Concept
3 readings
Not-self
Concept · 3 readings
The teaching of not-self questions identifying changing experience with a secure self. Challenging ownership and permanence is not the same as claiming that nothing exists.
All readings
3 readings · Title A–Z
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 4 of 8
Is the self its parts, or their owner?
Is the self the changing body and mind, or something other than them? Nāgārjuna rejects both, models the person on fire and its fuel, and still refuses to conclude that there is no self.
Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 7
Suffering, impermanence and not-self
Early Buddhist discourses challenge the hope of finding a secure self in changing experience, and do so for the sake of liberation. Not-self, the lesson shows, is not the claim that nothing exists.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 5 of 8
Who acts, and who answers for it?
If agent and action lack intrinsic nature, can anyone answer for what they do? The lesson follows chapter 17 on action and its results and weighs the charge that Madhyamaka is a form of nihilism.
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Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths
Follow Nāgārjuna’s arguments that nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, from causes and motion to persons, the two truths and the charge that the argument undermines itself. Ask what the arguments leave standing: can things exist, change and matter without such a nature?