Abstract
Asked by the wanderer Vacchagotta whether there is a self and whether there is no self, the Buddha was silent; he later gave Ānanda not two reasons but four, in two pairs, as to why. Scholarship divided between no-self and affirmative readings of anattā has claimed the episode for one side or the other without accounting for its fourfold form. This article locates the anattā teaching in the register of first-person experience, distinguishing two horizons: the phenomenal horizon as given, and the unconditioned (asaṅkhata) as itself. The contemplative procedure of the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta shows how the second is disclosed against the first, with Husserl’s account of eidetic intuition supplying the vocabulary for the structural point. Each horizon admits exactly two mishandlings, absolutization and erasure, yielding four extremes through which the four reasons are best read. The four extremes share the assumption that a horizon can be taken on its own; the Buddha’s silence in response to Vacchagotta’s questioning is accordingly structural rather than suspensive or merely pedagogical, refusing the framework the question presupposes rather than withholding an answer. What the Buddha’s silence preserves is mutual co-presence: conditioned experience inhabited without appropriation and the unconditioned disclosed without being seized. This mode of mutual co-presence I call middle-way selfhood; on this view, it is real yet non-substantial, and nibbāna is the horizon of its first-personal manifestation.
1. Introduction: A Silence and Its Four Reasons
The wanderer Vacchagotta came to the Blessed One and asked whether there is a self. The Blessed One was silent. He asked whether there is no self. The Blessed One was silent again, and the wanderer rose from his seat and departed. After he had gone, Ānanda asked why the Blessed One had not answered. The reply is worth quoting at length:
The passage has long been central to discussion of the Buddha’s treatment of self. What has attracted less attention is a feature of its form. The Buddha gives not one reason for his silence, nor two, but four, and they fall into two pairs. Each of the two possible answers is refused twice, on grounds that do not reduce to one another.If, Ānanda, when I was asked by the wanderer Vacchagotta, “Is there a self?”, I had answered, “There is a self,” this would have been siding with those ascetics and brahmins who are eternalists.And if, when I was asked, “Is there no self?”, I had answered, “There is no self,” this would have been siding with those ascetics and brahmins who are annihilationists.And if, when I was asked, “Is there a self?”, I had answered, “There is a self,” would that have been in conformity with the arising of the knowledge that “all dhammas are not-self”?—“No, venerable sir.”And if, when I was asked, “Is there no self?”, I had answered, “There is no self,” the already bewildered Vacchagotta would have fallen into still greater bewilderment, thinking, “It seems that the self I formerly had does not exist now.”(SN 44.10/IV 401)1
The asymmetry is easy to pass over, and the frames within which the passage is usually read do pass over it. If “self” named a single thing and the question were simply whether it exists, two reasons would suffice—one against each answer. That there are four invites the thought that something further is being tracked. I take this as the article’s point of departure: the question I pursue is not whether the Buddha affirmed or denied a self, but what structure a refusal of this shape records.
The question pursued here has an object, and that object needs delimiting. The Buddha’s teaching of anattā is directed at a determinate problem of self. It is not directed indiscriminately at every possible meaning of attā. This qualification matters, because the Nikāyas do not suppress the language of self, and they do not use it only in order to deny it.
Several kinds of usage stand outside the denial. In its reflexive sense attā means simply oneself, and a verse of the Dhammapada says that one is one’s own protector (Dhp 160). In a practical sense the term marks what a disciple is to rely on, and the Buddha’s final instruction is to dwell with oneself as one’s island and one’s refuge (DN 16/II 100). In a conventional sense it belongs to the person who bears a name and a history, whom the Bhāra-sutta identifies as the bearer of the burden (SN 22.22/III 25–26). A fourth case is less simple. The Poṭṭhapāda-sutta distinguishes three attapaṭilābhā, three acquisitions of self, graded from the gross to the formless (DN 9/I 195–196).
