Even if we forget it when we are immersed in a moment of pleasure, each one of us is aware that existence is filled with sufferings, hassles, dissatisfactions of all kinds and that it never stops. This characteristic ( dukkha ) which is obvious, is described in all schools of thought, in all religious systems.
The concept of impermanence ( anicca ) is less clear. It is nevertheless often described in religious and philosophical systems.
As for the characteristic of absence of in-itself ( anatta ), it is a totally new notion of which only Buddha speaks. This is by far the most subtle and essential point of all knowledge. It is the basis of any understanding of dhamma .
1. Anicca - The Aspect of Non-Permanence
Everything is limited to a certain duration and, consequently, to disappear.
Anicca is a pali word consisting of two words: " nicca " and the private particle " a ". " Nicca " is the idea of permanence, continuity. Anicca means the absence of continuity, the absence of permanence. Anicca is a universal law that applies to all the phenomena of the universe, to all our sensitive experiences.
Everything that happens in the world, in our perceptions, is subject to disappear, as soon as it appears. What marks the aspect of non-permanence, the aspect of change, is precisely that the phenomena appear. It is at the moment when a phenomenon occurs that one is particularly informed of its aspect of non-permanence because before it appears it was not there, and then it is there, it has just appeared. So there has been a change, especially when a phenomenon appears. Then, this phenomenon will last for some time, and it will disappear ineluctably. If it has appeared, it is obligatory that it eventually disappear. This is valid for everything, there is no exception.
Anicca is a characteristic common to all phenomena, all the realities that are within our sensory experiences, conscious.
Thus, our consciousness is in perpetual mutation and all our experiences, even if we are dealing with experiences of meditation, experiences of transcendence or mystical experiences, are experiments in mutation. If we were able to reach through transcendental states of unification, such as we are described in spiritual literature, we could imagine having touched an eternal substance. An immutable substance that is not subject to this law of non-permanence. It is precisely because one has attained this experience that the fact of having attained it clearly shows that it is subject to change. Why ? Because before, this experiment was not reached. So there is something that has just begun, which is a fusional state of consciousness, Resulting from training in various spiritual exercises or meditations. So it is not yet the refuge we seek, stability, eternity. In fact, this refuge does not exist.
There are essentially two categories of training that we can follow. There are exercises that fall under the category of what we call samatha and practices that fall under the category of what we call vipassanā .
Vipassanā is a pali term that means direct vision, superior vision. Superior vision in the sense that it is superior to others, because it is direct, it is a direct view of reality.
What is reality? Reality is a fact that is inescapable, universally verified and applies to all phenomena. This fact is triple:
All the phenomena that have appeared will disappear.
All phenomena are taxable and subject to the law of impermanence and change, anicca .
All the phenomena that have appeared last a certain time. They last a while, but they do not last long. They always last too long when they are unsatisfactory and never long enough when they are pleasant.
They thus convey a property of dissatisfaction. Their presence is already source of dissatisfaction, it is called dukkha . Then, these phenomena cease, disappear independently of our will, our control. They disappear when it is necessary that they disappear. When the causes end up being absent, the phenomena disappear. This uncontrollable character of phenomena, it is called anatta . It is the absence of characteristics in itself, the absence of control, the absence of directive.
2. Dukkha - Suffering
Everything is unsatisfactory. There is nothing to be trusted, there is nothing that can bring happiness.
In one way or another, whether we like it or not, many of the situations we find ourselves in are painful. The teaching of Buddha has sometimes been accused of being pessimistic because of this assertion and it is sometimes said that the world is not that painful because there is hope. There is the hope of a better world, the hope of winning a paradise, of creating a happier world, of building a more human, more balanced environment. When people say that the world is not so unhappy because there is hope, Buddha in his teaching tends to tell us that it is precisely because there is hope that This shows that the world is much more unhappy than we think.
