Which Western philosopher comes closest to the Buddha’s teaching of not-self, where the likeness ends, and how to say it in English without being misunderstood. 西方哪一位哲學家最接近佛陀的無我教導？相似到哪裡為止？還有，怎麼用英文把它說出來而不被誤解？
D2 Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學Self and Reality · 自我與真實Advanced · 高級about 30 min
無我
anattā Pāli anātman Sanskritnot-self
The verdict · 判定
Closest: Derek Parfit, with David Hume a near second. Both reach the Buddha’s conclusion about what a person is. Neither has his account of why it matters or his method for making the conclusion real.
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all.每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
1 · What the Dharma says · 佛法怎麼說
The teaching in its own words 用它自己的話說
The teaching was first given, according to the tradition, in the Buddha’s second discourse, to the five companions who had practiced austerities with him. He takes the five aggregates (khandha) into which a person can be analyzed, namely bodily form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness, and says of each that it is anattā, not-self. He gives two reasons. The first is about control. “Form is not-self. For if form were self, it would not lead to affliction, and one could have it of form: ‘Let my form be thus, let my form not be thus.’” We cannot command the body not to age or a feeling not to arise. The second reason is put as a series of questions. Is form permanent or impermanent? Impermanent. Is what is impermanent satisfying or unsatisfying? Unsatisfying. “Is what is impermanent, unsatisfying, and subject to change fit to be regarded thus: ‘This is mine, this I am, this is my self’?” The monks answer that it is not (Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.59).
Three things about the passage are easy to miss. The Buddha says of each aggregate that it is not self. He does not say here, in so many words, “there is no self.” On another occasion a wanderer named Vacchagotta asks him directly whether there is a self, and then whether there is no self, and both times the Buddha stays silent. He explains afterward that to say “there is a self” would side with the eternalists, and to say “there is no self” would side with the annihilationists and leave the questioner more confused than before (Saṃyutta Nikāya 44.10). Second, the target is a particular idea of self that was current in his day: something permanent, blissful, and in control. Third, the teaching is offered as something to be seen and not merely assented to. The discourse ends with the five listeners liberated by what they have understood.
Later teachers made the positive account explicit. What we call a person is a designation applied to the aggregates when they occur together, as the word “chariot” is applied to assembled parts (Saṃyutta Nikāya 5.10). The aggregates arise and cease in dependence on conditions, and one moment conditions the next. That causal stream is enough for memory, for moral responsibility, and, in the traditional teaching, for rebirth. No owner travels along it.
Descartes doubted everything he could and found one thing left: “I am, I exist.” From this he concluded that he was a thinking substance, a single thing that persists and has thoughts as its states. The first step is one a Buddhist can accept, since no one denies that thinking is going on. The second step is the one that the not-self teaching refuses. Descartes moved from “there is thinking” to “there is a thing that thinks,” and that thing is the ātman under a French name.
Hume repeated Descartes’ experiment and reported a different result. “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.” He concluded that a person is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions,” and that the identity we ascribe to the mind “is only a fictitious one.” This is the second premise of the Buddhist argument, reached independently and stated with great force. Hume’s account stops there. He has no theory of how the bundle is tied together, and in an appendix he admits it: “I find myself involved in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent.”
The same conclusion, and its consequences · 同樣的結論，以及它的後果
Derek Parfit 帕菲特1984
Parfit defends what he calls reductionism. A person’s existence consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of a series of connected physical and mental events. There is no further fact, no separately existing subject. He then draws consequences that Hume did not. What matters for survival is the continuation of the mental stream, whether or not we call the result “me.” The boundary between my future and other people’s is less deep than it seems, and so concern for others becomes more rational and the fear of death less so. He notes that the Buddha would have agreed, and he prints Buddhist texts in an appendix to make the point.
Who is closest, and where the likeness ends 誰最接近，相似到哪裡為止
Parfit is the closest. He holds all three parts of the Buddhist position: that there is no separate self, that a person is a causally connected series, and that seeing this changes how one should live. Hume holds the first with unsurpassed clarity, has no account of the second, and treats the third as a joke at his own expense, going off to play backgammon. Descartes holds none of them, and his cogito is the best Western statement of the view the Buddha was arguing against.
The likeness to Parfit ends at four places. First, he reaches the view by argument about imaginary cases, and says frankly that he cannot always believe it: the conviction fades when he stops thinking about the arguments. Second, the continuity he describes is psychological, and it ends at death. The Buddhist stream includes the body, runs on causal conditions of which memory is only one, and is traditionally held to continue from life to life. Third, Parfit is content to say that persons reduce to physical and mental events and to stop there. The Madhyamaka philosophers pressed on and argued that those events have no independent nature either. Fourth, and most important, Parfit offers a conclusion and the Buddha offers a training.
