Examination of the Self and Entities

Nothing feels more certain than 'I'. I am the one reading this sentence, the one who was a child in an old photograph, the one who will wake up tomorrow. Yet when we try to say what this I is, it slips away. Is it the body? The mind? Something that has them? This chapter asks the question directly, and from the answer draws out the whole path: how suffering is kept going, how it stops, and what the Buddha meant when he spoke of self and of no-self.

It is one of the shortest chapters and one of the most important. It gathers the search for the person in Chapter 9 and Chapter 10, completes the account of bondage in Chapter 16 and karma in Chapter 17, and contains the verse on dependence (18.10) that the owner's books return to again and again.

The verses

The translation is new, made from the Sanskrit for this site. The Sanskrit is given above each verse; it follows the GRETIL e-text (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The self and the aggregates

Buddhism describes a person as five aggregates (skandha): body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Verse 18.1 asks how the self relates to them. There are two basic options, and both fail.

The self is the aggregates. Then the self would arise and pass away as they do. Feelings change from moment to moment; perceptions come and go; the body is replaced cell by cell. A self that simply was these would be a new self every moment, and there would be as many selves as there are aggregates. That is not what 'I' is taken to mean: the one who remembers, who lasts, who owns the feelings.

The self is other than the aggregates. Then it would not have their marks. It would not be bodily, would not feel, perceive, intend or know. What would be left to call 'I'? And where would we find it? Every time we look for the self, we meet a sensation, a thought, a perception: an aggregate. A self different from all of them has never been met.

The fuller searches of Chapters 9 and 10, and Candrakīrti's sevenfold analysis of the chariot, add the remaining options: the self inside the aggregates, the aggregates inside the self, the self owning them, the self as their collection or their shape. All depend on the self being either the same as the aggregates or different from them, so all fall with verse 18.1.

What is left is not 'no person'. Tsongkhapa calls it the mere I (nga tsam): the person designated in dependence on the aggregates, identical with none of them and found nowhere apart from them, yet fully able to remember, act, keep promises and change. The owner's main book develops this in Chapter 9.

Not even an egoless one

Verse 18.2 draws the first consequence. If there is no self to own things, there is nothing that is truly 'mine'. When the sense of self and the sense of ownership come to rest, one is free of 'I' and free of 'mine'. This is the classic aim of Buddhist practice.

Verse 18.3 immediately blocks a subtle mistake. It would be easy to picture the result as a new kind of person: the egoless one, the one who has gone beyond self. Nāgārjuna says that this person is not found either. Whoever sees someone 'free of I' is still seeing a someone, and has not seen. Liberation does not produce a refined self that has the quality of selflessness. It is the end of looking for a self, including a selfless one.

The owner's companion book makes the same point in its own terms: no subject survives the analysis to stand outside, look back and enjoy its freedom.

How the round stops

Verses 18.4 and 18.5 trace the mechanism of suffering backward, and show where it can be cut. When 'I' and 'mine' are used up, in relation to outer things and inner experience alike, grasping (upādāna) stops; and without grasping, no further birth is taken up (18.4).

Verse 18.5 goes one level deeper. Liberation is the ending of action and afflictions. Action and afflictions arise from conceptual construction (vikalpa): the mind building up 'pleasant', 'unpleasant', 'mine', 'theirs', 'I am wronged'. And conceptual construction arises from elaboration (prapañca): the spinning-out of things as existing from their own side, ready to be named and reacted to. Elaboration, finally, stops in emptiness.

Commentators read the last line in two ways. Candrakīrti reads 'in emptiness' (śūnyatāyām): elaboration stops when emptiness is realised, as darkness stops when a lamp is lit. Some modern scholars read 'by emptiness' (śūnyatayā). The difference is small in practice. Either way, emptiness is not a new object that replaces the old ones. It is the seeing that the objects of elaboration were never there as elaborated.

Self, no-self, and neither

Verse 18.6 can be surprising. The buddhas taught a self; they taught no-self; and they taught neither self nor no-self. How can all three be the teaching?

