EXISTENTIAL CRISIS: A PERSPECTIVE ON ANATTA

Once upon a time, there was a normal 9 th grader. Sitting amidst a noisy classroom, he was
quietly minding his own business and doing his assignment. After a while, the teacher stood
up and told the class, “Don’t be noisy please, kids! Do your assignment quickly so you can
finish it quickly.” It was the last session before school was over, and being a snotty little brat,
the boy smirked and whispered to himself, “Heh, we might finish quickly but we still can’t go
home any sooner. No point in doing that.” But then there came a sudden realization triggered
by the teacher’s words. “What if I do the assignments quickly, finish quickly, take the exam
quickly, graduate school quickly, go to college quickly, work quickly, marry quickly, have
kids quickly, retire quickly, what then? Die quickly? What for?” It was at that moment that
the boy realizes he didn’t have any purpose in life, for he never gave a thought about it. Thus,
the spiritual journey of finding the true purpose of life began. That little boy was me.

As I grew older, I grew interest in philosophy, particularly from the ancient Chinese. After
being admitted to college, I began a more serious approach in learning Buddhism. There’s a
concept about Tilakkhana, a.k.a. the Three Characteristics, which everything abides. Those
are dukkha or suffering, anicca or impermanence, and anatta or without self. Everybody
aspiring to achieve one of the four stages of enlightenment in Buddhism (sotapanna,
sakadagami, anagami, and arahat) must be able to fully grasp the concept of Tilakkhana as
one of the prerequisites. Such is the importance of Tilakkhana, and I feel particularly
interested in sharing a piece of my mind regarding anatta. Subjectively, dukkha and anicca
are easier to comprehend, whereas anatta continues to baffle me as if to say “Come and catch
me! You can’t, can ya?”

Imagine this: If you cut your pinky finger, which one is you? Is the pinky finger you or is the
rest of your body you? Next, what if we scale it up and you cut your hand, arm, leg, body,
and head? Which part of your ‘mutilated’ body can be referred as you? According to the Ship
of Theseus paradox, every part of your ‘mutilated’ body is you. On the contrary, according to
me (pertaining to anatta), NONE of your body parts can be called you. I’ll tell you why later.

Next, sit or stand still for a while. Look all around you. Question yourself, is everything
around you real? What if you close your eyes, does everything around you disappear or do
YOU disappear? What if I rob you of your vision, hearing, sense of smell, touch, and taste
(your five senses), can you still firmly state that you exist? What if all the things around you
exist NOT because they do, but solely because YOU can perceive them? If you can’t perceive
something and you don’t have any memory about something, does it still exist? Consider this
possibility: everything might just be an illusion you made up in your mind. Without the mind
to perceive, there is nothing left, literally. Because you won’t be able to grasp anything.
Heck, if the whole world might just be an illusion your mind made up, how can you be so
sure that YOU yourself might not be just another illusion your mind made up too?

I have never experienced being hypnotized before, but judging from others’ experiences, I
can conclude something. If your mind is being manipulated to believe something to be real,
even when it is not, it WILL become real to you. The same goes to the effect of using drugs,
where not only imagination which can be distorted, but also the reality (at least for the ones
whose mind were being manipulated). My point is, it’s very easy to fabricate reality. As easy
as manipulating the mind. Up to this point, if I succeed in convincing you, you must have
doubted what you used to believe to be the reality.

Quoting from Lamrim Outlines compiled by Karin Valham, it goes: “How does the ‘I’ exist?
By being merely labeled or imputed by the mind on the base, the five aggregates. That’s all!”
‘I’ here refers to self. Five aggregates are the basic building blocks of human from Buddhist
perspective (form, feeling, recognition, compositional factors, and consciousness – also
known as Panca Kandha/ Panca Skandha). Paraphrasing the statement above, it goes “I exist
because my mind labels the five aggregates as me.” In other words, I exist merely because I
THINK I exist. Similar to this statement is the statement from a famous 16 th century French
philosopher, Rene Descartes, who said the phrase “Cogito Ergo Sum”, which means “I think;
therefore I exist.” The core concept might not be identical (Descartes was not a Buddhist),
but at least the idea was not too far-fetched (which shows Buddhism is not totally unrelated to
a more modern philosophy).

In the end, I shall raise this question, “Are you still 100% sure that you really exist?” Not so
sure anymore, aren’t you?