Why Early Buddhists Taught The Five Aggregates Weren’t Self

This essay considers reasons the early Buddhists taught that the five aggregates (khandhas) weren’t the self. These reasons can be classified into three categories: soteriological, socio-cultural, and philosophical. Given the Buddha’s emphasis on teaching for the purpose of liberation, the soteriological reasons are the most important and are given the most attention. Nonetheless, the social and religious milieu of Northern India during the Buddha’s time was dominated by an earlier version of the Brahmanic culture still existing in India today. One aspect of the religious life of that culture was its assertion of the existence of a self that would, upon liberation, merge with Brahman. Because of the dominance of this view, the Buddha needed to address this assertion of a self in his teaching. In addition, although the Buddha did not emphasize bare philosophy in his teachings, philosophical issues are often interrelated with soteriological ones, and encounters with other religious sects and philosophical viewpoints led him to address issues in more strictly philosophical terms.

The term “early Buddhist” is used here to imply both the Buddha himself and the early followers who preserved and then later composed his teachings into the form now known as the Pli Canon. While we have no definitive proof that this is actually what the Buddha taught, it is the closest approximation we have, and the basis for much of the scholarly work done in the field of early Buddhism.

This paper does not address the debate over whether the Buddha actually taught the absolute non-existence of the self. Although most traditional and western scholars accept the idea that the Buddha did indeed teach the non-existence of the self, it has also been suggested that the reason the Buddha taught that the five aggregates aren’t self is that something else is the actual self. This discussion is beyond the scope of this essay and more properly belongs to the topic of the “unanswered questions”. The Buddha refused to answer the question of the existence or non-existence of the self, saying, in effect, that an answer would cause more confusion, and would not help others achieve liberation. As Hamilton points out: “Over and over again it is stated in the texts that the Buddha taught only what would help people to achieve the goal of nirvana. And the style in which the early teachings are given notably shies away from theoretical underpinnings. Indeed, there are strong suggestions that theoretical speculations – especially those to do with metaphysics – are both pointless and potentially misleading in the quest for nirva.” In discussing the importance modern scholars and the tradition itself place on answering the question of whether a self exists, Vedder says: “To have a view (whatever it may be) in this matter distinguishes Buddhist tradition and modern scholars from an ancient, purely practical approach where such questions were thought to be an obstacle to spiritual progress and where it was not considered problematic to leave matters undecided.” Rather than address this topic, I refer readers to Steven Collins’s book Selfless Persons, Peter Harvey’s The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness and Nirva in Early Buddhism, and Joaquín Perez-Rémón’s Self and Non-Self in Early Buddhism for analysis of this topic.

The Five Aggregates

Teachings on the five aggregates are found in a variety of places in the Pli Canon. Gethin notes that “they are found most characteristically treated in the Majjhima- and Saṃyutta-nikyas, and certain sections of the abhidharma texts,” Hamilton notes that the key Pli text on the khandhas is the Khandha Saṃyutta, from the Saṃyutta Nikya, volume III. Absence of self in the five aggregates was first taught in what is traditionally considered the Buddha’s second sermon, given in Benares and recorded in the Anattlakkhaa Sutta.

The five aggregates are commonly considered to be form, sensation, perception, formations (or volitions), and consciousness (rūpa, vedan, saññ, saṃkhras, viññaa) and are said to contain all that comprises both a person and the set of conditioned things. There is nothing else to a person other than his form, sensations, perceptions, the mental states he constructs from these, and the consciousness that intellectualizes and makes sense of experience. Despite the fact that the five aggregates also include inanimate form, there is little emphasis on this in the teachings. The Buddha is primarily concerned with the aggregates of human beings and directs these teachings toward human liberation. He explains that it is the five aggregates that lead a human being to think of him or herself as a self, to think “I am” and “this is mine”.

The Soteriological Reasons

The teaching of non-self in the aggregates is related to soteriological concerns, i.e., to achieving liberation from the cycle of saṃsra. The overarching soteriological reason for these teachings is that both craving for “I” and “mine” and ignorance about the true nature of the five aggregates lead to suffering and continued rebirth. Therefore, both the craving for the aggregates and ignorance about their true nature must be ended, or extinguished, to reach liberation.

The Buddha taught both craving and ignorance as the source of dukkha (often translated as suffering, or unsatisfactoriness). Gethin says, “In other words craving goes hand in hand with a fundamental ignorance and misapprehension of the world.” Craving is also referred to as the affective aspect of the problem of dukkha, and ignorance as the cognitive aspect. Because of craving, we cling to the five khandhas and the experiences mediated through them. These experiences are unsatisfactory, inherently so in the case of painful experiences, and indirectly so in the case of pleasant experiences, because of their impermanence. Due to our ignorance we can’t perceive the true nature of our five aggregates and so continue to cling to them.