That last case has to be taken with the setting the discourse gives it. The Buddha teaches the abandoning of each of the three acquisitions in turn. At the close of the sutta these terms are called worldly designations and worldly ways of speaking, which the Tathāgata employs without grasping at them (DN 9/I 202). The passage therefore licenses no substantial self. What it does show serves the present purpose better. The status of self-language does not turn on whether the term is used, since the Buddha goes on using it. It turns on whether what the term picks out is appropriated.
None of these usages establishes a substantial self. None of them falls automatically within the scope of the anattā teaching either. Together they show that the bare occurrence of attā settles neither its meaning nor its doctrinal status. The object of the present inquiry is accordingly narrower. I shall call it, in a restricted sense, the Buddha’s selfhood: not a personal self possessed by the Buddha, but the mode of selfhood placed in question where his teaching of anattā and his non-declaration concerning self intersect. Two levels should be kept apart throughout. The account reconstructed in this article is an interpretation of the non-declaration; selfhood names what that account is about—the mode of being whose standing is in question. What is attributed to the Buddha is the refusal and its structure, not a theory withheld.
SN 44.10 presents the intersection between the anattā teaching and the Buddha’s non-declaration in its most explicit form. The passage quoted above poses both alternatives, and the Buddha’s explanation to Ānanda assigns two grounds for refusing each. An affirmation is said to arrive at eternalism, and a denial at annihilationism. An affirmation is measured, in addition, against the arising of the knowledge that all dhammas are not-self, and this measure is applied to the affirmation alone. A denial is weighed, in addition, against the bewilderment it would produce in this particular hearer. The self about which Vacchagotta asks is thus brought by the text itself into direct relation with the anattā teaching and with the Buddha’s non-declaration. What that relation is remains to be reconstructed.
So delimited, the inquiry concerns the attā implicated at once in the declaration sabbe dhammā anattā and in the refusal to affirm either that self exists or that it does not. Whether that declaration by itself settles the question Vacchagotta asks is taken up in Section 2.
The dispute over the Buddha’s position has proved unusually durable. One line holds that the Nikāyas deny the self outright, another that they nowhere contain such a denial. Each finds real support in the texts, and neither can account for the other’s evidence without strain. The most disciplined response has been to treat the silence itself as the position—Katsura’s proposal that the Buddha’s final stance was avyākata, non-declaration (Katsura 2011, pp. 259–72). I accept this as descriptively correct and argue that it has been left without content: to say that the question was set aside reports what was not asserted, without saying what the refusal preserves. My contention is that the impasse is generated by the terms in which the question has been posed, and that a refusal operating twice against each answer cannot be accounted for on a single axis.
The reframing I propose begins from the structure of experience rather than from a verdict on the existence axis, and the texts themselves warrant the choice: the Nikāyas present anattā as something to be seen, in a contemplative procedure whose terminus is a transformation in the practitioner. That they also argue for it is not in question; what matters for the present reconstruction is the experiential register in which the seeing is placed. Within that register I distinguish two horizons of first-person experience. The phenomenal horizon-as-given is the field of the conditioned—the five aggregates, arising and ceasing in dependence and present as content for an awareness to which they are available. The transcendent horizon-as-itself is the unconditioned (asaṅkhata) that the discourses affirm in three registers—the declarations of the Udāna, the flat idiom of doctrinal classification, and verse—and that can be indicated but not specified as an object. Section 4 assembles the passages.
A horizon can be mishandled in exactly two ways: it may be absolutized, taken as a self-standing entity that is what one is, or erased, taken as nothing at all. Crossing the two horizons with these two errors yields four positions, and I argue that the four reasons given to Ānanda are best read through them. The Nikāyas’ non-declaration, on this reading, neither conceals an enduring self nor eliminates every form of selfhood. It refuses two operations at once: the appropriation of either the conditioned or the unconditioned as what one is, and the elimination of either as nothing at all.
