Unit 15 · Interpreters Across the Centuries

Pali tradition places the Anattalakkhana Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 22.59, just after the first sermon, spoken to the same five monks. It takes the five aggregates one by one: form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Each, the sutta says, is not self. Its argument has two steps.

First, if form were self, it would not lead to affliction, and one could say, let my form be thus. But one cannot command it. The same holds for the other four. Second, the Buddha, as the sutta presents him, asks whether each aggregate is permanent or impermanent. Impermanent, the monks answer. Is what is impermanent suffering or ease? Suffering. Is it fit to regard what is impermanent and suffering as ’this is mine, this I am, this is my self’? No.

The sutta ends with the five monks reaching awakening. Scholars note what it does and does not claim. It denies that any aggregate is a self. It does not, in so many words, state that there is no self anywhere. That gap is where later readers split. The key term is anatta, not-self, which the sutta joins with impermanence and suffering as three marks of existence.

The Milindapanha, or Questions of King Milinda, is a Pali dialogue probably compiled over several centuries around the turn of the common era. Theravada tradition treats it with great respect, and in Myanmar it is included in the Khuddaka Nikaya. Rhys Davids translated it in 1890 and 1894. Its most famous passage is the chariot simile.

The argument works by analysis. Take a chariot apart and no single part is the chariot. Nor is the chariot something extra beyond the parts. Yet the word chariot is useful and correct in daily speech. Nagasena draws the parallel: a person is a convention, a name for aggregates put together, while no self is found among or beyond them.

The simile has an earlier source. In Samyutta Nikaya 5.10, the nun Vajira uses the chariot image to answer Mara, the tempter. Just as the word chariot is used when parts are assembled, she says, so being is used when the aggregates are present. So the Milindapanha builds on a line credited to a woman teacher in the canon. Scholars see it as a clear early statement of conventional designation.

If there is no lasting self, readers have long asked, who is reborn and who receives the results of karma? King Milinda presses this. Nagasena answers that the one reborn is neither the same person nor a different one. He gives an image: a lamp lit from another lamp. Is the flame the same? Not exactly. Is it unrelated? No. It depends on the first.

The same holds, Nagasena says, for a child and the old man it becomes, or milk that turns to curd and then to butter. There is continuity by causes, not identity of a substance. Theravada teachers use this reasoning to hold both karma and not-self: actions shape later states, but no unchanging owner carries them.

Not all early Buddhists accepted this answer. A group called the Pudgalavadins, or Personalists, held that a person (pudgala) is real, neither the same as nor different from the aggregates. Other schools, including the Theravada in the Kathavatthu, argued against them. The debate shows that not-self was contested from within Buddhism, not only from outside it.

Buddhaghosa came to Sri Lanka from India in the fifth century CE, tradition says, and worked at the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura. He wrote or edited many Pali commentaries and one great summary, the Visuddhimagga, the Path of Purification. It organizes the path into virtue, concentration and wisdom, following a verse in the Samyutta Nikaya.

On not-self, Buddhaghosa is systematic. A person is analyzed into mind and matter, nama-rupa, and further into momentary states that arise and cease in dependence on conditions. He quotes a line many teachers repeat: there is suffering, but no sufferer; there is doing, but no doer; there is a path, but no one who travels it. This is not-self stated as a method of seeing.

For most of Theravada history, Buddhaghosa’s reading has been the standard one. Monks in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand learn the texts through his commentaries. Some modern teachers, especially in Thai forest traditions, have questioned parts of his system and returned to the suttas directly. The Visuddhimagga remains a central commentarial voice.

The Abhidhamma, the third basket of the Pali Canon, restates the teaching as analysis. It lists the basic events, called dhammas, that make up experience: kinds of consciousness, mental factors, material qualities and nibbana. Theravada lists 89 or 121 types of consciousness and 52 mental factors.

In this picture, a person is a rapid stream of dhammas, each lasting a moment. Not-self follows: examine the stream and find only events, no owner. Other early schools built their own Abhidharma systems. The Sarvastivada school, strong in northwest India, held that dhammas exist in past, present and future, which is what its name means.

The method was powerful, but it raised a question. If the self is empty because it breaks down into dhammas, are the dhammas themselves real? The Abhidhamma schools said each dhamma has its own nature, svabhava in Sanskrit. The Mahayana philosopher Nagarjuna would argue that even dhammas lack such a nature. That argument is the subject of the next section.