The Buddha taught that all things, including all conditioned things (the five aggregates), possess ‘the three marks’: impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and lack of self (annatt). As we shall see below, these three marks were likely emphasized in response to claims by the Brahmanical tradition and other sects that the true self is permanent, unchanging, and blissful. Gethin says, “The conclusion that the anicca-dukkha-anatt formula focuses upon is that each of the khandhas is to be seen by right wisdom as it really is: “This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my att. It is the attainment of this vision that distinguishes the ariya svaka (noble hearer) from the assutavant puthujjana (ignorant ordinary man).” Here we note that the teaching of absence of self in the khandhas is clearly seen as soteriological.

Further Soteriological Considerations

Both Gethin (1986) and Hamilton (2000) note that the khandhas are compared to dukkha in the teaching of the four noble truths. Gethin says, “The stock nikya statement of the truths explains dukkha as ‘in short the five updnakkhandhas’.” There is actually a series of such correspondences explained by Gethin as suffering, the five grasping aggregates, the existing body, the burden, the world, the six internal sense spheres, and being (my translations). He also says:

The concern is not so much the presentation of an analysis of man as object, but rather the understanding of the nature of conditioned existence from the point of view of the experiencing subject. Thus at the most general level, rūpa, vedan, saññ, saṃkhras, and viññaa are presented as five aspects of an individual being’s experience of the world; each khandha is seen as representing a complex class of phenomena that is continuously arising and falling away in response to processes of consciousness based on the six spheres of sense.

Hamilton writes in a related vein in her two books, Identity and Experience and Early Buddhism, A New Approach, where she describes the aggregates as a process rather than a collection of things. The teachings on the khandhas are then a description of the cognitive process that determines our experiences as humans. The five aggregates, rather than being a description of what we are, are a description of how we are: an ongoing, always changing subjective experience of objectivity. She notes that not only is dukkha equated with the khandhas as mentioned above, but that both are equated with experience itself. Because the khandhas are equivalent to both suffering and experience, one can reach liberation by having insight into their true nature. A permanent unchanging self is irrelevant in this context. Hamilton suggests that most scholars to date have focused too much on the meaning of the five khandha teaching in relation to the self. She proposes that the Buddha taught the five aggregates aren’t self in order to teach the true nature of the five aggregates, not to teach the true nature of the self. Here again we have a soteriological motive, although with a difference in emphasis.

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Although Collins primarily addresses the issue of the ontological status of the self in his book Selfless Persons, he also puts forth two additional soteriological reasons for the teaching of the five aggregates as non-self. First, he says the Buddha taught the denial of self in the five aggregates as part of right view, which according to him has three types, two which are provisional and allow people to travel the path, and the last of which is that of the Arhat, who sees things as they truly are. Right view is important in Buddhism because it is the mind and its motivations that are the primary source of karma. This is in sharp contrast to the Brahmanical view, where performing ritual actions and sacrifices properly was considered most important. Right view is also a crucial part of the eight-fold noble path, and provisional right view, by allowing and encouraging one to practice, can lead to the genuine right view (which includes realizing the khandhas aren’t self) and thereby to Arhatship. In addition, Collins says that denial of self in the aggregates is an aid to practice, and quotes from the Visuddhimagga: “ ‘Why does the monk see conditioned things as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self? To contrive a means to deliverance.’” The act of considering conditioned things (the aggregates) this way motivates one to search for a solution and apply that solution in practice.

An Alternate Soteriological Framework

Realizing the lack of self in the khandhas is considered one of the liberating or discriminating insights taught as an alternative or a supplementary method to attain liberation or nibbna, in contrast to or in addition to practicing the four dhynas. The Buddha is said to have obtained liberation by achieving the fourth dhyna and one or three types of knowledge (in sources that cite just one, it is the knowledge of the four Noble Truths that is mentioned—this is also considered one of the liberating insights). But when he taught what is traditionally considered his second sermon, his first teaching that the five aggregates are not self, the five ascetics who were his former companions all attained liberating insight, as described in the Anattlakkhaa Sutta:

