Descartes vs. Gautama

Je pense, donc je suis-- Descartes.

Cogito ergo sum -- “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes found the existence of the self to be the one self-evident, undeniable truth. From this, he constructed the Enlightenment cosmology that we live by today.

Je pense, donc, je ne suis pas--Gautama.

Yet in around 500 BC, the Buddha Gautama seems to have come to the very opposite conclusion: the key to his own cosmology is “anatta”--”no self.” His personal revelation was that the self did not exist. From this, for him, all else followed.

I believe both are right. Descartes is right that we cannot deny the existence of the self as a perceiving subject; to do so would be an immediate contradiction. Then who is denying?

But beyond that, what can we say about this self? What are the properties that make it what it is? The instant we try to assign any property to it, we are again involved in a contradiction—because the instant it can perceive a property, that property is, ipso facto, not an aspect of the perceiver, but a thing perceived. Anything ascribed to the self therefore appears to be, in Aquinas's terminology, an accident, rather than a real quality. I am not fat or thin; were I the one instead of the other, I would still be the same self. I am not male or female; were I the one instead of the other, I would still be the same self. I am not old or young, Jew or Greek, or anything else in particular.

It's all an accident - Aquinas.

So the self is nothing in particular. In this real sense, it is nothing: “not this, not that,” in the formulation of the Upanishads. From this insight, it seems to me the Buddha is correct that cravings for one thing or another are nonsensical, like a dog chasing its own tail. Nothing can be acquired by the self.

One can see all things, then, as a movie playing before us in a darkened theatre. Nothing touches the self.