Originally posted by Cenarious:
yeah, but you already exist, so buddhism helps you realise that you
dont really exist in the first place.[/b]
it's best to have a good understanding of No-self or
Not-self?
by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/notself2.html
One of the first stumbling blocks
that Westerners often encounter when they learn about Buddhism is
the teaching on anatta, often translated as no-self. This teaching
is a stumbling block for two reasons. First, the idea of there
being no self doesn't fit well with other Buddhist teachings, such
as the doctrine of kamma and rebirth: If there's no self, what
experiences the results of kamma and takes rebirth? Second, it
doesn't fit well with our own Judeo-Christian background, which
assumes the existence of an eternal soul or self as a basic
presupposition: If there's no self, what's the purpose of a
spiritual life? Many books try to answer these questions,
but if you look at the Pali canon the earliest extant record of
the Buddha's teachings you won't find them addressed at all. In
fact, the one place where the Buddha was asked point-blank whether
or not there was a self, he refused to answer. When later asked
why, he said that to hold either that there is a self or that there
is no self is to fall into extreme forms of wrong view that make
the path of Buddhist practice impossible. Thus the question should
be put aside. To understand what his silence on this question says
about the meaning of anatta, we first have to look at his teachings
on how questions should be asked and answered, and how to interpret
his answers.
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