The Truth of Anatman

Tom Pepper

Original: Tom Pepper, "The Truth of Anatman". From the collection: Tom Pepper, The Faithful Buddhist (2014), section “Essays from The Faithful Buddhist”.

The essay opens Tom Pepper's collection The Faithful Buddhist. Pepper reads anatman through Alain Badiou and critical realism, and in the second half of the text he does a “hypertranslation” of the Pali sutta: not a translation, but a rewriting according to the method that Badiou tried out on Plato’s Republic. Who is Pepper and how this method works, read the translator's commentary at the end.

What does it mean to be a faithful Buddhist?

What is your position in relation to what I prefer to call the Buddha Event?

By “event” I mean as Alain Badiou uses the term: the emergence of truth in human discourse or practice. That is, the appearance to human thinking and activity of a certain concept or practice, which, although they were always already true, were not recognized as true in the World. By "World" Badiou means something like a set of social practices (including thinking) that organize and make possible certain human experiences. Truths in Badiou's sense exist only in the human World and never in nature, because only the humanly constructed World, the realm of ideology, social structures and symbolic systems, is capable of preventing some truth from appearing at all; in nature this cannot happen: there, what exists simply is .

During what is often called the Axial Time[1], several events of truth occurred, and a number of truths emerged in the Worlds of various cultures. What I call the Buddha Event is the emergence in India of one of the most important yet most elusive truths for the human species: the truth that there are two levels, or registers, of reality. There is a mind-independent reality of the universe, intransitive and existing completely indifferent to us[2]. And there is a reality produced by humans, transitive, open to change, extending as far as humanity extends, and yet possessing real causal powers. We can change our World, but we cannot change it on a whim or as we please, because it has a certain structural and causal influence on our actions.

This Truth could emerge through the acceptance of the most elusive Truth of all—anatman. It is often translated, confusingly, as “selflessness” or “egolessness.”[3] Meanwhile, this is the core of Buddhist teaching, without which nothing else in Buddhism truly makes sense, and its rejection leads to an insistence on the complexity and mystical nature of Buddhist thought. In short, anatman is simply the Truth that there is nothing transcendental in any sense, nothing that is not subject to change, nothing that does not depend for its existence on causes and conditions. There is no soul, no transcendental consciousness or mind, no eternal “true self.” Everything that we are comes into being for reasons that can be explained, and everything that we are will eventually cease to exist.

Here I want to briefly discuss what kind of subjects such an event of truth usually gives rise to, and the Buddha event is no exception. In “Logics of Worlds” [4] Badiou proposes a typology of the subject in its relation to the emergence of truth. The subject may be loyal , reactionary or obscurantist . (The last two are sometimes translated as “reactive” and “obscure,” but I prefer my version because it emphasizes that the term names the function of the subject position, not its qualities.)

The faithful subject is the one who notices the event of truth and tries to force the World to accept it. “Forcing” is a term borrowed from set theory[5]; it is about an attempt to transform the discursive practices and institutions of the World so that the truth becomes provable, can appear and become the subject of speech. In a sense, this is the presentation of “proof” of a truth that is so far only grasped “intuitively.” Until truth is “forced” to appear, it is vague, seems not to belong to the World and is kept on the periphery of discourses and institutions: it exists, but does not officially appear (Badiou gives the example of French undocumented workers[6]).

A faithful subject notices the event of truth, the emergence in the World of something that looks like a contradiction, an excess, something that cannot be taken into account, and fights to remake the World so that this truth appears in it. As Badiou says, the faithful subject “generates an expansion of the present and presents, fragment by fragment, the truth” (53).

The reactionary subject denies the existence of this truth. Like the faithful, the reactionary subject becomes a subject only due to the existence of truth, which threatens the stability and closure of the World: every subject is a subject only in relation to some kind of truth. For the reactionary subject it is necessary to deny the very existence of this truth, to restrain the expansion of the true subject and ensure that everything goes on as before, pretending that the present state of affairs is complete, complete, consistent; this subject assures us that all the benefits of progress can be achieved without any fundamental change in our current discourses and practices. We see this, for example, in the current fashion for neuroscience and meditation, which attempts to prove that any benefit from Buddhism can be gained entirely within the positivist and empiricist ideologies of capitalism; or in the popular insistence that Buddhism has always been an “apolitical”, “personal” religion that does not require us to change anything in the world; or, at worst, in the claim that Buddhism is perfectly compatible with capitalism and is nothing more than the best ideology within which we can survive the monstrous future of global capitalism and global destruction that we cannot hope to prevent.

The obscurantist subject is one who “systematically resorts to the invocation of a complete and pure transcendental Body, an ahistorical or anti-event body,” which “has the power to silence that which the event affirms, thereby forbidding the real body to exist” (59–60). The obscurantist subject appeals to some inexpressible truth beyond words, which science threatens to destroy, to the “truly human”, eluding reason, which is revealed only in miraculous revelations and is always hidden in dark origins. In x-Buddhism[7] we see this whenever it is insisted that awakening lies beyond language, that the Buddha never used language to teach, that one cannot think if one hopes to become enlightened, or that the ultimate goal is some complete and pure "substrate consciousness"[8], Buddha nature or "true self." We see this subject whenever a dispute is drowned out by appeals to tradition, quotations from sutras and references to lines of succession.

It is important to remember: in the sense in which Badiou uses the term, the subject is not an individual. The subject is a collective social practice, discourse, ideology, and it always requires the joint action of many individuals. The only way we have any agency at all is through the production of social practices that “present, piece by piece, the truth.”

The reactionary and obscurantist subject , therefore, tends to take the form of strategies of containment, social institutions designed to prevent the emergence of truth and to stop the incorporation of ever-increasing numbers of individuals into the collective of the faithful subject. These may be educational institutions that work precisely to prevent any threatening truth by making endless “modifications” of the knowledge system and calling them changes. Harry Potter, in an excellent article in The Journal of Critical Realism, explains how the educational system operates through what he calls "structural mystification": it does not prohibit the production of truth, but organizes discursive practices so that no one who succeeds in an academic institution has any real interest in producing dangerous truths; Only those who are fully invested in maintaining the status quo will succeed. However, these containment strategies are also much less “official”: they manifest themselves as grassroots organizations seeking to “return to nature” or “reclaim our true human nature.” In x-Buddhism we see a mixture of containment strategies: the threatening truth of the Buddha Event is suffocated under the loving attention of both reactionary and obscurantist subjects, who fight with each other to divert attention from the faithful subject, the very one they are trying to stifle.

To be a faithful Buddhist means to work towards the emergence of the Truth of Buddhism in our World. This Truth can and has appeared in other discourses: there is nothing culturally specific about it, it does not require racist assumptions about the difference between Asians and Europeans. The compulsion of this Truth therefore requires that we be open to any and all discourses that may contribute to its acceptance. It also requires a complete renunciation of reverence for sacred texts and authoritative teachers. Truth is constrained by attachment to texts that are somehow divinely revealed, and usually also constrained by the establishment of authorizing institutions that decide what counts as true.

My hope for this blog is simple: to find a few fellow faithful Buddhists to produce a collective faithful entity who will work to force this Truth to appear.

To this end, I will begin with a “hypertranslation” of one passage from the Pali canon. This passage is often used to justify continued belief in the transcendental self: the Buddha does not deny its existence. My hypertranslation attempts to clear up this misunderstanding. Alain Badiou uses the term “hypertranslation” for his new translation of Plato’s Republic, which attempts to produce “something startlingly new by expanding, contracting, updating and dramatizing it, flavoring it with humor and enlivening it with its own philosophical vocabulary” (Spitzer, xxiv). I plan to do several more such translations, focusing on passages that are most often misunderstood or quoted in order to obscure the Truth of the anatman and maintain the illusion of a transcendent entity like the atman. Any suggestions regarding problematic passages would be welcome.