Hope for a Better Future
Thus, many humans live in the hope of a better future; Which is already a way of recognizing that the present is not that pleasant. Unfortunately, we can see that the world is full of difficulties. For some humans, it is even unbearable suffering, some must undergo very serious, very painful illnesses. Some humans have to suffer the oppression of crazy governments, some have to suffer accidents, disasters, and others, who do not face such raw suffering but have experienced in their lives all sorts of daily sorrows, Such as the difficulty of losing a loved one, the difficulty of having been sick, or, in other words.This is why many humans - almost all of them - have, over the centuries, imagined an eternal, wonderful paradise where all beings live a perfect happiness. For some, this paradise is democracy; When one lives in a country oppressed by a totalitarian regime. For others it is wealth and prosperity; When one lives in a very poor country, where one has to work a lot to earn little. For some, it is the artificial paradise of drugs; When one lives in personal discomforts or in existential problems. For some, it is an idyllic paradise that is presented to the people whose work is exploited; When one makes oneself part of a religious clergy. Moreover, no religion - including Buddhism - seems to have escaped this rule.
Thus, we tend to imagine, to project in the future, in space too, a better world. What is good about this scheme is that it starts from the fact that the world we live in today is painful - it is already a good thing. The disadvantage of this approach is that it often makes humans unable to build a decent life for the present. Also, humans tend to turn away from a daily reality - which they must assume - to the benefit of an imaginary future they manufacture.
The Cessation of Suffering
Discontinuation rather than acquisition
According to him, the most important point is not the acquisition of happiness. The most important point is to arrive at the end, the cessation, the extinction, the disappearance of the punishment. Besides, when he tells us what the world is made of according to him, he says that it is made of dukkha , which is sorrow, pain. He tells us that there is of course a cause for this trouble, and that because there is pain and sorrow in the world, there must be the possibility of the end of the punishment. In the same way that it is because there exists the disease that there is healing. For if there were no disease there would of course be no cure.
He therefore does not present us with happiness, eternal life, the fact of living to live in divine worlds as the alternative, the solution, the answer to the question of suffering. He tells us that it is the end of suffering that is the alternative. In the same way that the alternative to light is obscurity; It is nothing else. For Buddha, the alternative to suffering is the cessation of suffering, and not anything else.
For example, we know that the opposite of hot is not cold. What we call "cold" is actually "less hot". It is a way of speaking, a convention, when one opposes the "cold" to the "hot". It is like "big" and "small". In fact, "small" is not the opposite of "big", it is simply "less great", it is also a way of speaking. When one says of a building: "This building is big", what is the opposite of a tall building? Is it a small building? Of course not because a "small" building simply means a "lesser" building. A building that we will believe small will remain great for an insect.
The opposite, the presence of a building, whether big or small, is the absence of building. The alternative to heat is lack of heat, lack of temperature (this is something humans never experience, because on earth, the coldest things still have a temperature).
The Solution
The alternative, the solution, to the question of punishment is its absence. It's that simple ! This is why in the teaching of Buddha the original teaching, as it can be found in the writings of the Theravada , does not speak to us so much of happiness, but speaks much more to us about the cessation of pain - nirodha . To achieve the cessation of suffering, according to him, there is not much we can do. Because we can not take away the suffering. Suffering is not something you can catch, isolate, separate and remove. It's not like dirt in the laundry. When you take linen that is dirty, it is washed, the dirt is removed, and you have clean linen. With suffering, it does not work quite as well.
According to Buddha, to get to the end of suffering, it is enough simply to stop creating it, to stop producing it. Since it can not be removed, it should be avoided. To stop making suffering, it is enough simply to stop what causes it. Exactly as for a fire, we can not take it and take it away. If we want to extinguish a fire, we must stop the cause of the fire; We must stop what is responsible for the presence of fire. What is responsible for the presence of fire is that there is a fuel that is heated. It burns and gives fire. Therefore, when we want to extinguish a fire, we can not remove the flame. When water is thrown over a wood fire, water is not an element that will erase the fire - it has of course been studied scientifically. Simply put, the water will cool the wood that is on fire. Because the wood will be cooled, it will no longer produce gas, flammable gasolines. It will become cold again and for this reason the flame will disappear.
In the same way, when we want to treat cancer, removing cancer cells is not enough to cure cancer, because new cancer cells will come. A remedy must be found to prevent the appearance of these cells. If not, we will not be able to cure the disease.
The Path to Follow
The foundation of the path of liberation
Buddha gave us very clear explanations, technically easy enough to put in place to stop producing the causes of our miseries, our difficulties, our sorrows. To start already by ourselves. Everyone can start the work for himself. The more healthy people, the "healed" people, the balanced people, that is, the people Buddha called "noble beings", the better human society will be. This certainly should not prevent goodwill from finding economic, humanitarian, scientific or medical solutions to relieve the world of its suffering. As we can see, this is not enough.
