John Smith and Anatta

 

Here is a human leg bone.

Now it's something we immediately ask: whose leg bone is this? How did they die? How did they live?

All fair enough.

We can assume they had a name and lets call them John Smith. Now John Smith will have probably had 2 legs bones like this, two arms, a body and a head. In fact John Smith would have had something like 206 bones.

But now a bit of an SRH question: which of these bones or collections of bones is John Smith? Well we might say none of them cos John Smith has died. But if none of them are John Smith then how can they belong to John Smith? And this even more odd if John Smith no longer exists.

Now some people believe in spirits and souls and these are permanent so that John Smith still exists and these bones belong to him.

But what if we grind these bones down and sprinkle on a field and then over time eat the crops from this field. The minerals in John Smith's bones will gradually become the bones in me. So they are no longer John Smith's bones but mine.

And what happens then to John Smith's soul, have I stolen his bones? Has he become property-less?

And the real question there, if the bones belong to the soul then who does the soul belong to? Isn't there a infinite regress here? All sounding very SRH. And if the soul is the seat of ownership then why do we need the soul, can't the body just be John Smith, can't be bones own themselves?

So why not just have John Smith as the collection of bones and body.

Anyway this goes on indefinitely because John Smith is actually really bad defined. John Smith cannot be found in the world or in the spiritual world. It is just a vague idea. When a bomb goes off people get blown apart. When emergency services collect the parts, which part does the "person" go "into"? Which part owns the rest?

None of it makes any real sense.

If I have my arm amputated and I wake up from the operation to see an arm in medical waste. Is that "my" arm? And then we might ask as greater parts of us get amputated at what point do we go into medical waste? This is a common philosophical thought experiment. Usually we end up thinking that we can lose everything but our head and it can look at the pile of medical waste as the stuff that has been removed. But then what if our eyes were removed and put on the pile? What if they were still connected by their optic nerves? When we woke up we would be looking from the medical waste pile to our head on the bed. Surely now we have been put on the waste pile? But then we might argue that the brain is on the bed, and the optic nerve needs to be connected to that brain for us to be on the waste pile (altho you can equally argue the eyes are needed to get this perspective looking from the waste pile). So we cut the optic nerve and are cast into darkness, that we somehow argue is now on the bed (while just before we were looking at the bed). And we get abstract then and start to ignore space and start to think thoughts about who we are and where we are.

We enter the discussion Buddha has with Ananda in the Shurangama Sutra. And the point is that at each point we are trying to cling to something, some solid foundation on which we can "stand." But as things get cut off the places to stand get smaller and smaller and then more and more confusing, and the "here" and "there" starts to get confusing and it all starts to fall apart.

What we are resisting is the ultimate letting go, that actually there is no seat of self. Like John Smith it doesn't really make sense.

Letting go casts us off from material attachment and this deep obsession with being bound to something physical and solid.

That can (will be) quite unsettling and ungrounding. This "emptiness" is frightening and unsettling but when we can handle it, then it is pure freedom from suffering.

Returning to the top, it is no surprise then that all this trying to make John Smith fit the bones or the body or the soul doesn't really work because there is no such thing as John Smith. It is just a name that we loosely give to a "person." That loosely refers to their birth, looking backwards gestation and conceptions but then it gets confusing with sperms and eggs how it started. And then going through life we can attribute things like what they did and who knew them, and this goes through the whole bodily processes until they get ill and eventually the die. And then it gets confusing again. Perhaps they donated body parts to people at some stage, and we can can kind of ignore that. And perhaps they thought great things and lots of people started to think those things, perhaps like Adam Smith they will be remembered in these thought: this is Adam Smith's Pin Factory. So Adam Smith now becomes much more complex than just his bones.

 We kind of go along with it, but it doesn't really make much actual sense.

And yet, we do this to ourselves. We actually think there is a person inside us, somehow connected to our life, somehow born and somehow to die. Somehow owning our body parts, and what we do, and somehow being in our heads and our thoughts and our decisions. Yet haven't we seen with John Smith that this person doesn't really exist?

And if there is no one actually at the centre of all of this, the doesn't the world just carry on as it is without any hassle and worry? Things are just what they are and there is no one here in my life to worry about that.

Buddha calls this Anatta.