’s. He looked at things from the perspective of the really-long-term. If you lose your virtue, you’re going to create the kind of karma that could pull you down for a long time to come. If you lose your right view, you’re tempted to do anything at all because you feel that your actions have no consequences, they’re not real, so you don’t have to be careful. That attitude can be really detrimental for many, many lifetimes.

So, things like that you say are not-self. You realize your wealth isn’t really yours. Even your health isn’t really yours, It’s nothing you can hold on to and direct. You can make some adjustments in the way you live and the way you eat, but you can’t guarantee that they’ll keep you healthy.

Back when I was younger, there was a woman who was a famous nutritionist. She appeared all over the TV, talking about how if you ate the right vitamins, you would never get cancer. Well, sure enough, she herself got cancer.

So even though we can stave off things like loss of wealth and health and relatives to some extent, the Buddha says there has to be a limit to what you’re willing to do. In other words, you don’t break the precepts to protect your wealth or your health, even to protect your relatives. Try to maintain that right view that the quality of your actions coming from the quality of your intentions is the most important thing you have to care for.

That kind of thing, you want to hold on to. That, you identify with.

The same principle holds when you’re practicing concentration: Everything that’s related to being ardent, alert, mindful, focused on your topic of concentration: That’s self. You’re the one who’s doing the meditation. You’re the one who’s going to benefit from it. You’re the one who’s watching it to make sure that you’re doing it well, and who offers suggestions on how to do it better.

But at the same time, the Buddha says, you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That means whatever is out in the world right now, you remind yourself, “It’s not-self. It’s not me. It’s not mine. I have more important things to focus on.”

The same with discernment—and this is where the range of not-self starts getting bigger and bigger: As you look at the different things you crave and cling to, and you realize that even though they may help in some ways, they’re actually pulling you down, so you have to regard them as not-self. You apply this perception to anything that’s placing a burden on the mind in any way at all, until the only thing that’s left burdening the mind is the path of practice itself.

You turn on that, too. You say, “This, too, is not-self.” After all, your state of concentration is made up of aggregates, the same things that you use to make your other senses of self: You’ve got the form of the body as you sense it through the breath; you’ve got feelings of pleasure; you’ve got the perceptions that you hold in mind about how the breath runs through the body and where you are in the body as you focus on the breath; fabrications would be the intentions that hold you here; and then there’s consciousness.

So all five aggregates are here in the state of concentration. You realize that you’ve been holding on to them as your means for letting go of other things that are less skillful, but now comes the time to let go of them as well. And then you even let go of the perception of not-self, because that, too, is a perception. It’s an aggregate.

That’s when the mind opens up to something that’s very different. Up to this point, your sense of self and your sense of not-self—even as you’ve refined them and made them more consistent—are still strategies, they’re still done for the sake of something. But when you hit the deathless, it’s not for the sake of anything.

Which means that those value judgements and those strategies of self and not-self no longer have any role to play. So you let them go totally. All that remains is the ultimate happiness—totally free.

As Ajaan Suwat used to say, once you’ve found that happiness, the question of whether there’s somebody experiencing it or nobody experiencing it doesn’t occur to you, doesn’t have any meaning at all. It’s not worth asking.

So that question, “Who is the real I, who is the real me?” just gets dropped, because you realize that it came from your confusion over your many senses of self and your many different senses of not-self.

Once those issues have been straightened out, then the question of “Who is the real me?” has no more meaning. You don’t need a “me” anymore. There’s no need for strategies because nibbāna is not for the purpose of anything.

There was a time when someone asked the Buddha, “What is virtue for?” “Virtue is for concentration.” “What is concentration for?” “Concentration is for the purpose of discernment.” “What is the purpose of discernment?” “The purpose of discernment is release.” “What is the purpose of release?” “Total unbinding, nibbāna.” Then the person asked “What is the purpose of nibbāna?” The Buddha said, “No, you’ve gone too far.” Once you’ve hit nibbāna, there’s no more talk of purposes anymore, because you’ve arrived.

Or, as they once asked Ajaan Maha Boowa whether nibbāna was self or not-self, he said, “Nibbāna is nibbāna.” You use concepts of self and not-self just like you use the stairs to get up to a house. Once you’ve gotten to the house, you don’t need the stairs anymore—you’ve arrived.