To go further and arrive at a world with less pain, less suffering, we must first work on ourselves.
The work we can provide requires a minimum of control, personal discipline, vigilance, especially when we live in a world where we are surrounded by an environment that is not conducive to health and well-being . As soon as we make a move to get better, we are going to end up with many contradictions. Many people around us believe that what they do is good, that what they do is good, and do things hoping that this will bring them happiness. These are things, which very often break them down and contribute to an extra-civilized state of society.
On the other hand, as we follow the Buddha path, we realized that it was not necessary to do things to run after happiness but rather to stop doing things that invariably bring people To misfortune. That is why Buddha proposes in his medicine rather to stop doing harmful things, which are unhealthy and generating pain, to begin by stopping to do what is wrong. This requires some vigilance and some self-control.
3. Anatta - Theoretical Point of View
Everything is devoid of in-itself. There is no proper entity, nothing can be controlled.
This is the most subtle, the most difficult, and at the same time the most perfect doctrine which has never been exposed in the history of mankind. Its peculiarity is that it can be discovered, taught, revealed and reported only by an omniscient Buddha, a " tathāgata ", that is, a perfect being.
This is what happened twenty-five centuries ago when, renouncing the world, the pleasures of the senses, all ambition and all projects, Prince Siddhatta has absorbed himself in various Practices and spiritual exercises. Always dissatisfied with what they are leading to, he has come to an experience, a complete realization, at the end of which he was able to teach this new doctrine, unknown before him, and which is taught nowhere else but by his Pupils who succeeded him.
It is important to understand that the doctrine of anatta , as taught and expounded in what is called the theravāda , is totally unknown in any other system of thought or any other system of exegesis, Including in modern Buddhism called speculative, that is, Buddhism " mahayāna ".
Originally, the monk Gotama, the awakened one, the one called Buddha, discovered this principle. He discovered a radically new thing in the development of all the spiritual traditions of mankind. He will expose this discovery under the name of anatta.
It is important that, each one at his level, manages to have at least a basic and accessible understanding of what anatta is.
Only those who have achieved full realization have reached arahant , that is to say, complete enlightenment, which have an extremely vast capacity for reflection and investigation, complete and subtle In this doctrine. Those who have not arrived at this stage can only have a partial, truncated understanding, their capacity for investigation is more limited. As for those who have never seen nibbāna in their lives, they will not be able to have a correct and effective understanding of this doctrine. Nevertheless, someone very versed in the writings, of very scholarly, whose intellectual capacity is sufficiently developed, will nevertheless arrive at a good enough idea of the thing, or rather not bad.
Anatta is a Pali word, not a Sanskrit word, which has absolutely nothing to do with its Sanskrit equivalent "anatman". If Buddha refused to use the Sanskrit language, if he chose to use his native dialect, which is the dialect "magadha", it is because there is a reason.
Buddha is someone who claims to have acquired omniscience. That is, the ability to know everything about everything. It is precisely this omniscience (allegedly, to the limit that we know if it is true) that he made choices, both as regards what he wanted to avoid and for what 'He wanted to cultivate.
The Pali Dialect
One of the five conditions for a " tathāgata " (a Buddha) to appear in the world is that it appears in this particular region of present-day India, called the " majjhimadesa " which means the middle region, the region Because it is geographically situated at a medium distance between coasts, mountains and forests. It is a bit the heart of the Indian peninsula. Also, it is in this region that the magadha dialect is used. Later, by the fact that the word of Buddha was written on paper, that it became canonized, the term " pāḷi " is used which can be translated as "canon". To refer to this dialect, we then replaced the word "magadha" with the word " pāḷi ".
In pāḷi , the literal meaning of the word anatta is divided as follows: " a " which is the private particle, which is found in French equivalent and " atta " which is the reflexive particle, translated into English by "self "And which does not really have an equivalent in a single French word. It is generally said "in itself". That is, the forms such as "m ', t', s'" which we use in French will be precisely expressed in pāḷi by the term " atta ".
Buddha did not use technical terms. He refused to use the Sanskrit words that refer to spiritual techniques and religious or mystical beliefs. He used words of everyday language, precisely used by the magadha people for the things of everyday life. There is not in the pāḷi a vocabulary proper to teaching, to ideas, to philosophical or religious conceptions. As soon as we wanted to teach these things, we used Sanskrit. Namely that Sanskrit and pāḷi are very close to each other but are not identical.