Nagarjuna lived in South India, probably in the second century CE, though his dates are uncertain. Mahayana Buddhists in Tibet and East Asia honor him as a second Buddha. His main work is the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the Root Verses on the Middle Way, in 27 chapters. The school built on it is called Madhyamaka, the Middle.

His central claim is that all things are empty, shunya, of svabhava. A thing that had its own-nature would not depend on anything and would not change. But everything arises in dependence on causes and parts. So nothing has own-nature. In the famous verse 24.18, as usually read, he says that dependent arising is what he calls emptiness, and that this is itself the middle way.

Nagarjuna thus pushed not-self further. The Abhidhamma had said the person is empty because it is made of dhammas. Nagarjuna said the dhammas are empty too. Madhyamaka thinkers stress that emptiness is not nothingness. It is the absence of independent essence. Critics in other schools, Buddhist and Hindu, argued that the view slid toward nihilism, a charge Madhyamaka writers answered at length.

In the Root Verses 24.8 to 24.10, Nagarjuna says the Buddhas teach by means of two truths: a conventional truth and an ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the difference, he says, do not understand the deep point of the teaching. And without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be taught.

Conventional truth is how things appear and are named in ordinary life: chariots, persons, cause and effect. Ultimate truth, for Madhyamaka, is their emptiness. The two are not two worlds. They are two ways of seeing the same things. This lets Madhyamaka affirm ethics, karma and practice at the conventional level while denying own-nature at the ultimate.

Readers connect the two truths to the chariot simile and to verse 160 of the Dhammapada. Many later schools adopted the distinction but drew its line in different places. Some Tibetan schools debated whether the ultimate can be stated in words at all. The concept became one of the most widely used tools in Buddhist hermeneutics, the art of interpreting texts.

Yogacara, the practice-of-yoga school, arose in India around the fourth century CE. Tradition names two brothers, Asanga and Vasubandhu, as its founders. It is also called Vijnanavada, the way of consciousness, or cittamatra, mind only. Its texts include the Samdhinirmocana Sutra and Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses and Thirty Verses.

Yogacara analyzes experience as the work of consciousness. It describes eight kinds, including a storehouse consciousness, alaya-vijnana, where the seeds of past actions are kept until they ripen. This offered an account of karma and continuity without a self: a stream of seeds, not an owner.

Scholars debate what mind only means. Some read Yogacara as idealism: only mind exists. Others read it as a method of practice: attend to how experience is constructed, and set aside questions about what lies beyond it. Tibetan scholars, East Asian schools such as Faxiang, and modern Western philosophers have all argued over the reading. Madhyamaka critics said Yogacara made consciousness too real.

Buddhism in Tibet drew heavily on the Indian monastic universities, such as Nalanda. Tibetan scholars translated Indian texts into Tibetan and organized study around them. Madhyamaka came to be regarded by most Tibetan schools as the highest philosophical view. Monks still learn it through formal debate, with clapping and questions in the monastery courtyard.

Tsongkhapa (1357 to 1419), founder of the Gelug school to which the Dalai Lamas belong, argued that emptiness must be understood precisely. What is negated is inherent existence, he said, not conventional existence. Other Tibetan thinkers read emptiness differently. Some in the Jonang school held an ’other-emptiness’ view: the ultimate is empty of what is other than it, but not empty of itself.

These debates were serious and sometimes sharp. Tibetan traditions also held that intellectual understanding must be joined to practice. A careful student notes that Tibetan readers share the texts and many terms but drew different conclusions, and each school claims fidelity to Nagarjuna.

When Indian texts reached China, readers interpreted them through new questions and a new language. Zhiyi (538 to 597), founder of the Tiantai school, taught three truths: emptiness, conventional existence, and the middle that holds both. He organized the sutras into a sequence, with the Lotus Sutra at the summit.

The Huayan school, systematized by Fazang (643 to 712), drew on the Avatamsaka Sutra. It taught the interpenetration of all things: each phenomenon contains and reflects every other. Fazang is said to have explained this to Empress Wu with a golden lion statue, and later writers used the image of Indra’s net, in which each jewel reflects all the others.

These readings keep emptiness and dependent arising but give them a warmer, more cosmic tone. Scholars note that Chinese ideas about harmony may have shaped them. Chan, later Zen, drew on these schools while stressing direct experience over doctrine. The same Indian terms, read in China, opened new interpretations without leaving the tradition.

