Today I want to discuss non-self. We often say that impermanence and non-self emerged from dependent arising. Strictly speaking, even that is imprecise. The Buddha did not manufacture something that had not existed; he discovered that the world was already this way and expressed the discovery in speech.
The difficulty is that one or two words cannot contain the world’s original appearance. Human beings ordinarily understand through language. We give something a name, define it through that name, and think about the resulting concept. The world itself, however, precedes language. Impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising are not substances that capture it whole but signs pointing toward ways of examining it.
In 1994 I saw myself demanding the opposite of an impermanent world
Near the beginning of 1994, while at university, I underwent my first awakening. Contemplating impermanence, I confronted the questions: if the world is impermanent, why did I demand that it not be so, and why did I demand that my family not be poor? I learned for the first time what it meant to accept reality as it is.
People wish not to lose, yet they lose. They wish not to die, yet they die. They wish not to separate, yet meetings end. Someone one wished never to meet may appear again. Desired things are not obtained, and rain falls even after prayers that it stop. Wanting the opposite of the world’s movement does not alter reality.
In the Buddha’s analogy, throwing a heavy rock into a river and praying cannot make it float. I saw that through my early twenties I had lived as though praying for a rock at the bottom of the sea to rise.
Attachment to a life without poverty or separation created suffering
I wanted friendships to last, but my family was poor and I moved repeatedly with my father. I changed elementary schools several times and changed middle schools as well. I could not retain neighborhood friends, and relationships formed over a few years repeatedly ended. I did not want to leave friends, and I hated my family’s poverty.
I wanted enough money for tuition and spending, a life in which I could buy meals for friends instead of always receiving them. Yet we were poor and I could not do what I wanted. I was demanding that an impermanent world cease to be impermanent.
Because I wanted the opposite of reality’s principle, the wish could not be fulfilled and suffering repeated. Comparing my home with wealthier families enlarged resentment and pain. The cause was my attachment demanding that impermanence not be impermanent.
Seeing this changed my life. I did not yet understand impermanence completely, but the mind brightened enough for the world before and after to appear different. My father noticed that his son had changed. My reading, speech, and conduct were different, and he began occasionally asking me questions.
My father’s question: “Who are you?”
One day he asked, “Who are you?” A son might answer, “I am your son,” or give the name “Yoon Deok-man.” But I knew the question did not ask for my name.
My father had asked because he wanted an answer. A name was not one. If I said, “I am Yoon Deok-man,” he would have broken that superficial response. Was there some other thing that could answer? I searched across my life but could not reply before he died.
My father’s death made the question ring again in my chest
My father died on December 26, 2020, the day after Christmas. He had asked that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered through mountains and nature. We quietly scattered them into a river.
That night I woke and observed my breathing. I had practiced with breath long before, though I had largely stopped. While watching it by chance, the image of my father’s bones spreading over the river and sinking returned powerfully to my chest.
At that moment the question I had heard throughout life sounded again: “Who are you?” I cried intensely. He had asked several times, and I had never answered. Now the person who asked was gone.
The full understanding that I too would die dissolved the doubt
After my first awakening in 1994, I had lived through many small insights, periods of brightness, and renewed darkness. Before my father’s death, another great awakening occurred.
Everyone knows verbally that all people die. We say that people, houses, and trees disappear. That night, however, the fact entered my whole body: just as my father’s bones had scattered, I too would die. In that moment the doubt contained in “Who are you? Who am I?” vanished.
When the lifelong question was resolved, I felt that I could finally answer my father. But he was already gone and could no longer hear. The memory therefore holds deep grief together with awakening.
Non-self, impermanence, and dependent arising point to one body
The question “Who am I?” begins with non-self. Non-self means there is no fixed, unchanging, independently existing me. A self unrelated to anything else and immune to influence could remain forever unchanged. No such self exists.
As impermanence already teaches, everything is connected through dependent arising. Nothing exists alone; because things affect one another, they continually change. I too am connected, change, and eventually die. Impermanence is already present within non-self, and non-self within impermanence. They indicate different parts of the one body of a world constituted through dependent arising.
No single word can seize that original appearance. Buddhism therefore often avoids inventing a new substance and instead negates something already assumed. It places “non” before “self.” Through negation, it asks us to reexamine the self taken for granted and look toward the absence of a fixed one.
All the data about me are not myself
I can list countless facts: I am a student, a man, Yoon Deok-man, a first awakened person; I have a certain height and character. In modern terms, every fact about me could be converted into data and transmitted. Adding cell counts and genetic information would create an immense dataset.
Would all that information fully explain me? Even as the explanation is spoken, I change because I am impermanent. Mind and body continue moving. The instant a dataset is completed, it has already become a record different from the present person.
Nor can I be explained after separating air and food. Without air I die; without food I die. When breathing in, where does air end and I begin? When oxygen binds to hemoglobin and circulates in blood, is it me or not? When food becomes body and later waste, where is the boundary? What can be removed to leave a pure self alone?
The question itself is the teaching, not a sentence offered as an answer
Even if I had answered my father, I could have offered only a figurative or clever line such as, “Now I know who I am.” The actual answer cannot be exchanged through words. “I am so-and-so” is not an answer to “Who are you?”
The question itself teaches by turning me back toward what I believe myself to be. Whenever it is heard, it makes one ask: what am I, who am I? With my father’s death, I fully accepted that I too would die. Attachment to myself loosened, and the earlier understanding of impermanence became complete.
Buddhism is a religion of questions
As reason and awareness develop, people assign meaning to their existence. They ask what they are, how and why they were born, and how they should live. Some ask a god for the meaning of existence. Questions of life and death stand at the beginning of religion.
Other religions offer their answers, and Buddhism offers its own. But Buddhism does not end by telling us to believe the impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising awakened to by Gautama Siddhartha. It demands that we awaken to them again ourselves. It asks each person to inquire into what one is and how one should live.
Why do I suffer? How should I live? What am I, and what happens in death? Buddhism begins in these doubts. Impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising are not three isolated terms to memorize but one living process.
Buddhism is a religion of questions. When one pursues their answer to the end, the questions eventually disappear, and nothing remains to ask, learn, or seek. Such a person is an arhat and a Buddha. Deeply understanding non-self is central to that path.
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