PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

Eckel: Defining a Usable Past 73What is the source of these paradoxes, and how can they be resolved,if they can be resolved at all? In my discussion of the Primal Vow, Imentioned the Buddhist paradox of identity. This is a paradox that anystudents of Buddhism confront when they begin to ask questions abouttraditional Buddhist views of reality. If everything changes and there is nopermanent self, who is it who acts? If there is no self, who remembersyesterday’s events or the events of a previous life? And if there is no self,who practices the path and hopes some day to achieve nirvana? The sameproblems apply to the concept of the Buddha, but with even greater force,since a buddha is a being who has perfectly realized and perfectly embodiedthe awareness of no-self. If buddhahood is defined as the awareness ofno-self or (in Mahåyåna terms) emptiness, how can a buddha choose oneaction over another? If everything is empty, how can the practices that leadfrom a bodhisattva to a buddha make any sense? There are many ways tounderstand the idea of no-self, of course, but the problems remain remarkablyconstant in different schools of Buddhist thought. Buddhists want tobe free from attributing any permanent identity to things, yet they alsowant to count on a predictable sequence of events, along with the possibilitythat whatever they do today will bear some fruit tomorrow, no matterhow much they may have changed.Karl Potter gave a useful, if rather abstract, explanation of this dilemmawhen he said that every Indian philosophical school has to avoid twoproblems: fatalism and skepticism. 54 Fatalism means that things willalways be the way they are and nothing can be done to change them.Skepticism means that, while things may change, there is nothing I can doto change them or benefit from the change. You might say that a fatalistthinks that the chain of causation is too tight and everything is predetermined.A skeptic thinks the chain is too loose and actions have no predictableeffect. To avoid these two problems, an Indian philosopher has toshow how things can be free to change but also how the change can besufficiently predictable that a person can do something today and hope toget some result from it tomorrow. In other words, there has to be anelement of freedom in a system and also an element of predictability. Ifeither freedom or predictability is missing, it is impossible to makechoices that have any meaning, from buying the morning newspaper toseeking nirvana.Given this set of choices, the classical Buddhist tradition opted decisivelyfor freedom. Buddhist thinkers said that reality ultimately involvedno self. By no self they meant not only that there was no continuous realityfrom one moment to the next, but, in the more radical interpretation of theMahåyåna, no reality even in the individual moments themselves. Heraclitusmay have said that you cannot step into the same river twice, but thephilosophers of the Mahåyåna took the point a step further and said thatyou cannot step into the same river once. This choice, of course, left the