Remember those big questions: “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, “What’s the meaning of life?” Questions unanswerable in words. Here’s an easy one: “What am I?”
Provisionally speaking, “I” am a collection of things.
Early Buddhist thinkers were reductionists. Like their Greek contemporaries, the “Atomists”, they were concerned with reducing ‘things’, both physical and mental, to constituent parts. The Greek’s atom was a physical thing. A particle so small as to be invisible, yet a particle from which everything was made. Western science followed this lead; from atoms to subatomic particles to clouds of probabilities “collapsing” into observable events, to…
Buddhist thinkers however were not emphasizing ever smaller things, but things not made of, or dependent on, other things. Things that were “non-compounded”. The Sanskrit term for a unit of ‘thingness’ is dharma [not to be confused with Dharma, meaning teaching or law], and in Buddhism there are only two non-compounded dharmas: nirvana and sunyata. Extinction and emptiness.
In Early Buddhism nirvana (Pali nibbana) didn’t mean enlightenment, it meant extinction or cessation. To be liberated from the cycle of (re)birth and death. Shakyamuni Buddha’s metaphor for nirvana was a fire whose fuel once completely consumed…is no more. What is this “no more”? Where does fire go when extinguished?
In Buddhism “I” is a compounded dharma, a collection of things. These collections are called skandhas, a Sanskrit term meaning heaps or piles of like things. “I” is constituted by five skandhas: rupa, vedana, samjna, samskara, vijnana. The translation of these Sanskrit terms vary from school to school, from teacher to teacher, but a working definition of the five are: form, sensation, perception, volition, consciousness.
Form is what seems to be “out there”. The (so-called) external world. Sensation is the coalescence of (form as) an object of sensation with an organ of sensation and a mind of sensation. An apple, an eye, a mental image. Perception is current sensation + the memory of prior similar sensation, without a valence added. This is sweet, this is sour. Volition is perception with a valence added. I want sweet, I don’t want sour. Consciousness is figuring out how to get what volition wants. I’ll buy the sweet apples, not the sour ones. Form is the material world as experienced in sensation, re-cognized by perception, transformed by volition, and actualized by consciousness. Voila, a self!
Each skandha, each pile of forms, sensations, perceptions, etc., is a pile of compounded things which have no inherent ‘self-ness’. An exercise: what personal experience can you trace to being a non-compounded dharma? Every sensation, thought, emotion…every experienceable physical or mental formation are compounded dharmas. The “I” of the five skandhas, being a collection of compounded dharmas, is itself a compounded dharma.
Yet the Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form; the same is true of sensations, perceptions, volitions, consciousness.” It explicitly states the five skandhas are inherently empty, are non-compounded dharmas. Hence the “I” of the five skandhas is empty, a non-compounded dharma.
What am “I”?
Poof!