Translation of the word Anatta
anatta is the conjunction of two particles: the privative particle and particle designating the idea of reflexivity, reciprocity. If one wanted to find a French term to synthesize anatta , one could say: "absence of a self", "absence of what is in itself", "absence of a proper nature".
Very often, the word anatta is translated in the literature by the "non-ego" or the "non soi". This translation is quite improper. Even if, by extension and deduction, the idea of anatta suggests the absence of ego, self, soul, the word anatta in itself (this is the case of saying it) does not mean Absence of ego "," absence of self "or" absence of soul ". There are other terms to describe this in pāḷi . In English, one is obliged to use a word like "not self" or "none self" because the English have in their vocabulary a word designating the reflexive particle which is "self". For example, "myself" means "myself", "himself" means "himself". We thus find exactly as in pāḷi the addition of the particle "self" to designate "self". That is why the English have legitimately translated the word anatta by "not self" or "none self".
The problem is that when we started translating into French, we basically translated from English sources. So of course, the French intellectuals, who for the most part did not understand much about the teaching of the awakened, translated "not self" by "non soi". This is a mistake that unfortunately led to a misunderstanding in the minds of the majority of French-speaking readers.
This being said, in Sanskrit, the word "anatman" can effectively convey the idea of "absence of self", "absence of soul", "absence of ego". But this is a Sanskrit word and not a Pali word. It is precisely on the basis of this Sanskrit word that the translators have given themselves the exaggerated freedom to translate the word anatta by the word "non soi", "non-ego" or "non soul".
The Absence of "in itself"
Anatta , is the absence of "in-itself", applicable to all things, ideas, characteristics and all material or mental phenomena. From this point of view, we can of course give details and explanations in order to understand that in this or that case, in this or that field, it is in this way that the doctrine of anatta expresses itself or Makes it feel. The typical description that you may have already heard is say, for example: Let's take a cart. This cart is subject to the law of anatta . We can not say that there really is a cart. Indeed, if one removes it piece by piece and is spread on the ground, one can no longer say that there is a cart. Yet all the parts are present.
It is a rather superficial and easy way of trying to make the idea of anatta understand , but it has the disadvantage of remaining encamped on this idea of absence of substance, nucleus or soul. It is interesting to note that when Buddha himself was asked, and it is important to know what he described as an anatta , he did not take the example of the cart. He did not take the example. He is one of his pupils who, in order to make himself understood by some one, took this example. The example of a cow cut into pieces on the butcher's stall is also sometimes used.
When Buddha Explains Anatta
When Buddha exposes what he sees as this characteristic of absence of itself, he chooses a different way and, as we have suspected, remarkably effective. He said: "There is no body in this" atta ". Because if there was in this body " atta ", at that moment, " atta " would have the possibility of deciding or choosing whether this body is so or that it is not so. "
We find this demonstration in many sutta . Throughout his life, he very often uses this technique to make this presentation understand.
Here's how it works ...
Someone is convinced that there is in this body a substance, a nucleus, an entity, or in any case that this body and this spirit are the emanation of an immutable, unconditioned and eternal principle.
Buddha said to him:
"Is this body immobile, immutable, or is it changing?" - He is subject to change (old age, sickness, decrepitude, etc.), noble Venerable. - What is subject to change, is it a source of pleasure or is it a source of dissatisfaction? - What is subject to change is a source of dissatisfaction, Lord. - How can the source of dissatisfaction be considered our property? "
One would have to be crazy to keep in his hands a burning coal, a source of pain. One would have to be crazy to keep this body, source of transformations and dissatisfactions. This is the particular point that Buddha addresses in his demonstration on anatta . This is the idea of total absence of control. It is not just the idea that there is no owner or entity. It is also the idea of lack of control. Anatta suggests the total absence of control.
For example, we would like to stop aging. We would like to keep a young body, dynamic, flexible and if possible beautiful and seductive. However, there is a natural aging process that is uncontrollable. There is no way to control this, not only because there is no one, there is no individual, there is no ego, but also because That it is impossible to control this. This is simply explained by the fact that there is no agent in the matter of the body that can control matter. There is no "self-control", there is no self-monitoring agent. Matter can not control itself. It is the same for the mind, it can not control matter and matter can not control the mind.