From the late 1800s, Asian and Western Buddhists began presenting their tradition in new ways. Colonial rule, Christian missions, printing and science all put pressure on older forms. Reformers answered by stressing meditation, ethics and reason, and by downplaying ritual, gods and miracles. Scholars call this broad pattern Buddhist modernism.

David McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008) traces its sources: European ideas about science and individual experience, Romantic ideas about nature and the self, and Asian reform movements. In Sri Lanka, Anagarika Dharmapala (1864 to 1933) led a Buddhist revival. He spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, as did the Japanese Zen teacher Soyen Shaku.

Modernism is not one school. It runs through Theravada, Zen and Tibetan communities alike. Some scholars and traditional Buddhists caution that modernist readings can lose the devotion, ritual and cosmology that many Asian Buddhists hold central. Others see modernism as one more chapter in a long history of adaptation. Most scholars describe it rather than judge it.

In The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), Ambedkar retold the Buddha’s life and teaching. He rejected parts of the tradition that he felt did not fit reason or justice. He questioned the traditional account of the Four Sights. He read suffering as including social suffering from poverty and caste. He stressed that the Buddha, as the texts present him, admitted people of every caste to the sangha.

His twenty-two vows set out a break with Hindu practice and a commitment to equality, reason and the precepts. Many of his followers call their tradition Navayana, the new vehicle, though the name is not used by all. They honor Ambedkar as Babasaheb and gather each year at Nagpur on the anniversary of the conversion.

Other Buddhists have responded in several ways. Some traditional scholars say Ambedkar departed from the texts on karma and rebirth. Many Dalit Buddhists see his work as recovering the texts’ true social core. Scholars such as Christopher Queen treat his movement as a major example of socially engaged Buddhism. In India today, most Buddhists belong to communities shaped by his conversion.

American Buddhism is diverse. Many Buddhists in the United States belong to Asian heritage communities: Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Korean, Sri Lankan, Tibetan and more. The Buddhist Temple of Chicago, founded in 1944 by Rev. Gyomay Kubose, grew from a Japanese American Jodo Shinshu community after World War II.

Other American Buddhists are converts, people who came to Buddhism as adults, often through meditation centers, books or Zen and Tibetan teachers. Convert communities often stress meditation and read texts like the Satipatthana Sutta or the Heart Sutra closely. Heritage temples often center family ritual, festivals, chanting for the dead and language classes for children.

Scholars once described these as two Buddhisms, but many now call that too simple. Heritage communities include meditators; convert communities include ritual; children of immigrants and converts share centers. Some Asian American Buddhists have written about being overlooked when media present Buddhism as a white convert practice. A careful reader treats every community as an equal interpreter of the tradition.

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 to 2022) was a Vietnamese Zen monk. During the Vietnam War he worked for peace, trained young volunteers in relief work, and in 1966 founded the Order of Interbeing. He used the phrase engaged Buddhism for practice that responds to suffering in society, not only within the self. His 1967 book Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire made the case in English.

He read classic texts through this lens. His word interbeing, drawn from Huayan teaching, says that nothing exists by itself; a sheet of paper contains the cloud, the rain and the logger. His Five Mindfulness Trainings restate the five precepts in positive, social terms: protecting life, practicing generosity, responsible sexual conduct, loving speech and mindful consumption.

Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. Exiled from Vietnam for decades, he built Plum Village in France, which drew practitioners from many countries. Some traditional critics said he changed the precepts too freely; his students answer that he kept their spirit. He remains one of the most read modern Buddhist teachers.

On June 11, 1963, the monk Thich Quang Duc sat down at a busy intersection in Saigon and set himself on fire. He was protesting the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, which Buddhists said discriminated against them. Earlier that spring, government forces had fired on Buddhists in Hue during Vesak, killing several people.

A photograph by the journalist Malcolm Browne showed the monk sitting still in the flames. It spread around the world and put great pressure on the Diem government, which fell in a coup that November. Several other monks and nuns later died in the same way. The event is part of the history of engaged Buddhism, though it is not a model the tradition teaches.

Buddhists have responded in different ways. Thich Nhat Hanh, in a 1965 letter to Martin Luther King Jr., described the act as not suicide but an expression of will to be heard. Some Theravada and other teachers point to the precept against taking life and say they cannot approve. Many regard Thich Quang Duc with reverence. A careful student reports these views and the context without urging any view of the act.

Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, was born in 1935 and has lived in exile in India since 1959. Tibetan Buddhists regard him as a manifestation of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Since 1987 he has met scientists in the Mind and Life dialogues on mind, meditation and the brain.

In The Universe in a Single Atom (2005), he wrote that if science proves a Buddhist claim wrong, Buddhists must accept the finding and give up the claim. He applied this to the traditional cosmology of a flat world with a central mountain, Meru, which he said can be set aside. He did not apply it to rebirth or consciousness, which he said science has not disproven.

His approach is a clear case of modernist reading from within a traditional lineage. Some scientists praise the dialogues as open inquiry. Some scholars ask whether meditation research strips practices from their religious setting. Some traditional Tibetan teachers keep the older cosmology in teaching. Each reader weighs text, lineage and evidence differently.

The Vinaya, in the Cullavagga, tells how Mahapajapati Gotami, the Buddha’s aunt and foster mother, asked to be ordained. The Buddha at first refused. Ananda asked whether women could reach awakening. The Buddha, as the text presents him, said yes, and allowed ordination with eight special rules, the garudhammas, that placed nuns under monks in certain ways.

The order of fully ordained Theravada nuns, bhikkhunis, died out in Sri Lanka around the eleventh century. The Vinaya requires both monks and nuns for a nun’s ordination, so many Theravada authorities hold that the lineage cannot be revived. East Asian traditions kept their nuns’ lineage, and in 1996 and 1998 Sri Lankan women were ordained with help from Korean and Taiwanese nuns.

Today the debate continues. Some Theravada monks, such as Ajahn Brahm in Australia in 2009, have supported ordinations and faced sanctions. Some traditional authorities reject them as invalid. Many women practice as ten-precept nuns without full ordination. Tibetan traditions have been discussing full ordination too. Scholars and practitioners read the same Vinaya passages to reach different conclusions.

Beginning in the late 1980s, some Thai monks wrapped trees in orange robes and ordained them, so that cutting them would be seen as harming a monk. Scholars such as Susan Darlington call them ecology monks. They drew on the forest settings of the Buddha’s life, the precept against taking life, and the respect owed to the robe.

Other readers draw on the texts directly. Dhammapada 49 compares the sage to a bee who takes nectar without harming the flower’s color or scent. Thai reformer Sulak Sivaraksa and American writer Joanna Macy read dependent arising as teaching that humans and nature are bound together. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of the earth as a living mother.

Some scholars caution that early texts were not written with modern ecology in mind. The suttas describe forests as places of practice and sometimes of danger, and rules against harming plants belong to monastic discipline. Environmental Buddhists answer that each generation applies the texts to its own suffering. Both points belong in a careful account of eco-Buddhism.

Who counts as a reader of the Buddhist texts? Monks and nuns who chant them daily. Laypeople who hear them at funerals. Reformers like Ambedkar. Teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh. Scientists in dialogue with the Dalai Lama. And academic scholars, many of whom are not Buddhist, who study the texts historically.

Religious studies scholars sometimes speak of insider and outsider readers. An insider reads the text as part of their own practice and community. An outsider reads it from a distance, asking historical or comparative questions. Many people are both: a Buddhist scholar, or a non-Buddhist who has practiced for years. The terms describe stances more than people.

Each stance sees things the other can miss. Insiders know how a text lives: what is chanted, when, and why it moves people. Outsiders may notice change over time and parallels in other traditions. This course takes an outsider’s descriptive stance while treating insider readings as authoritative for their communities. That is not a ranking. It is a method.

This chapter has met many modern readings. Ambedkar read the texts for social equality. Thich Nhat Hanh read them for peace and interbeing. The Dalai Lama read them in dialogue with science. Women seeking ordination read the Vinaya for precedent. Ecology monks read them for the earth. Each is a real interpretation.

One way to compare without ranking uses three questions. What passages does the reader cite? What question from their own time are they answering? Which community do they speak for and to? These questions turn opinions into evidence. They let a student explain why readers differ instead of simply declaring a winner.

Traditional readers raise a fourth question: does the reading stay faithful to the texts and the lineage? Modern readers often answer that faithfulness means applying the Dhamma to present suffering. That debate itself is part of the tradition. A careful student can report it, weigh the evidence each side gives, and still leave the verdict to the communities themselves.