“Seeing thus, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple experiences revulsion towards form, revulsion towards feeling, revulsion towards perception, revulsion towards volitional formations, revulsion towards consciousness. Experiencing revulsion, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, [his mind] is liberated. When it is liberated, there comes the knowledge, ‘It’s liberated.’ He understands ‘Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being.’ That is what the Blessed One said. Elated, those bhikkhus delighted in the Blessed One’s statement. And while this discourse was being spoken, the minds of the bhikkhus of the group of five were liberated from the taints by nonclinging.” This sutta describes a means of liberation that doesn’t appear to rely on dhyna meditation. Scholars have considered the relationship between the two methods of liberation, dhyna and insight, presented in the canon. Griffiths examines the apparent contradictions between the two methods and their two types of liberation in his 1981 article. Among scholars, ideas about the timing and importance of these two methods of achieving liberation vary. It is traditionally thought that the practices of liberating insight were the Buddha’s contribution to the meditative practices of ancient India, while dhyna meditation was already in use by others. Johannes Bronkhorst, in his book The Two Traditions of Meditation in Ancient India challenges this view, attempting to show that dhyna meditation was not practiced before it was introduced by the Buddha. In addition, both he and Tilmann Vetter assert that the teachings of liberating insight came later than those of dhyna. Vetter suggests a number of reasons for this: The introduction of the path of discriminating insight probably is connected with difficulties involved in practising the real dhyna and its preparations. Instead of this a simpler method was devised (very likely by the Buddha himself) and offered to most of the disciples, namely the method of judging the constituents of the person as non-self. Moreover, this method was said to release one from desire (and therefore from rebirth) as soon as one has fully understood the fact that the constituents are not the self.

Although Vedder doesn’t offer much evidence as to why the difficulties of practicing dhyna (becoming a monk, following the precepts, practicing mindfulness, etc.) led to needing this new method, through analyzing the texts that discuss these issues he does offer evidence that the notion and practices of discriminating insight did in fact come later than those of dhyna.

In contrast, Bronkhorst asserts that the teachings of the non-self in the aggregates were included in the Buddhist teachings in part because of pressure from outside groups. According to Bronkhorst, the belief at the time was that if a tradition promised to lead to liberation during life (rather than after death), it had to offer some particular liberating insight that allowed that shift to the liberated state to occur. He hypothesizes that questions from other groups prompted early Buddhists to add the importance of a liberating insight to the descriptions of the Buddha’s liberation. Additionally, he says: It may be, however, that another factor aided this development. The Buddhist texts often speak about ‘insight’ (prajñ/paññ) as something immediately preceding liberation or characterize the teaching of the Buddha as especially concerning śila (‘morality’), samdhi (‘concentration’) and prajñ(‘insight’), to which sometimes vimukti (‘liberation’) is added. This may have made it plausible to the Buddhists themselves that the Buddhist doctrine knew some ‘liberating insight’ as well which had to be specified. The choice fell on the Four Noble Truths and on the other contents which we have seen were subsequently given to this insight. This then, as suggested by Vetter and Bronkhorst, is another reason for the teachings that the five aggregates aren’t self—it offers a liberating insight that provides an additional way to achieve liberation.

Socio-Cultural Reasons

Because North India of the Buddha’s time was dominated by the Brahmanic culture, the Buddha needed to address the issue of a permanent, unchanging self. This notion had itself evolved within the Brahmanic religion, and in fact, the result of that evolution roughly coincided with the time of the Buddha. Scholars note the creation of the Chndogya Upaniṣad (c. 600-400 BCE) as significant in terms of the Brahmanical conception of the self. Kapstein writes: “It is from the eighth book of the Chndogya Upaniṣad where we find for the first time a clear expression of the problem of the self posed in terms of identity through time.” Hamilton mentions that the time of the Buddha was a philosophically uncertain time in India, and suggests that the sort of philosophical inquiry represented by the Chndogya Upaniṣad was still probably considered supplemental to the ritualistic sacrificial system. Kapstein notes that in addition to Buddhism and Jainism, “During the same period there also flourished many smaller schools, proclaiming a remarkable variety of doctrines: materialism, determinism, skepticism, hedonism, etc. In short, it was an age of intense intellectual and spiritual ferment, in some respects like the closely contemporaneous period during which the Sophists rose to prominence in Greece.” But despite this being an active philosophical and religious time, the dominant culture was still Brahmanical. As Collins says: “All the movements came to settle down in practice to a modus vivendi with the Brahmin-derived hierarchy of social groups; in the same way, the general pattern of the belief system of saṃsra-karma-moka, as it developed in Brahmanical thought, was accepted by all the major schools of Indian religious thinking, while even those minor trends which did not accept the overall pattern had specifically to refute it.”

The Buddha accepted the three Brahmanical notions of saṃsra-karma-moka, although he would come to define karma and moka differently. His teachings were primarily about liberation (moka) from cyclic existence (saṃsra) via actions of body, speech, and mind (karma) that created results leading away from the things that bind us and cause suffering. But Brahmanical dominance also forced the Buddha to address the idea of the tman, the permanent, unchanging self postulated in the Upaniṣads. And even though the Buddha refused to answer the question of the intrinsic existence of the self, the doctrine of lack of self in the aggregates was sufficient to give his teachings a distinctive counterpoint to the prevailing Brahmanical beliefs. Collins says, As a socially institutionalised system of symbols, Buddhist theory functions as a reference point which orients, and provides a criterion for, the general religious outlook and practices of the ordinary Buddhist; in this sense, the anatt doctrine’s crucial importance is to provide an intransigent symbolic opposition to the belief system of the Brahmin priesthood, and therefore to the social position of Brahmins themselves. This statement should also apply to the doctrine of the lack of self in the aggregates. And although the Buddha didn’t challenge the prevailing social order, he did challenge the prevailing spiritual order, declaring, “Given that these bad and good qualities, which are condemned and praised by the wise, are both found distributed among these four classes, then the wise are not going to approve the brahmins’ claim that the Brahmin class is the best.”

