selfs

I was asked recently by someone to explain the Buddhist idea of no-self. The problem with this, of course, is that Buddhism was (and still is, today) taught on several different levels, depending upon the audience.
What I finally decided to do was to summarise some of the ideas in the first chapter of Nagarjuna's (c150-250CE) Fundamental Insight into the Middle Way (cf. this link), where he demonstrates that the idea that things exist as such cannot be upheld logically.

If any particular is to be itself, says he, it can only come into existence in one of several ways: either it is produced from itself, or from another, of from both, or from neither. There are no other options.

If it arises from itself, it would have to exist as itself before producing itself, in which case there would be no reason at all for it to re–produce itself since it would already exist.
Furthermore, why would there then be aby end to such production? Things could be and then produce themselves and then be and produce themselves, over and over again, ad infinitum.
Brief examination of the world around us shows that neither of these is the case. Something that comes into being does NOT prexist itself, in the first place, and nor is it the case that, once it does exist it then continues to produce itself without let or stay, therefore the logical position that things arise of themselves is untenable.

Perhaps they arise from something else — something ‘other’ — then?
Firstly, for two things to be different, they have to exist simultaneously. One does not generally say that light is different from itself or from nothing else.
In general parlance, when we seek to establish the uniqueness of light we do so by contrasting it with other things that already exist so as to highlight the difference. Light is not the same as a shoe sole, for example, or a plate of scrambled eggs. It is also not the same as darkness, but the word ‘light’ only has real meaning within such distinctions. The notion 'light' — as is the case with all other notions — is inherently dualistic.
Firstly, if what arises can arise from something totally different from itself, then fire will arise from barley seeds and cows from ducks, seeds will be born of shoots and the past from the present.
As will be noticed, this is not actually the case.
It seems fairly established, for example, that a child is born of its parents. However, if one pushes the logic of the thing, its parents are not its parents until the very instant it is born: the mother is not a mother, though she may be what is called an expectant mother, and the father is by no means a father (to the particular child concerned — it may, of course, be the fact that the parents have had several other children beforehand, but what we are talking about here is the logical possibility of one particular arising from another that is different from it) until the child makes them so.

Let us assume, then, that things arise from both themselves and from something else.
But all this does is combine and compound the logical errors of both the above. It is a logical dead-end.

So perhaps things arise from nothing all?
If this were the case, there would be no reason to assume that - for example - striking a match would result in a small burst of fire, or to assume that earth should be solid and the other four elements more or less insubstantial... Any thing could arise at any time for any and even no reason. Therer would be no sense to anything at all.
This too is demonstrably not the case (try belting your thumb hard with a hammer, for example, and see).

What we do notice, however, is that what we call particulars are in fact simply‘appearances’ — simply a certain level readout of an infinite concatenation of causes and conditions. Far from being permanent, partless, and independent ‘entities’, they are fleeting modulations in a field of experienced ‘energy’ that has no ultimate existence as such...

The word I'm translating as 'appearance’ — nangwa (snang ba) in Tibetan, abhasa in Sanskrit — actually has a multitude of meanings to do with appearance, perception, lucidity, radiance and sensation, but for our purposes three will suffice: sensory appearances in general, one's individual perception of sense objects, and what may probably best be termed ‘experience’. It has three modes: pure, impure and degenerate and obviously refers to the forms, sounds, tastes, smells, touch and concepts concerning these that make up our daily experience.
The problem here being that — for all its vividness — the only aspect of these experiences we can truly vouch for is the conceptual one. What we are sure of is that there seems to be an endless array of sensory experiences related to the five sense organs, but — in fact — all we really know of these expereiences is what appears to our minds.
Add to this the fact that, in a universe of infinite possibility, we see only seven grades of light, hear only between about15 or 20 and 20,000 hertz (which are waves or sound cycles per second) and generally tend to experience smell, taste and touch in a highly inarticulate and hence largely generalised way, and these often in an extremely distorted (where not entirely projected) manner...
Appearance is almost inevitably ‘good’ in that it agrees with, ‘bad’ in that it upsets or ‘indifferent’ in that it is of no interest to the ends–in–view and intentions of the experiencer.
Not only that, but it also is invariably caught up in the causal networks of karma (as ‘experientially initiated potentialities for experience’) and of the mechanics of becoming (whereby every thing depends entirely upon everything else for its least aspect of being)... Everything is subject to the moods and vagaries of everything and therefore cannot be a 'self' which is, by definition, independent, indivisible and permanent...

There is no ‘ultimate particle’, because any particle that has location at all will always be divisible into a front, a back, a left and right hand side, a top and a bottom, intermediate directions and a core — at least nine (if not seventeen) parts, in fact.
There is no ‘ultimate instant’ because even quadrillionths of femto seconds are divisible into a beginning, middle and end.
There is no ‘ultimate thing’ because things are just conglmerations of ever smaller things, ad infinitessimum, and also - in fact - simply parts of ever larger wholes, ad infinitum, to the extent that one Dzogchen cosmology perceives our entire universe and all that's in it as merely a single atom on one petal on the fourteenth level of petals of lotus in the begging bowl of one of an infinite network of buddhas called Vairochana ('In Form Making Visible')...
Who knows if they may be right, but the point is that we actually have no way of knowing...

So 'self' seems to be an idea... Quite a useful idea in some contexts (just prior to stepping off a pavement, for example) and an absolute blind in others. But as to any 'reality' to it, there is none that is immediately observable. It has no form, sound, taste, colour, palpable sense of presence and cannot be located anywhere inside or outside the body. If you contest this, then you will surely be able to point to where it is, what it is, and allow anyone at all to weigh it in there hands, is this not so?
But we cannot.
And why not?
Because it is just that... an idea... And nothing else.

Nor is there any "ultimate self" or "Ur-self" - no "Atman" or "Maha-atman" - and for the same reasons given above. Certainly there are areas of the idea of self that are hidden from conscious awareness, some that ore more profound than necessary for day-to-day activities, some that ore more or less consciously pushed into the background for one reason and another, but - to use a very Buddhist analogy - this is also exactly the case in the state of dream... the horns of a rabbit and hair of a tortoise... Utterly convincing within the context of the dream itself, but soon seen to be mere figments of the imagination once one is awake.

That's it, more or less, and the best I can do for the moment.

Anyone interested in this vast and somewhat convoluted study (not becuase IT is convoluted in itself, but because the attitudes and presumption it tries to correct are) might look into the following possible reading list which might help to clarify some if it.

My recommendation is the 'Time, Space and Knowledge' series by Tarthang Tulku [DHARMA PUBLISHING], a tounguetip taste of which is available as an interactive website here

http://tsk.designwest.com/

the texts Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness and Sun of Wisdom, both by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, the former available here

http://www.snowlionpub.com/search.php?cart_id=3150902.28559&item_no=PRSTME

and the latter here

http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/1-57062-999-4.cfm

Thrangu Rinpoche's Pointing Out the Dharmakaya, which can be found here

http://www.snowlionpub.com/search.php?in_item_id=6606

and Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche's 'It's Up to You', available here.

http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/1-59030-148-X.cfm

Also, while on the subject, there is, available on the web now, a series of talks by HH XIVth Dalai Lama on a text written in VIIIth. c. Tibet by Guru Padmasambhava (at http://www.lamrim.com/hhdl/garlandofviews.html).
The full series (which also includes a talk in English on world peace as the outcome of inner pacification) lasts a good 10 hours, but - if you want to know what the Buddhist point of view is and is not - this is the best of all possible places to start.