Scholarly Buddhism has the wrong picture of Buddhism

Let’s imagine that you got a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle at a garage sale for fifty-cents.  It was fairly old.  The box with secured with twine, and the picture on the box was of a forest with a lake and mountains in the background.  But when you began to put the puzzle together something wasn't right, you were having a great deal of trouble making the pieces match the picture on the top of the box. 

What you did not know is that the jigsaw puzzle had been put into a different box.  One somewhat like the original but not the original.  This, I sense, is where we are with Buddhism—scholarly, Buddhism.  We have all these pieces of Buddhism, but they only partially match the scholarly picture of Buddhism.

Okay, what does scholarly Buddhism have as its picture?

"According to Buddhist scholasticism, the self is purely the result of physical and mental processes, a sort of “mental fabrication” which has no ultimate reality. Awakening involves becoming aware of this illusory nature of the self. As the monk Nāgasena (second century BC) put it in his famous apologue: “Just as, when certain pieces of wood are assembled, we talk of a chariot; in the same way, when the five physical and mental components are present, we talk of the ‘Self’.” These five groups or “aggregates” (skandha), are impermanent and therefore contribute to the impermanence of the self. They are: form (or matter, rūpa), sensations (vedanā ), perceptions (samjñā ), mental formations (saṃskāra), and consciousness (vijñāna)” (Bernard Faure, Unmasking Buddhism, p. 48–49).

But this is misleading.  Actually, the Buddha taught that these five aggregates are not who we really are.  He did not teach, categorically, that there is not a self or in Pali natthattā. 

The aggregates are not our true self even though we might choose to believe, for example, that consciousness (vijñāna) is our self.  After all, sensory consciousness is very important in our daily lives.

According to the Buddha, recluses and Brahmins where some of the people who claim to see the self (ātman), but were actually only seeing the five aggregates of attachment which was not their self.  It hadn’t dawned on them that according to the Buddha we are to regard each aggregate this way: This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.  We see this clearly in the Catuṣpariṣat-sūtra:

“Therefore then, O monks, whatever material form there is, past, future or present, inside or outside, gross or subtle, low or eminent, far or near, “all this is not mine, I am not this, it is not my self.  In this way it must be seen, in truth, by means of correct discriminative knowledge (prajñā).  And whatever sensation there is and whatever conception, whatever psychic conformations there are and whatever consciousness, past, future, or present, inside or outside, gross or subtle, low or eminent, far or near, “all this is not mine, I am not this, it is not my self.”

We can see that one is taught by the Buddha to wake up from mistaking as their self what, precisely, is not their self.  Few scholars in academia see Buddhism this way.  And why?  Because it has become somewhat of a taboo for Buddhist scholars to think that the Buddha implicitly taught a self, but not a self tied up with the five groups or “aggregates” (skandha) that are impermanent.  It's difficult to break old habits.

Comments

[dave b]

"According to Buddhist **scholasticism**, the self is purely the result of physical and mental processes, a sort of 'mental fabrication' which has no ultimate reality."

The quote is absolutely correct; this is what Buddhist SCHOLASTICS had to say, but not what Buddha Himself had to say.

That's the problem, i.e. that they are only interested in ehat Buddhist SCHOLASTICS said not what Buddha said.

Further, I think an excellent argument can be made that the 5 aggregates themselves, despite their ubiquity in the Pali Canon, are a later scholastic creation, i.e. that Buddha in all those cases actually just said sakkaya (the body) and the scholastics decided to split that into their new conception of 5 aggregates or constituent components that they felt make up sakkaya, which created a confusing mess without adding any explanatory power.

There are suttas that repeat, that are literally the same 100% in wording except in one paragraph like "I teach sakkaya, the cause of sakkaya, the cesation of sakkaya, and the path to the cessation of sakkaya" in one versus "I teach X, the cause of X, the cesation of X, and the path to the cessation of X" where that paragraph is repeated 5 times with X replaced by one aggregate each time. The 5 aggregates clearly is a fancy sit-in for simply the body in the suttas, as is clear by its usage, especially it being interchangeable with sakkaya--but people, especially scholars, are confused by the 5 aggregates into thinking its more than the body by the fact that 4 aggregates are mental proceses. Whoever split Buddha's term sakkaya (the body) into this scholastic 5 aggregates was a true imbecile who ruined Buddhism. They made it impossible for scholars to see that Buddha was merely saying you're not the body because you're the soul, because despite the 6th aggregate itself being described clearly as merely the 5 senses (eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, etc.), scholars are convinced the 5th aggregate is the soul and therefore the soul itself is no-self. Scholars are a lost cause because they could never even understand the point I just made, much less consider its value. They can't even figure out that the consciousness-aggregate is the 5 senses not the soul, despite it being plainly spelled out in the texts.