In addition to teaching lack of self in the khandhas in response to the doctrine of the Brahmins, the Buddha also refuted the notions of self held by other schools. Collins says: “The idea of a self as separate from the process of phenomenal experience was widespread among contemporary religious thinkers.” In the Smaññaphala Sutta, the Buddha gives an interpretation of the positions of six other leading teachers of his day. Each of them held either to a position of eternalism (a permanent self existed), or to a position of annihilationism (a self existed but only during this single lifetime). The Buddha considered both positions to be incorrect, and unhealthy in that they would prevent the proper striving toward liberation, and even prevent liberation itself. Thus the socio-cultural milieu of the time inspired the Buddha to teach the non-existence of self in the five aggregates to counteract the views of groups other than Brahmins.

Philosophical Reasons

As mentioned above, philosophy for its own sake did not appear to be important to the Buddha. However, as time went on, and in response both to questioning from Buddhists and from those of other schools and sects, philosophical positions on the issue of the self were taken by Buddhists. While it is hard to separate the philosophical from the soteriological (the early Buddhists did not forget that the essence of the Buddha’s message was liberation from saṃsra), there are some teachings about this issue that appear more philosophical than others. For example, given the accepted definition of the self at the time, that it is permanent, in control, and free of suffering, it is easy to show that the five aggregates don’t meet that definition, since they are always in flux, we have only limited control over them, and they are intimately tied to suffering, both mental and physical. Collins delineates three arguments that the Buddha used against the concept of a permanent self (and implicitly, against the idea that the five aggregates could be that self).

The first way in which the Buddha attempted to deny the existence of such a self was, accordingly, to claim that no such control existed… In the commentaries, things are regularly said to be not-self because there is ‘no exercising of mastery’ over them. The five constituents of phenomenal personality, the khandh, are not-self because they have no ‘leader’, no ‘guide’, no ‘inner controller’ as the Upaniṣads had put it. The second argument he cites is that what is impermanent, unsatisfactory and subject to change is not suitable to be regarded as self. These qualities are closely related to the classic three marks mentioned above. The third argument says it is pointless to speak of a self apart from experience. For example, the Buddha argues against saying feeling is identical with self, because it’s always changing, or that self has no feeling, because if there is no feeling at all, can I really say “I am”? Nor can we say that feeling is an attribute of self, for then, when feeling is completely absent, how can one say this is what one is? In addition to these three arguments, attributed to the Buddha himself, there is also the reasoning of the chariot found in the Milindapañha, which uses the device of a question from King Milinda to the monk Ngasena with regard to who he is, if he is not his name. Ngasena explains that just as the parts of the chariot are not the chariot, and that the term chariot is just a convenient label for something with no independent existence, so too for Ngasena, his various parts, and his name. It is worth noting that there was a sect of early Buddhists, called the Pudgalavdins, who asserted an inexpressible self that was neither the same as the aggregates nor different from them. Kapstein says that “the earliest detailed Buddhist scholastic debates of which we now have record are concerned in large measure with rebuking a rebellious Buddhist school that affirmed the reality of a persisting basis for individuation, which they called the ‘person’ (Pli, puggala, Skt., pudgala).”

The strong opposition to the doctrine of the Pudgalavdins confirms the fact that most Buddhists did indeed think that the five aggregates weren’t the self.Although there was clearly philosophical content in the early Buddhist teachings, a stronger philosophical emphasis developed in the tradition over time. Buddhist dialogue with other Indian philosophers became more prominent and more formal during the times of Ngrjuna, Dignga, Dharmakīrti, and Vasubhandu, as Buddhists engaged the views of the Nyya-Vaiśeṣikas, the Mīmṃskas, the Ćarvaka-Lokyatas, and others. ConclusionsThe early Buddhists taught the non-existence of self in the aggregates for soteriological, socio-cultural, and philosophical reasons. They lived in an environment in ancient India where the idea of a permanent self that could be liberated was popular among those who considered such things, the Brahmins and the wandering ascetics. They responded to that environment by pointing out what was to them a large error in thinking and practice. Their primary goal was liberation rather than debate, and a variety of teachings and practices were taught in order to help a range of people. This particular teaching was one type of insight teaching that was designed to help followers see the interconnectedness and impermanence of everything conditioned, and thereby free themselves from the wheel of cyclic suffering.

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