The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
20 July 2024
Q: Could you please give a summary of the meaning of anattā?
Than Ajahn: Anattā is a word opposite of atta. Atta means self. Anattā is no self. Anattā means something natural like the wind, the rain. There is no self pushing the wind, controlling the wind or telling the wind when to blow or when not to blow. This is what it means by anattā – no one behind the activity except the condition that keep it rises. It’s scientific, that’s what it means.
Like the rain. We get rain from the evaporation of water. There is evaporation because of the heat. So there are conditions that are pushing one condition to cause another thing to happen but there’s nobody behind these activities.
So is the body. There is no ‘you’ or ‘me’ pushing this body. We can’t push this body.
The body has its own course. Once it takes conception, it will grow and then it will take birth, it will come out of the womb and it will continue to grow by adding the four elements into the body. So it keeps growing and one day, it gets to the maximum growth and starts to deteriorate. It starts to countdown because the four elements that were combined lose the strength that bind them together and this causes the four elements start to separate gradually, and eventually the body ceases to exist because the four elements separated. So this is a natural phenomenon, there is no somebody pushing it or telling it what to be or what not to be.
This is what is meant by anattā – no self, no body pushing, controlling, or telling it what to be.
We might think that we can control the body, yes, to a certain extent, we can tell it when to eat or when not to eat, when to walk, when not to walk. But those who tell the body what to eat is not a self either, they are just thoughts. According to Buddhism, there are thinking but there are no thinkers.
So everything is natural conditions, natural phenomena or natural processes that interact with one another and causing one to appear and the other to disappear.
Everything is the interaction of conditions, usually, the interaction between the four elements (the earth, wind, water and fire element). In science we have four qualities of matter: solid, liquid, temperature [plasma/superheated matter], and gas. They interact with each other, that's what they are.
Our body is like that too. Everything is like that like your house, your car. Everything is the interaction of four elements forming and then dissolving. You build something and one day, it falls apart, right? That’s the law of nature in this physical world we live in.
In Pāli, anattā usually translated into English as no self.
Everything is like the weather.
Sometimes we control some of them, sometimes we can’t. Like flooding, we can make dam to prevent flooding but eventually the dam will break down and the flooding starts again. And the one who thinks that it is managing everything is not a self either. It’s just the working of the perception, memory and thinking that create new ideas, new desire and cravings.
So no self. Everything is just the natural phenomena: mental phenomena and physical phenomena.
Sometimes the mental phenomena interact with physical phenomena like body.
Sometimes the body is intervened by the mental phenomena like by our thoughts and our perception.
The term self is a concept created by the delusion of the mind. There's no self. The delusion creates the concept of a self. You’ll find that the self disappears when you stop your thoughts.
When you meditate and get into jhāna, your perception and your thinking stop and all that is left with is just knowing. But when you come out of meditation, your perception and your thoughts start to work again and then you start to think in terms of self and no self again, think about you, me and other people and so forth. It's just thinking. It’s a concept.
Like in ancient time, there’s this concept that The World is Flat and everybody believes that the World is Flat.
That's just a concept. It’s just a delusion, it’s not the truth.
The same way with the self. This is a delusional concept. But we were born with it, we have been stuck with it for a long time and it becomes second nature to us.
Meditate and get into jhāna, then you can find the disappearance of the self temporarily.
There is a knowing but no knower. Just knowing.
“Dhamma in English, Dec 26, 2023.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
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