Candrakīrti explains it as skilful teaching. To someone who thinks death is the end and actions have no consequences, the Buddha speaks of a self that experiences the fruit of its deeds. To someone attached to a lasting self, he teaches no-self. And to those ready for it, he teaches that neither a self nor a 'no-self' is found as a thing, since 'no-self' too is only a designation, not a new fact standing in the self's place.

Verse 18.8 gives the same graded pattern for reality as a whole. 'Everything is real' is said to those who must first trust ordinary experience and its causes. 'Nothing is real' is said to loosen grasping at things. 'Both' joins the two: real conventionally, not real ultimately. 'Neither' is for those who no longer need either label. Candrakīrti reads the four as steps for students at different stages, not as four claims to be believed at once.

Verse 18.7 says why no single statement can be final. Where elaboration stops, what words can name and what thought can range over have stopped too. The true nature of things (dharmatā), unarisen and unceasing, is like nirvāṇa. This is not a mystical realm beyond the world. It is what the homage of Chapter 1 already said: dependent arising itself is without arising and ceasing.

The mark of reality

Verse 18.9 gives five marks of reality (tattva). It is not known by depending on someone else's description; it must be seen for oneself. Candrakīrti's example: someone with an eye disease sees hairs floating in the air; being told that there are no hairs does not let them see their absence, but once the eye is cured they see it for themselves. It is peaceful. It is not elaborated by elaborations. It is free of conceptual construction. And it is without plurality, not divided into separate natures.

The marks are negative, and even 'at peace' means that something has been stilled. Reality is described by what is absent from it: the overlay of elaboration. This matches the method of the whole work. Nāgārjuna does not install a positive absolute behind appearances. He removes what was added, and leaves appearances to be met without it.

Neither the same nor different

Verse 18.10 is the most quoted line in this chapter, and perhaps in the owner's books. Whatever comes to be in dependence on something is not that very thing, and not other than it either. So it is neither cut off nor permanent.

Take a rice seed and the rice plant that grows from it. The plant is not the seed: the seed is gone, and the plant has leaves and roots the seed never had. If they were the same, nothing would have grown. But the plant is not wholly other than the seed either: rice seed gives rice, never barley. If they were completely different, any seed could give any plant. Because they are not the same, the seed is not permanent, preserved inside the plant. Because they are not different, the plant is not cut off, unconnected with what went before.

The verse applies everywhere. It explains how karma links a deed to its fruit without a carrier (Chapter 17), how the person who wakes is the person who slept, and how continuity holds across a life without anything unchanged running through it. Verse 18.11 calls this the nectar of the Buddha's teaching: not one, not many, not cut off, not permanent. It repeats four of the eight negations of the opening homage.

Is reality luminous?

Readers who know the later traditions will ask a question the verses do not raise. Tibetan Buddhism, and Dzogchen above all, speaks of the nature of mind as luminous ('od gsal), and an early discourse already says 'luminous, monks, is this mind' (Aṅguttara Nikāya 1.51–52). Verse 18.9 describes reality only by what is absent from it. Is something luminous left over when the elaborations stop?

The word does not appear in the verses, so the answer has to come from how Nāgārjuna argues. Suppose luminosity were a radiant awareness behind appearances, existing from its own side. Then it would be one more thing with own-nature, and every chapter of this book would apply to it. It would have to be found either as one with what it lights up or as other than it, and it is found as neither (18.10). Calling it empty of everything else but not of itself only moves the own-nature to a new place. That is the reading called 'empty of other' (gzhan stong), and it is not the one this book follows.

There is another reading. The Nyingma Dzogchen tradition, which takes the Middle Way as its view, holds it, and this book follows it. Luminosity is not a light behind appearing. It is the knowing clarity of appearing itself: a sound heard as sound, a cold felt as cold, with no one standing apart to receive them. Nothing blocks this showing. The Tibetan word is ma 'gags pa, unobstructed, and it does not mean that anything lasts. The clarity is empty in the same way as everything else, because it too arises dependently. The clarity of a sound is not found apart from the sound, the ear and the hearing, and whatever arises dependently is empty (24.19). Clarity and emptiness are not two, and neither is the ground of the other.