So here's my first try. I hope to find others who are interested in joining this Collective Faithful Subject of Truth!

Related Tutorials [10]

Part IV: The Book of the Six Senses

Chapter X: Unexplained

10. Ananda (Is there a “I”?)

Vacchagotta was always pestering the Buddha with questions. He was not one of those who hoped to prove his superiority with questions or drive his interlocutor into a dead end with sophisms. He just didn't fully understand. He was especially stuck on the idea of ​​anatman. Either “I” exists or it doesn’t—so it seemed to him. There's no third option, right?

And yet, when he asked the Buddha, “Is there a ‘I’?” - Buddha remained silent.

Then he asked: “So there is no ‘I’?” Buddha remained silent.

Vachchagotta gave up and went away to ponder why he was not receiving an answer.

After he left, Ananda came up. He asked: “Why didn’t you answer him?”

The Buddha told him, “If I had said that 'I am', Vacchagotta would have misunderstood. He would think that I was telling him about atman, the unchanging and eternal core of our being. He would have thought that I was taking the same position as the Vedantins. He would understand me as if I were saying: this body, these thoughts, my work, my actions, my habits - all this is just an illusion, none of this is my true “I”, which never changes. This is how many people understand what I say; they think that by anatman I mean that the conventional self, constructed by actions, by the body, by social practices, is not the real and true self. This is not at all what I would like to instill in him. On the contrary: these things are the only thing that is “I”, they are completely real, they are not just an illusion. But there is no atman, no unchanging core of self separate from these things. I could not tell Vacchagotte that there is an “I” because he is not yet able to conceive of an “I” that is real, but at the same time entirely conventional, entirely constructed by causes and conditions.

At the same time, I could not tell him that “I” was not there. If I had said that, he would have thought I was one of those postmodern radical constructivists. He would have thought that I was saying: there is no “I” at all, everything is just an illusion, and therefore there is no need to do anything about it. But this is again the opposite of what I mean. It is precisely because the “I” is constructed and this constructed “I” is all that there is, the only thing that is, that we should be all the more concerned about how it is constructed. And we cannot delude ourselves that we can simply reverse engineer it on a whim, that it is insignificant, that it has no causal power, no inertia of its own. The “I” can only be constructed through great effort and through changing the social practices in which it lives, and not on a whim. And whose whim would it be? Such an assumption would again presuppose an atman separate from this conventional self.

Therefore I could not answer Vacchagotta's questions the way he posed them. He needs to reconsider the premises from which he starts by asking these questions, and only then can he begin to understand the concept of anatman.”

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds . Trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum, 2009.

Potter, Harry. "Power and Knowledge: A Dialectical Contradiction", Journal of Critical Realism 9.2, 2010.

Spitzer, Susan. ""Translator's Preface" to Plato's Republic , by Alain Badiou." New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

From the translator

Tom Pepper did not write from the pulpit. His platform was blogs and comments under other people's posts, primarily Glenn Wallis's Speculative Non-Buddhism, where he remained for many years one of the most visible and most caustic authors. In 2013, Cruel Theory | Sublime Practice,” a book for three with Wallis and Matthias Steingass. “The Faithful Buddhist” is already his own blog, and a 2014 collection collects what he wrote there.

He reads Buddhism through Althusser, Badiou and the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar. Hence the move that is strange at first glance: Pepper’s anatman is not mysticism or psychotechnics, but a materialistic thesis about the structure of the subject. Since there is no unchanging core, it means that the “I” is entirely assembled from social practices. This means that it can be collected differently, and will have to be collected together: in Badiou, the subject is not an individual at all, but a collective work. From this comes politics, and Pepper hits it all the way.