What survives both refusals is fixed by what the four extremes share. Since each of them detaches a horizon and handles it alone, whatever the refusals leave standing can stand only in the relation between the two. I call this relation mutual co-presence: the two horizons are disclosed as such only through one another, neither collapsing into one nor available as two. Middle-way selfhood, I shall argue, is the mode of being that obtains in that relation: it is real yet non-substantial and first-personal. In this mode of being, conditioned experience is inhabited without appropriation, while the unconditioned is disclosed without being seized as what one ultimately is. I test the reconstruction against the five-stage process of liberation the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta describes.
Three things should be stated at the outset. As to corpus, I confine myself to the five Nikāyas of the Pāli canon, drawing neither on the Abhidhamma, nor the commentarial literature, nor the Chinese Āgamas; where I engage scholarship that relies on post-canonical sources—Harvey’s reconstruction of the criteria of selfhood in particular—I mark the dependence and take from it only what canonical material independently supports.2 I proceed on the working hypothesis that the Nikāyas, whatever their compositional history, admit of reconstruction as a body of material holding a coherent philosophical position on the question at issue.3
As to method, Husserl’s analysis is drawn on at two points and not beyond them: in Section 3, for the formal characterization of a horizon and of the first-personal standpoint, and in Section 6, for the structure of eidetic intuition and the variation that yields it. The later sections proceed by doctrinal argument from the discourses themselves. This is not a phenomenological study of early Buddhism but a reading of the Nikāyas that borrows two descriptive instruments where the discourses’ own idiom leaves a structure unnamed. I do not claim that the discourses operate with these concepts, and Section 6 addresses the charge of anachronism directly.
As to limits, the distinction between the conditioned and the unconditioned is drawn by the discourses; its reconstruction as two horizons of first-person experience is not, nor is the fourfold analysis of the extremes, nor the account of their relation. These three reconstructions are my own, offered as interpretive instruments and to be judged by what they explain. I do not claim to recover the intention of the historical Buddha, nor that the pattern examined here is the only approach to liberation the Nikāyas contain.
2. The Debate over Self, No-Self, and Non-Declaration
Modern scholarship on anattā has divided along a line that has proved remarkably stable, and the Vacchagotta episode has been claimed by both sides.
On one reading, the Buddha denied the self outright. The person is analyzed exhaustively into the five aggregates, and behind their conditioned flow no abiding locus of identity is to be found. Rahula states the position with characteristic directness, while Malalasekera and Nyanatiloka define Buddhism itself by this denial (Rahula 1967, p. 51; Malalasekera 1957, pp. 33–4; Nyanatiloka 1974, pp. 4–7). Collins gave the reading its most influential philosophical elaboration, and Gethin’s standard account presents anattā as the claim that no permanent metaphysical self is discoverable in the depths of the personality (Gethin 1998, p. 160). Within the Theravāda commentarial tradition this understanding became normative. Gethin adds the corollary that matters here: the thought “I do not exist” is as much bound to the notion of self as “I exist” (Gethin 1998, p. 162).
On the other reading, the Buddha did no such thing. Its proponents make three observations. The early discourses nowhere contain a categorical denial of the form “there is no self.” Attā continues to be used without embarrassment throughout the Nikāyas. And the recurrent formula “this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self” is a predication about the aggregates rather than an existential verdict about a self. Rhys Davids (1927), Radhakrishnan (1977), and Humphreys (1962) advanced versions of this position; Nakamura went so far as to hold that Upaniṣadic conceptions of ātman are conspicuously preserved within the early canon (Nakamura [1963] 1981, p. 36). Pérez-Remón’s monograph remains the fullest statement of the case (Pérez-Remón 1980, pp. 153–60, 195–203).
Two more recent contributions do not restate the affirmative reading but transform it. Harvey reconstructs the criteria a genuine self would have to satisfy and finds that nibbāna meets nearly all of them; Albahari, relocating the question to the philosophy of mind, argues that what survives the dissolution of the personal self is a non-illusory witness-consciousness she finds hard to distinguish in principle from the Upaniṣadic ātman. Neither concludes that the Buddha taught an ātman; both conclude that the unconditioned occupies much of the ground ātman-discourse had held. Section 5 examines their arguments.
