Early Theravada Buddhism

The claim

Three marks: everything conditioned is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self. What we call a person is five aggregates functioning together, and no sixth thing owns them.

What it held

The not-self doctrine is often stated as a denial that there is anything at all, and that is not it. The claim is that when you look for a self among the constituents of experience — body, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness — you find only the constituents. There is no additional owner.

The chariot analogy makes the shape of the argument clear. Take a chariot apart and you have axle, wheels, frame, pole. None is the chariot; the collection is not the chariot in the sense of a further thing; and yet chariot is not a meaningless word. A person is like that.

The Abhidhamma takes this to its conclusion, producing an exhaustive analysis of experience into dhammas — momentary events with defined characteristics — and mapping every combination in which they arise. It is one of the most systematic phenomenologies anyone has attempted, and it was assembled without the vocabulary of a philosophy of mind.

Dependent origination supplies the causal frame: everything arises in dependence on conditions, so nothing needs a substance to hold it in place, and the chain can be interrupted.

How it argued

Analysis into constituents, verified by introspective observation, and cast as lists — the tradition's characteristic form, designed for oral transmission and unusually resistant to drift.

What it was arguing against

The Upanishadic self, the Ajivika denial of effective action, and Carvaka materialism, all of which the early discourses name and answer.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether dhammas have their own nature, which later schools debated fiercely. Whether the person is merely a convenient designation or has some further status — the Puggalavadins said the latter and were rejected.

Common misconceptions

That not-self means nothing exists or that nobody is responsible for anything. The tradition insists on moral causation throughout, and the discourses treat the question of whether the self exists or not as badly framed rather than as having an answer.

How it began

The earliest recoverable strata of the Buddhist discourses, systematised at the councils and preserved in Pali in Sri Lanka.

What became of it

Living, with a continuous textual and monastic tradition across Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia.

Lasting influence

Every later Buddhist school works from these categories, including those that reject the Abhidhamma. The modern mindfulness literature draws on its analysis of attention, usually without the metaphysics.

Why it still matters

The bundle theory of the self is a standing position in philosophy of mind, and this is its earliest and most detailed statement.

Put another way

A chariot, which is nothing but its parts and is still what you arrive in.

Where to start

The Milindapanha. It is a conversation, it is funny in places, and the chariot passage is the whole argument.

The surprising bit

The Abhidhamma catalogues 121 types of consciousness and 52 mental factors, specifying which can co-occur. It is a combinatorial psychology compiled two thousand years before anyone had a word for one.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Ajīvika school, Carvaka (Lokayata), Purva Mimamsa

Influenced

Madhyamaka Buddhism, Yogacara Buddhism

The verdict

The most detailed analysis of experience produced in the ancient world, and it was undertaken for therapeutic reasons.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy