Suffering, impermanence and not-self

When something we rely on changes

Imagine a musician who injures a hand. A movement that was once second nature has become painful and uncertain, and alongside the pain comes another thought: “If I cannot play, who am I?” The injury threatens an activity that has helped this person understand who they are.

The case separates two things: an unwelcome event, and the further distress that can arise when we depend on a changeable ability for a lasting sense of who we are. It cannot explain every kind of suffering, and it gives us no reason to blame an injured person for being distressed.

Our question is whether anything in our changing experience can serve as a secure, lasting self. To pursue it, we will follow selected early Buddhist discourses preserved in Pāli, a language of Buddhist scripture. They come to us through a transmitted religious tradition rather than as a verbatim record of the historical Buddha’s speech, and their purpose is practical, extending to liberation from rebirth. [4]

Suffering and the tasks of the path

The discourse SN 56.11 sets out four things: suffering, its origin in craving, its cessation and the path that leads to cessation. Dukkha is the Pāli word usually translated as suffering; the translation used here also calls it stress. It covers aging, death, separation from what is dear and not getting what one wants, which is not the same as saying that every moment feels miserable. [2]

Each of the four comes with a task: suffering is to be understood, craving abandoned, cessation realized and the path developed. That structure matters. Repeating that life involves suffering, and stopping there, would leave out the response the discourse proposes.

The path covers how one understands, speaks, acts and earns a living, as well as effort, mindfulness and concentration, so it reaches well beyond a technique for feeling calm. The discourse also rejects two extremes as the way forward: indulgence in sensual pleasure and self-affliction. These are claims within a particular account of liberation, and we can try to understand them without being required to adopt them. [2]

Five aspects of experience

SN 22.59 examines five aggregates, or groupings used to analyze a person’s experience:

• Form: the bodily or material aspect.
• Feeling: the pleasant, painful or neutral tone of experience.
• Perception: recognizing or distinguishing what is encountered.
• Choices: activities of intention and mental formation; translations differ over the best English term.
• Consciousness: awareness of an object or experience.

The list is an aid to following the discourse, not an inventory of five little objects hidden inside a person. Its English names are approximate. Sujato translates the fourth grouping as “choices”; Ñāṇamoli uses “determinations.” Neither word maps onto an exact, exhaustive modern psychological category. [1] [4]

The discourse then asks whether any of these groupings can properly be regarded as self, and it reasons along two lines. The first concerns control. If the body were self in the proposed sense, why would it bring affliction, and why could we not simply command it to be as we wished? The same question is put to each of the other four groupings. [1]

The second concerns impermanence. Each grouping changes, is vulnerable and cannot be relied on to stay as we want it. Is such a thing fit to be regarded as mine, as what I am, or as my self? The discourse answers no. Not-self names this refusal of identification; it is not another substance hiding behind the five groupings. [1]

What the argument needs

Both lines of reasoning deserve scrutiny. From “my body changes” alone, it does not follow that there is no self: someone might reply that a self can change, or that being a self need not bring complete control. The challenge makes sense once we see what is being asked of a self, namely an enduring identity on which we can securely rely. Whether a self must meet that demand is itself open to question.

A further assumption also needs examining. Showing that none of the five candidates is such a self rules out every possible self only if the candidates cover all the possibilities. Mark Siderits raises this question of completeness, along with the argument from control, in his account of early Buddhist reasoning. It is possible to understand the argument well and still dispute one of its assumptions. [4]

In the last lesson, Yajnavalkya’s account identified ātman, the self, with brahman, ultimate reality. This discourse asks something different: whether bodily and mental experience can meet the demands placed on a self. Setting the two accounts side by side is useful, but it doesn’t show that the historical Buddha was answering the dialogue with Maitreyī, or that Upanishadic and Buddhist thinkers held only these two positions.

Dependent arising: change and its conditions

SN 12.15 explicitly rejects two extremes: the view that everything exists and the view that everything does not exist. Instead, it explains suffering through dependent arising: events arise when their conditions are present and cease when those conditions cease. The sequence runs from ignorance through experience, craving and attachment to renewed birth, and ends in aging and death. That is a far more specific claim than the loose idea that everything is connected. [3]

Return to the musician, who hears a diagnosis, feels afraid and clings to the thought that a life without performing would be worthless. These are separate links in the situation, and examining the last of them, the added judgment, might ease the distress it produces even while the hand still needs treatment. The example illustrates how conditions relate to one another. It does not demonstrate the discourse’s full account of rebirth, and it promises no cure through reflection.

SN 22.59 ends with disenchantment, the fading of desire and release. Understanding impermanence is meant to change how we cling, not merely to add one more belief to a list. Accounts of karma (action and its consequences) belong to this larger religious setting as well. Yet a practical purpose does not make the philosophical questions go away: what is a person, and how does a life continue? [1] [4]

Pause and try

A reader says, “My perceptions change, so nothing exists and my actions cannot matter.” Where does the conclusion outrun the reasons? Explain one purpose that examining change serves in these discourses.

Read an explanatory answer

The conclusion outruns its reasons twice: changing perceptions show neither that nothing exists nor that actions have no consequences. The discourses examine whether changing bodily and mental processes deserve to be identified as a secure self, and how attachment contributes to suffering. Far from making conditions irrelevant, dependent arising gives them a role in what happens. We can explain that purpose while leaving open whether every premise of the argument about self is convincing.

Carry this forward

We now have two questions worth keeping apart: what makes a person the same person over time, and what could bear the demand for lasting security? An argument may bear on both without settling them in the same way.

The next lesson, “Nonviolence and partial perspectives,” turns to a Jain account in which a living being endures through change, and asks how that account connects conduct, knowledge and liberation.

Sources and limits

[1] SN 22.59, “The Characteristic of Not-Self”, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato, SuttaCentral, for the five aggregates and the arguments from control and impermanence. In the reference, “SN” stands for the Saṃyutta Nikāya, a collection of connected discourses, and 22.59 identifies this discourse within it. The complete translated discourse was read, including its concluding passage on release. The translator’s notes were consulted as notes and not treated as statements made by the speaker.

The complete Ñāṇamoli translation, “The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic,” was also read: Three Cardinal Discourses of the Buddha (Buddhist Publication Society, 1981), Access to Insight revision 2010. The comparison supports the sequence the lesson follows (control, impermanence, release) and records the difference between “choices” and “determinations.” No independent Pāli analysis or comparison of all the early collections was undertaken.

[2] SN 56.11, “Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion”, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Access to Insight, translation copyright 1993, web edition 2013, for the four truths and the path. The complete discourse and its three notes were read; the passages used are the two extremes, the four truths with their four tasks, and the eightfold path. These details identify the edition consulted; the Access to Insight site also links to a newer translation hosted elsewhere.

[3] SN 12.15, “To Kaccayana Gotta (on Right View)”, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Access to Insight, translation copyright 1997, web edition 2013, for dependent arising. The complete short discourse was read, with particular attention to the two extremes and the sequence of arising and cessation. The musician is an original example, not an illustration supplied by this source.

[4] Mark Siderits, “Buddha”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, substantive revision 6 March 2023. Sections 1–3 were read for the historical limits of the sources, the core teachings and the arguments about self, and selected discussion of karma and continuity in §4 was also consulted. The entry is one specialist’s reconstruction. It is not evidence that every Buddhist school agrees, or that these texts preserve an unedited transcript.