The claim that Buddhist materials support a self that is real and yet non-substantial is not new here. Thompson argues that the self is an enacted process rather than an illusion or a thing (Thompson 2015, chap. 10); Ganeri, that selfhood is a matter of performance rather than substance (Ganeri 2007, pt. 3); MacKenzie, that the self of a self-organizing human being is emergent and constructed without being merely virtual (MacKenzie 2010). What distinguishes the present reconstruction is not the conclusion but where the account begins and where it locates what it finds. These accounts reach a non-substantial self by analysis of conditioned mental life and situate it in the organization of that life. The account offered here takes its textual point of departure from the structure of a refusal recorded in the discourses, and situates what it finds in the relation of the conditioned to the unconditioned. The difference bears directly on the question at issue: these accounts are addressed to what a self could be, not to the fourfold shape of the refusal, and whether that shape implicates a relation beyond the conditioned organization is the question pursued here.
An opposing conclusion has recently been argued in detail. Smith holds that the sutta material entails metaphysical anti-realism about the self, and that the Buddha’s refusal to state the denial is explained by the psychology of conceit (Smith 2021). A denial cast in the first person would re-entrench the very tendency the teaching works against. Much of this I accept; the refusal is neither agnosticism nor a gap in the teaching. Two things separate us. The first concerns a premise. Smith’s entailment turns on the claim that if there were a self it would be found among the aggregates, supplied from the Samanupassanā-sutta (SN 22.47/III 46; Smith 2021, p. 9). That discourse states that those who regard a self regard it in the five aggregates of grasping or in one of them. It anatomizes how self-view is formed; it is not a modal limit on where a self could be found, and it therefore does not answer the question Vacchagotta puts. A textual observation bears on the entailment more broadly. On Frauwallner’s reading of the canon, the texts do not merely withhold the denial: where an explicit utterance is found, the soul is characterized as incomprehensible rather than as absent (Frauwallner 1997, pp. 177–8). Frauwallner draws from this a positive conclusion about what the incomprehensible term is; that conclusion is taken up, and qualified, in Section 5 and Section 9.
The second is explanatory scope. An explanation by conceit accounts for the absence of the denial; it does not account for the form of the refusal, and it leaves unexplained why each answer is refused on two grounds rather than one. That doubling is this article’s point of departure, and Section 7 and Section 8 give my reasons for holding the refusal of the denial “there is no self” to rest on truth rather than on the hearer’s condition alone.
Across its classical and recent versions, what is striking about the division is not that the two readings disagree but that neither can be dislodged. The negative reading must explain the absence of the denial it attributes to the Buddha. If anattā means that no self exists, the Nikāyas had every opportunity to say so and did not. In the very passage where the question is put most directly the Buddha declines to say it, telling Ānanda that saying it would have aligned him with the annihilationists. The affirmative reading faces the mirror difficulty: if the Buddha accepted a self, his refusal to affirm one when asked becomes inexplicable, and his statement that such an affirmation would have placed him among the eternalists becomes an embarrassment rather than a datum.
The deadlock is not evidential: the passages we have are distributed across two frameworks, each of which must treat part of the evidence as anomalous. What requires examination is therefore not the evidence but the terms in which the question has been posed.
The most promising attempt to dissolve the difficulty distinguishes two things that the English word “self” runs together.
To say of the aggregates that they are anattā may be to make a predicative claim—that they cannot be characterized as self, that they are not-self—or an existential claim, that no self exists at all: no-self. The distinction is well established, and it does substantial work. Vetter had already drawn the boundary, finding in the Vinaya and Sutta collections a denial that things are the self but no denial that a self exists, and declining to read the latter absence as an affirmation (Vetter 1988, pp. 39–41). Shulman has argued that the aim of the anattā teaching is to show that things are “not-my-self” or “not-I,” rather than to establish that they lack a self of their own (Shulman 2014, p. 66). Polak has recently pressed a related point, locating the burden of the teaching on our identification with consciousness rather than on the existence of anything (Polak 2023a, pp. 743–4). On this reading, the Buddha’s refusal to say “there is no self” is no longer anomalous. He never held that thesis, so he had no occasion to state it.