Read this way, verse 18.9 and the luminosity teachings describe one seeing from two sides. The verse names what is absent: own-nature, elaboration, plurality. The Dzogchen word names how appearing is when nothing is added: vivid, clear and unowned. 'At peace' does not mean dim. When elaboration stops in emptiness (18.5), nothing goes dark, and nothing new is installed to shine.

Without a teacher

The last verse (18.12) adds a quiet point. Even when no buddha has appeared and no disciples remain, the knowledge can arise by itself, in the solitary buddhas (pratyekabuddha), who find it in seclusion, without a teacher. The truth taught here is not the private property of a tradition. It is how things are, open to anyone who looks closely enough, at any time.

What is left standing

The chapter takes away a self that is found, and leaves the person fully in place. You still remember your childhood, answer to your name, keep your promises and suffer the results of your choices. All of this belongs to the mere I, designated in dependence on body and mind. The practical result is not a blank. It is a loosening: 'I' and 'mine' stop being solid things to defend, and the grasping, anger and fear built on them lose their ground. Ethics, practice and teaching all keep their place; the graded teaching of verse 18.8 is itself a sign of how much depends on meeting people where they are.

In the books

The two books take up this chapter's themes in several places.

• Chapter 3, Unfindability and Freedom from the Eight Extremes (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'Neither the Same Nor Different': whatever arises in dependence on something is neither identical with it nor different from it (verse 18.10); and 'Neither Permanent Nor Annihilated': the rice seed and sprout.
• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'The Eight Extremes Turned Over': the table's last row, 'not wholly other: rice yields rice' (verse 18.10); and 'Continuity Without a Carrier': continuity designated on a succession that is neither identical nor wholly different.
• Chapter 9, The Reconceptualization of Continuity, the section 'Parfit's Reductionism and the Middle Way': Tsongkhapa's mere I, designated on the aggregates and identical with none of them (verse 18.1).
• Chapter 14, The Role of Function in Conventional Reality, the section 'Why Convention Seems Too Weak to Work': the mere I, found nowhere, keeps a promise for forty years.
• Beyond the Extremes: Why Life and Death Were Never the Right Words (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness): no subject who was bound and is now free survives the analysis (verse 18.3).
• Chapter 7, Dissolving the Hard Problem of Consciousness (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'Objection: What of the Luminous Mind?': luminosity read as a description of appearance, unobstructed and as empty as everything else.
• The Taste of Total Exertion (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness), the section 'Luminous Clarity Without Background Awareness': the vividness of the event itself, with no light behind it.
• Chapter 2, Vividness Without a Viewer (The Observer and the Taste of Presence): luminosity as the knowing clarity of the display; and Chapter 19, Two Traditions, One Risk: the objection from self-awareness.

Read also: Neither Carried Nor Cut, on continuity with nothing carried over and nothing cut off.

Talks on YouTube:

• Core Logic 2: The Identity vs. Difference Paradox, on the reasoning of verses 18.1 and 18.10 (given on MMK Chapter 10).

Words to know

• Self (ātman): an I existing from its own side, the owner and centre of experience. Sought here and not found.
• Aggregates (skandha): body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness, on which a person is designated.
• Mere I (Tibetan nga tsam): Tsongkhapa's term for the person merely designated on the aggregates, who acts and experiences.
• 'I' and 'mine' (ahaṃkāra, mamakāra): the sense of self and the sense of ownership.
• Conceptual construction (vikalpa): building experience into things to like, dislike and own.
• Elaboration (prapañca): the spinning-out of things as existing from their own side; it stops in emptiness.
• Reality (tattva): things as they are, described in verse 18.9 by what is absent from them.
• Luminosity (Tibetan 'od gsal): in Dzogchen, the clarity of appearing. In this book, the knowing clarity of appearing itself, empty like everything else; not a light or an awareness behind appearances.