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Question about the Unanswerable Questions
thickpaper
Veteran
Hi
Regarding these fourteen questions that the Buddha says are unanswerable.
I can see why he would say that of rebirth and eternality but not the question about self.
Surely the question "is the self identical with the body?" is answerable in Dharma? It is: "There is no self"
Or is that why its unanswerable? Does he actually mean the question is meaningless?
thanks for answers in advance:)
namaste
Regarding these fourteen questions that the Buddha says are unanswerable.
I can see why he would say that of rebirth and eternality but not the question about self.
Surely the question "is the self identical with the body?" is answerable in Dharma? It is: "There is no self"
Or is that why its unanswerable? Does he actually mean the question is meaningless?
thanks for answers in advance:)
namaste
0
Comments
It's unanswerable. If I remember correctly, we hit upon this in the anatta thread. The idea that there is no self does not apply.
For the Tathagata such a question might be foolish and useless. For us it is probably a fair question to ask, and -what is more- very useful, because it impels the mind towards a conundrum, a paradox, the solution of which cannot be achieved intellectually.
Cheers, Thomas
The body can only be called a 'self' as an abstraction by identifying it as this set of aggregates.
So, we can use terms conventionally such as 'me' and 'I' but only to identify the set of aggregates that is perceiving and acting.
Ultimately this 'self' is not a self, because it does not ever stand 'alone'; it always is a part of a larger picture.
While we are still working toward the supramundane, it is from the mundane perspective that we understand the teachings. There's no other way for it to be, until the mind awakens. And so we can not completely give up the idea of 'self' as at least meaning our mind-body complex; it would just mess with our heads too much.
Namaste
The question itself comes from a place the Buddha learned is wrong-thinking and taught us to avoid. Feel free to stay in that place of wrong thinking if you're stuck there. Otherwise, don't.
I wonder if part of the net that was being cast at him was the intent of the people asking. I could understand why he was not willing to get involved in reacting to those kind of intentions. Its like a Christian saying "well, then... where does your soul go when you die"... which doesn't have a helpful answer to it.
I'll restate it:
Why is the question about Atman unanswerable when one of the key tenets of Buddhism is explicitly an answer to that question?
Because there is no atman the unanswerable question is not just unanswerable but actually meaningless (In which case it stands asside from the other unanswerable questions).
Or is has some other mistake been made?
namaste
namaste
This is how he attends unwisely: "Was I in the past? Was I not in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? Having been what, what did I become in the past? Shall I be in the future? Shall I not be in the future? What shall I be in the future? How shall I be in the future? Having been what, what shall I become in the future? Or else he is inwardly perplexed about the present thus: "Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where will it go?"
When he attends unwisely in this way, one of six views arise in him. The view "self exists for me" arises in him as true and established; or the view "no self exists for me" arises in him as true and established; or the view "I perceive self with self" arises in him as true and established; or the view "I perceive not-self with self" arises in him as true and established; or the view "I perceive self with not-self" arises in him as true and established; or else he has some such view as this: "It is this self of mine that speaks and feels and experiences here and there the result of good and bad actions; but this self of mine is permanent, everlasting, eternal, not subject to change, and it will endure as long as eternity." This speculative view is called the thicket of views, the wilderness of views, the contortion of views, the vacillation of views, the fetter of views. Fettered by the fetter of views, the untaught ordinary person is not freed from.......suffering, I say.
It comes down to what T R V Murti (in "The Central Philosophy of Buddhism") spoke of as the interminable conflict in reason and the consequent attempt to to resolve the conflict by rising to a higher standpoint.
Such a "standpoint" is not yet another speculative answer, but is to find oneself free from all theories and to know, by experience, the "nature of form and how form arises and how from perishes". The Buddha wanted not a third position lying between two extremes but a no-position that supercedes them both.....i.e. the Middle Way. (This last paragraph taken from Thomas Merton's Asian Journal, and definitely not from my own personal experience!)
For me it is just seeking to live selflessly, as much as possible, with as little analysis as possible.
In Buddhism, this road consists of more than just conceptual learning (as in math). It consists also of developing the mind's eye through insight meditation. The teachings express what can be understood by the unawakened mind; the 'unanswerable' questions are of the 'supramundane' and so become a pitfall for the mind to seek answers on the 'conceptual' level.
That's about as clear as it gets, though not likely to satisfy anyone.
Namaste
The view that there is no self and the view that there is a self are both forms of self-view. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on you how you look at it), the Buddha refused to directly answer whether or not there is a self, stating that he didn't see "any such supporting (argument) for views [of self] from the reliance on which there would not arise sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair" (MN 22). Instead, he focuses on events in and of themselves, as they are experienced, bypassing the question of self altogether. The Buddha said, "Who suffers," isn't a valid question, and suggests the alternative, "From what as a requisite condition comes suffering" (SN 12.35) in an effort to re-frame these questions in a way that's conducive to liberation, i.e., in terms of dependent co-arising. Hence, my understanding is that the teachings on not-self are ultimately pragmatic, soteriological methods rather than strictly ontological statements.
Self (atta), in the philosophical sense as opposed to it's conventional usage, is defined as that which is "permanent, stable, eternal, not subject to change" (SN 24.3). Our sense of self, the ephemeral "I," on the other hand, is merely a mental imputation, the product of what the Buddha called a process of "I-making and my-making."
In the simplest of terms, the Buddha taught that whatever is inconstant is stressful, and whatever is stressful is not-self—with the goal being to essentially take this [analytical] knowledge, along with a specific set of practices such as meditation, as a stepping stone to what I can only describe as a profound psychological event that radically changes the way the mind relates to experience. That doesn't mean, however, that the teachings on not-self are understood to deny individuality (MN 22) or imply that the conventional person doesn't exist (SN 22.22). The way I understand it, they merely break down the conceptual idea of a self — i.e., that which is satisfactory, permanent and completely subject to our control — in relation to the various aspects of our experience that we falsely cling to as "me" or '"mine'" (SN 22.59).
So in essence, the Buddhist teachings on not-self aren't merely assertions that we have no self; they are a method for deconstructing our false perceptions about reality, as well as an important tool in removing the vast net of clinging that gives rise to suffering.
This may be a bit of nonsense, but in one of the ways I like to look at it, the conventional viewpoint (sammuti sacca) explains things through subject, verb and object whereas the ultimate viewpoint (paramattha sacca) explains things through verb alone. In essence, things are being viewed from the perspective of activities and processes. This, I think, is incredibly difficult to see, but perhaps what happens here is that once self-identity view (sakkaya-ditthi) is removed, the duality of subject and object is also removed, thereby revealing the level of mere conditional phenomena, i.e., dependent co-arising in action. This mental process is "seen," ignorance is replaced by knowledge and vision of things as they are (yatha-bhuta-nana-dassana), and nibbana, then, would be the "letting go" of what isn't self through the dispassion (viraga) invoked in seeing the inconstant (anicca) and stressful (dukkha) nature of clinging to false refuges that are neither fixed nor stable (anatta).
but they believe when the body dies they will be no more
so they effectively believe their self is the body
The reason it is imponderable is probably because the self is ungraspable. Its like trying to comb your hair with your foot to know the self with that type of consciousness grasping and pinpointing. Of course your better off combing the hair with the foot; you can actually succed.