This distinction is correct, and it is presupposed throughout what follows. When a determinate candidate for self is placed under examination, the Nikāyas are unequivocal. In the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta, every form, feeling, apperception, formation, and consciousness—whatever its temporal, spatial, or qualitative determination—is to be seen as “not mine, not I, not my self” (SN 22.59/III 67–68). Had Vacchagotta asked whether any specified constituent is self, the discourses themselves supply the answer. Vacchagotta’s question, however, has a different logical form. He does not ask whether any aggregate or other specified dhamma is self, or contains a self. He asks without qualification first whether attā exists and then whether it does not exist. This is an existential question concerning self as such, not a predicative question concerning a determinate candidate.
This difference marks the limit of what sabbe dhammā anattā directly settles. The formula excludes from identification as self every dhamma within its scope, and its force is decisive whenever a determinate dhamma is proposed as self. But Vacchagotta does not ask whether some dhamma is self; he asks whether attā exists. To derive the denial from the formula, one needs a further premise: that selfhood, in whatever mode it might obtain, would have to be identifiable with some dhamma the formula excludes. SN 44.10 neither states nor establishes it.4 The predicative reading therefore explains why the denial “there is no self” does not follow from the formula alone. It does not yet explain why the affirmation “there is a self” is refused as well, since the exclusion of specified dhammas leaves the affirmation logically open. Yet the Buddha invokes the arising of the knowledge that all dhammas are not-self as a reason for refusing the affirmation while also refusing the denial. This logical room is not the claim that a self exists outside all dhammas. The silence does not establish that selfhood is real; it shows only that the predicative claim cannot, without further argument, be converted into an existential denial.5 What the paired refusals open is the problem Section 1 termed the Buddha’s selfhood,6 and Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, Section 6, Section 7, Section 8, Section 9 and Section 10 undertake to determine whether and how it obtains as real yet non-substantial.
If neither answer can be given, one might conclude that the silence itself is the position. Katsura, surveying the three standard accounts of the Buddha’s relation to ātman—that he did not teach it, that he taught a “true self” distinct from it, and that he accepted it—finds each vulnerable to counterargument and to gaps in inference, and proposes a fourth. The Buddha’s final stance, on this account, was avyākata: the question was set aside rather than answered. Katsura supports the proposal by observing that Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu likewise declined to resolve it (Katsura 2011, pp. 259–72).
In my view this is descriptively correct. It is also, as it stands, explanatorily empty. To say that the Buddha declined to answer is to report the surface of the text; it tells us what he did not assert without telling us what, if anything, the refusal preserves. And silences are not all of one kind. A silence may be suspensive, expressing the absence of a settled view; it may be pedagogical, calibrated to a questioner unable to receive the answer; or it may be structural, the only available expression of a state of affairs that no one-sided assertion could carry without distortion. These are very different positions, and an appeal to non-declaration does not discriminate among them.
The passage itself allows a first discrimination, which Section 8 completes with the resources of the reconstruction. The silence is not suspensive, since a speaker with no view could not specify what each answer would commit him to, still less measure both against the arising of knowledge. It has a pedagogical dimension but is not exhausted by it: only one of the four reasons is person-relative, concerning what this questioner in this condition would have made of the answer, while the other three hold whoever is asking. And each answer is refused on two grounds rather than one, which suggests that the term is doing more than one kind of work and that the refusal tracks a structure rather than registering a gap.
