Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

48
'anatman might be expressed in the form, "The true Self is non-Self," since any
attempt to conceive the Self, believe in the Self, or seek for the Self immediately
thrusts it away' (WZ 47)
Two mutually inconsistent ideas need separating here. One is: there is no self, the
other is: there is a self but it is systematically elusive. The claim that 'the true Self is
non-Self' is the thesis that there is no psychic subject of one's own experiences, no
inner source of one's own thoughts and experiences. If we can still properly talk of a
true self, it is those experiences, or perhaps the series of psycho-physical events that
constitutes a life. This is an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about what does or does
not exist. It is not compatible with the view that there is an inner psychological self
which cannot itself be the object of thought and experience. On this view, the self is
that which thinks and so cannot be thought. It is that which experiences, and so
cannot be experienced. It is that which believes, so cannot be believed in. It is itself
the seeker and so cannot be found. The subjective self is, so to speak, so subjective
that it cannot ever be properly construed as objective.
It might be thought that this doctrine of the elusive nature of the self embodies
a logical fallacy. From the fact that the self is that which thinks and experiences it
would seem not to follow as a matter of logic that it cannot itself be thought or
experienced. In a way that is right. The inference is invalid. However, the point is
that as object of thought the self is not the subject of thought and as object of
experience the self is not subject of experience. Thinking of something is necessarily
thinking of it as an object of thought. Experiencing something is necessarily
experiencing it as an object of experience. This does not preclude also thinking of it,
or experiencing it as a subject, but it does at least present a psychological obstacle to
doing that. To draw an analogy, in seeing something, the eye that sees does not see
the eye that sees. This is not due only to contingent anatomical facts about the
location of the eyeball in the human body. It is also due to the fact that eyeballs are
subjective, they are part of the subjective standpoint of the seer. This whole doctrine
is not only ontological it is also epistemological. It is not only about what does or
does not exist, it is also about what we can or cannot know. It implies we cannot
know what we are, or, at least, we cannot know through ordinary methods of
thinking or experiencing what we are.
It is the first of the two doctrines about the self that Watts needs. It is not part of
Buddhism that there exists an inner, systematically elusive self. It is the Buddhist
doctrine that there is no self. As Suzuki puts it:
'Muga, wu-wo, anutman, 'non-ego', selflessness' [...] is the central concept of
Buddhism, both Hinayana and Mahayana' (ZNM 120)
Watts himself says