Five kinds of process, each arising and passing五類過程，各自生滅
Particular perceptions and nothing else個別的知覺，別無他物
Connected mental and physical events相連的心理與物理事件
A thinking thing一個思考的東西
What is a person?人是什麼？
A designation applied to the aggregates依諸蘊而施設的名稱
A bundle of perceptions一束知覺
A brain, a body, and a series of events腦、身體，與一連串事件
An immaterial substance joined to a body與身體相連的非物質實體
What ties the stages together?什麼把各階段繫在一起？
Dependent origination: each moment conditions the next緣起：前剎那為後剎那之緣
Resemblance and causation; he admits he cannot say相似與因果；他承認說不清
Psychological continuity and connectedness心理的連續與連結
The same substance同一個實體
How did he take the result?他怎麼面對這個結果？
As liberating當作解脫
As a puzzle to be left in the study當作留在書房裡的難題
As liberating, when he could believe it當作解脫——在他相信得了的時候
As a foundation for knowledge當作知識的地基
What follows for practice?對實踐意味著什麼？
A path of training that ends clinging一條止息執取的修習之道
Nothing. Dine, play backgammon沒有。吃飯、下棋
Less self-concern; ethics becomes more impersonal少一些自我關切；倫理更不偏私
Nothing directly沒有直接的意涵
5 · The step the Dharma takes further · 佛法多走的一步
From a view to a way of seeing 從一個見解，到一種看法
The Buddhist tradition draws a distinction that neither Hume nor Parfit has. It separates the belief in a self from the sense of self. The belief, called identity view (sakkāya-diṭṭhi), is a matter of opinion and can be given up by understanding an argument. The sense, the conceit “I am” (asmimāna), is something else. In one discourse the monk Khemaka, who is ill, is questioned by his fellows. He says that he does not regard any of the five aggregates as “this I am,” and yet the feeling “I am” has not left him. He compares it to the scent that clings to a cloth after it has been washed clean (Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.89). This is exactly Parfit’s situation: convinced by the arguments, and still unable to feel what he believes.
The path is the answer to that gap. Ethical conduct loosens the habits that keep the sense of self inflamed. Concentration steadies attention enough to watch the aggregates arise and pass. Insight is the repeated, direct observation that each of them is impermanent and ownerless, until the perception is no longer an inference. The tradition says that the belief falls away early and the conceit only at the end. Western philosophy has the argument, and in Parfit it even has the report of what believing it is like. It has nothing corresponding to the method.
Words that work, and words that mislead 有用的說法，與誤導的說法
Three habits of English cause most of the misunderstanding. The first is the phrase “no self,” which listeners hear as “you do not exist.” “Not-self” is closer to the Pāli and to the method: of each thing that you take to be you, see that it is not. The second is the word “soul.” Many in a Western audience will assume that what is being denied is the Christian soul, and will take the teaching as an attack on religion. It helps to say that the target is any fixed owner or controller of experience, religious or secular. The third is the fear of nihilism. It should be said early and plainly that the person who makes promises, feels pain, and deserves kindness is not being denied.
英文的三個習慣，造成了大部分的誤解。第一個是 no self 這個說法，聽的人會聽成「你不存在」。not-self 比較貼近巴利原文，也貼近方法：對每一樣你當成「你」的東西，看出它不是。第二個是 soul 這個字。西方聽眾裡有許多人會以為，被否定的是基督教的靈魂，於是把這個教導當成對宗教的攻擊。講明「被瞄準的是任何固定的、擁有或支配經驗的東西，不論宗教的或世俗的」，會有幫助。第三個是對虛無主義的恐懼。應該及早而明白地說：那個許下承諾、感受痛苦、值得被善待的人，並沒有被否定。
Sentences you can use 可以直接用的句子
The Buddha did not say that you do not exist. He said that nothing you can point to is a fixed, lasting owner of your experience.
佛陀沒有說你不存在。他說的是：你指得出來的任何東西，都不是你的經驗的一個固定而持久的擁有者。
Think of a river. It is real and it has a name, and there is no water in it that stays.
想想一條河。它是真實的，它有名字，而河裡沒有一滴水是留著不動的。
David Hume looked inside for a self and found only thoughts and feelings passing by. The Buddha found the same, and then asked what follows if we stop treating them as “mine.”
This is something to observe more than something to believe. Watch a feeling arise and fade, and ask who owns it.
這比較是要去觀察的事，而不是要去相信的事。看著一個感受生起又消退，然後問：是誰擁有它？
The teaching is aimed at suffering. Most of our distress comes from defending a self that turns out, on inspection, to be a process.
這個教導瞄準的是苦。我們大部分的苦惱，來自捍衛一個「自我」；而仔細一看，那原來是一個過程。
Giving up the idea of a fixed self does not make you care less. People who see it clearly tend to care more, because the wall between “me” and “you” has become thinner.