An adequate reconstruction must therefore satisfy three conditions. It must explain why the affirmation “there is a self” is refused. It must explain why the denial “there is no self” is refused. And since each refusal rests on two grounds rather than one, it must identify the structure that this doubling tracks—and show what the silence thereby discloses, rather than merely what it withholds. The sections that follow attempt to meet these conditions in turn, beginning with the distinction of experiential horizons on which the reconstruction rests.
3. Two Horizons of Experience
The three conditions cannot be met on the terms in which the question has ordinarily been posed. Both lines of interpretation ask whether a self exists or does not, and differ only in the value they assign. What the fourfold structure suggests is that, within the question Vacchagotta poses, attā is doing two kinds of work at once, and that a reconstruction must supply the second dimension along which those two kinds come apart. The dimension I propose is not a further ontological thesis but the structure of experience itself.
A reconstruction conducted in the register of experience returns to the register in which the discourses themselves place anattā. The early discourses present it as something to be seen—yathābhūtaṃ sammappaññāya daṭṭhabbaṃ, to be seen as it has come to be, with correct understanding (SN 22.59/III 67–68). The Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta argues and transforms at once. It gives reasons why each aggregate fails to be self, and those reasons do their work within a procedure whose terminus is dispassion and release. The two are not alternatives: it is by understanding how things are, at the experiential level, that the practitioner is transformed. Carpenter (2018) makes the point for attention, arguing that attending to impersonal reality is itself the means by which the self is dissolved and reformed. What follows accordingly turns on the register in which the discourse’s claims are pitched, not on a denial that it makes claims. Recent scholarship has drawn the corresponding inference about the khandhas. Rather than denoting objective constituents of a person, as they came to be treated in the commentarial tradition, the khandhas denote aspects of ordinary conscious experience as it presents itself from a first-person perspective (Gethin 1986, pp. 35–53; Hamilton 2000, p. 29; Wynne 2010, p. 113; Polak 2023a, pp. 743–4). The shift is therefore not a change of subject.
Within that register I distinguish two horizons, differentiated not by what they contain but by the manner in which each is given. The word horizon is used here in the sense Husserl gives it, and the borrowing is formal. Every act of consciousness, on his account, carries with it “an intentional horizon of reference to potentialities of consciousness” (Husserl 1960, §19, p. 44)—a field co-intended with what is actually before one, and belonging to the act itself rather than standing beside its object as a second object. Two features of that account do the work here. A horizon is not an item within the field it opens, so it cannot be inventoried alongside the contents it makes available, and it is nevertheless disclosed, since Husserl holds that a horizon can be explicated and its potentialities uncovered. Taken together, these allow a term to be indicated without being posited as an object, which is the difficulty the discourses leave unnamed. Nothing further is taken from Husserl: neither the transcendental reduction, nor the constitution of the object, nor any claim about what the horizon so described contains.
The first is the phenomenal horizon-as-given: the field of the conditioned (saṅkhata)—form, feeling, apperception, formations and consciousness, arising and altering and ceasing in dependence, and presenting themselves to first-person awareness as the ordinary content of a life.7 The qualifier as-given records the mode of presentation at issue: this horizon is characterized by givenness (Gegebenheit), by presenting itself as content for an awareness to which it is available. That the discourses recognize this horizon is uncontroversial; it is the field within which the whole of the khandha analysis is carried out.
The second is the transcendent horizon-as-itself. By transcendent I mean transcending the conditioned, not transcending experience: this horizon is disclosed within first-person experience rather than lying beyond it. The term also answers to an idiom of the discourses, which relate the unconditioned to the conditioned as an escape or going out (nissaraṇa) discerned from within the conditioned, not as a departure that leaves it behind (Section 4). By as-itself I mark a mode of presentation that contrasts with givenness. This horizon does not present itself as content for an awareness and is not one item among the objects available to a subject; it can be indicated, but only as itself.8 Where its ontological standing is at issue, I refer to it as the unconditioned (asaṅkhata); where its soteriological disclosure is at issue, nibbāna names the horizon of release within the mutual co-presence in which middle-way selfhood obtains. These are distinct registers, not separate items. How such a horizon comes to be disclosed at all, rather than merely postulated, is the question of Section 6.