Now about hypertranslation. Badiou coined the term for his version of Plato's Republic (2012). What he did there: he redrew the composition, replaced “soul” with “Subject”, and “god” with “Big Other”, turned the cave into a cinema hall, sketched out anachronisms from iPods and Euros to Lance Armstrong, and rewrote Adeimantha into a female character named Amantha, who argues with Socrates on equal terms. Plato's argument survives. The language, scenery and addressee have changed.

Pepper does the same with the sutta. The original SN 44.10 is very short: Vacchagotta asks, Buddha is silent, Ananda asks why, Buddha briefly explains. An entire reading tradition has grown out of this brevity: since Buddha did not directly say that there is no “I”, it means that he still left some kind of “I”. Pepper expands the silence into a lecture where the Buddha casually mentions Vedantists and postmodern constructivists. The text below is not a translation of the sutta, and it cannot be referred to as a canon. This is an argument wrapped around a canonical plot.

And one last thing. “X-Buddhism” in this dictionary is not a neutral description, but an accusation, and “faithful Buddhist” is not a compliment to oneself, but a reference to the Badouist faithful subject. Pepper is a polemicist, sometimes deliberately rude. This is exactly what makes him interesting.

Translator's Notes

1. Axial time. Term by Karl Jaspers from The Origins of History and Its Purpose (1949). The period is approximately from the 8th to the 3rd centuries BC, when philosophy and world religions appeared almost simultaneously in Greece, India, China and Israel. The hypothesis is controversial, but it has taken root firmly in philosophical texts.

2. Intransitive and transitive. A couple from Roy Bhaskar's critical realism. The intransitive exists independently of our knowledge of it. Transitive is knowledge itself, together with the practices that produce it. Pepper writes like a critical realist, and this is evident later in the text.

3. In the original there is selflessness and egolessness, hence the Russian “selflessness” and “egolessness”. Sanskrit anātman, Pali anattā. Pepper is not satisfied with the suggestion in these translations that something is not there at all; we are talking about something else: there is no unchanging core.

4. “Logiques of Worlds” (Logiques des mondes, 2006), the second part of “Being and Events”. The book has not been published in Russian, so the pages in parentheses refer to the English translation by Alberto Toscano (Continuum, 2009). This is where the terminological knot comes from: Badiou’s three figures of the subject are usually rendered as “faithful”, “reactive” and “obscure”. Pepper deliberately changes the last two and immediately explains why.

5. Forcing. Paul Cohen came up with this method in 1963 to prove the independence of the continuum hypothesis: a new object is added to a set theory model, about which only what can be told from within the model is known in advance. Badiou brought the procedure into philosophy, and forcing became his name for the work of a faithful subject.

6. In the original, undocumented workers. Речь о французских sans-papiers, мигрантах без легального статуса. Бадью вместе с «Политической организацией» занимался ими с середины 1980-х. Люди работают, платят за жильё, водят детей в школу, а для государства их нет.

7. X-буддизм. Термин Гленна Уоллиса, который ведёт блог Speculative Non-Buddhism. Икс подставляется на место любого определения: дзен-буддизм, тхеравада-буддизм, светский буддизм, нейробуддизм. Смысл в том, что все они воспроизводят один и тот же жест самолегитимации.

8. «Субстратное сознание», substrate consciousness. Так Б. Алан Уоллес передаёт санскритское ālaya-vijñāna из школы йогачара и считает этот слой сознания переживающим смерть тела. Для Пеппера перед нами атман под другим именем.

9. Гарри Поттер (Garry Potter), канадский социолог из Университета Уилфрида Лорье, один из заметных авторов критического реализма. Совпадение с именем волшебника случайное.

10. «Связанные наставления» это «Саньютта-никая», собрание коротких сутт палийского канона. Пеппер работает с английским переводом Бхиккху Бодхи «The Connected Discourses of the Buddha» (2000). Пассаж известен как SN 44.10, «Ананда-сутта», раздел «Абьяката-саньютта» («Неразъяснённое») внутри «Салаятана-вагги» («Книга шести сфер чувств»).