The discourses bear out the need for such caution in their own manner of speaking. They affirm an unconditioned—the textual case follows in the next section—but characterize it almost exclusively by negation: not born, not become, not made, not formed. The difficulty begins not with affirmation or naming as such, but with assigning the horizon a positive, self-standing identity. To call it attā would collapse it into the eternalist extreme; to call it ātman would import a metaphysical commitment the discourses do not make. The procedure of arriving at what is ultimate by successively negating what it is not was already the established method of Yājñavalkya’s neti neti; the early Buddhist texts share the method while declining the conclusion drawn from it, a divergence to which I return in Section 9.
A note on horizon, since the term is borrowed. I do not import Husserl’s concept wholesale; what is retained is its formal feature: what appears is always given with a co-intended horizon that exceeds what is presently given and is never exhausted as a finished datum.9 That feature is what makes “horizon” preferable to “realm” or “level,” which would suggest two regions of a single ontological space. Where no ambiguity arises I abbreviate the designations to the phenomenal horizon and the transcendent horizon.
If attā, asked about without qualification, ranges indifferently over both horizons—naming at once the continuity of the empirical stream and the standing of something beyond the conditioned—then an answer that fixes the term at either pole will misfire twice, once on each horizon. That is the hypothesis to be tested, and it is to be judged by whether it accounts for the four reasons more economically than the readings surveyed above. Its first requirement is that the second horizon be shown to have textual standing.
4. The Unconditioned in the Nikāyas
If the reconstruction is to do any work, it must be shown that the discourses affirm something beyond the conditioned, that they affirm it as real rather than as a manner of speaking, and that they do so in more than a single isolated passage. This section makes that case.
The most direct statement occurs in the Udāna:
Two features deserve attention beyond the assertion itself. The text does not simply declare that the unconditioned exists; it argues that were it absent, escape from the conditioned could not be discerned (paññāyetha), so that the unconditioned is introduced not as a metaphysical posit but as what makes a soteriological fact intelligible. And the term nissaraṇa, escape or going out, puts at issue a relation between the two orders rather than the substitution of one for the other—a point to which Section 9 returns.Bhikkhus, there is a not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-formed. If, bhikkhus, there were not this not-born … no escape (nissaraṇa) from the born, the become, the made, the formed would be discerned here. But because there is a not-born … an escape from the born, the become, the made, the formed is discerned.(Ud 8.3/80)
A second Udāna passage proceeds apophatically. It denies the unconditioned not only the four elements but the four formless attainments by name, and adds that there is no coming, no going, no arising there; it is unestablished, without support, and is identified as the end of suffering (Ud 8.1/80). What is indicated is therefore not one of the meditative attainments the tradition describes, nor a subtler grade within the same series. The negations run out without arriving at a positive characterization, which is itself evidence for the reading proposed above: this horizon admits of designation only as itself.
Two expressions deserve notice together. The first says that the escape is discerned; the second identifies what is indicated as the end of suffering. Neither is a report about an object held at a distance: one names a release that is discernible, the other a cessation that is reached. What the passages jointly indicate is a reality that admits of designation only as itself and is nonetheless available to discernment. This is the sense in which Section 3 called the horizon transcendent without placing it beyond experience.
The affirmation appears in another register as well. The Aṅguttara-nikāya states the point in the flat idiom of doctrinal classification:
In AN 3.47 the unconditioned appears as a formal category set over against the conditioned, defined by the negation of the three marks that characterize it, and the point is stated without rhetorical emphasis. Finally, the Suttanipāta forestalls the suspicion that what is described is simply nothing at all, characterizing nibbāna as not of a false or deceptive nature and as what the noble ones know truly (Sn 758). In these three registers the Nikāyas affirm an unconditioned and do not present it as the mere privation of the conditioned. What is contested is what follows from it.Bhikkhus, there are these three unconditioned-characteristics of the unconditioned (asaṅkhatassa asaṅkhata-lakkhaṇāni). What three? No arising is discerned; no passing away is discerned; no alteration of what stands is discerned.(AN 3.47/I 152)
One thing the discourses do not do should be registered before proceeding. They affirm the unconditioned in the registers just surveyed, but they nowhere set it out as a self. Their idiom also leaves open, without settling, a wider scope for anattā, and the argument that follows does not depend on a categorical answer.10 Why the Buddha declines the affirmation as firmly as the denial is the business of Section 7 and Section 8. For the present argument, it is enough to establish that the Nikāyas affirm an unconditioned reality, that it is encountered rather than merely posited, and that they stop short of calling it a self.
5. Nibbāna and the Ātman: Two Correspondences
Three lines of argument bear on the relation between nibbāna and the ātman of the texts’ environment. Attā and ātman are cognates, and nothing follows from the difference of language alone; where the two are set against each other here, the contrast is between attā as it operates within early Buddhist discourse and the substantialist conceptions of ātman current in the texts’ Brahmanical environment. Harvey proceeds by doctrinal exegesis, Albahari through the philosophy of mind, and a third line by the structure of the contemplative act itself. None entails that nibbāna is identical with a substantial self, but together they establish something any reconstruction must accommodate.
Harvey’s procedure is indirect, and its indirectness is its chief methodological virtue. Rather than asking whether the Buddha accepted an ātman—a question on which the textual evidence has proved indecisive—he asks a prior one: if a self existed, what would it have to be like? The discourses answer it, since they argue against candidate selves by showing that they fail conditions the interlocutor is assumed to accept. From this Harvey reconstructs a set of criteria, which he calls the Self-ideal: a genuine Self would be permanent, free of dukkha and hence wholly sukha, unconditioned, possessed of the self-awareness expressed in “I am,” an autonomous agent exercising control over itself, and possessed of an essential nature of its own (Harvey 1995, p. 46).11 I call the correspondence he goes on to establish descriptive.
His answer is nibbāna. Working from the Paṭisambhidāmagga schema in which the predicates opposed to anicca, dukkha and anattā are applied to nibbāna, he finds it characterized as permanent, as sukha, as not liable to collapse, as not false or deceptive, as possessing essential nature, and as dependent on nothing further (Harvey 1995, pp. 51–2). Set against the Self-ideal, the correspondence is close to complete.
This descriptive correspondence fails at one point. Nibbāna is where the conceit “I am” (asmimāna) has ceased to arise, and it therefore lacks precisely the self-awareness, control, and agency that the Self-ideal requires. From this Harvey draws his formulation: nibbāna is “the virtual attainment of Self-hood”—everything a Self could be, apart from I-ness, control and agency (Harvey 1995, p. 53). Elsewhere he observes that the ātman of Vedānta and nibbāna share permanence, freedom from dukkha, and unconditionedness (Harvey 1995, p. 34). What the Upaniṣadic ātman adds is the self-awareness of “I am,” with the control and agency associated with it (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.1; Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.11.1). The divergence that remains concerns this cluster of I-ness, control, and agency.
The second correspondence operates at a different level. Albahari asks not what the two discourses assert but what, if anything, they pick out in conscious experience, pursuing the question through philosophy of mind rather than doctrinal exegesis. Her conclusion is stronger than Harvey’s and correspondingly more contested.
Her analysis distinguishes three things. The self is the bounded and persisting personal owner of experiences that most people reflexively assume themselves to be. The person is the observable psycho-physical being to whom such a self is ordinarily, though perhaps mistakenly, ascribed. Awareness is witnessing considered apart from that supposed ownership—the mode in which it operates she terms witness-consciousness (Albahari 2006, pp. 7–21, 140). On her account what we ordinarily take ourselves to be is a two-tiered illusion: awareness itself is unconstructed, elusive, unified and invariant, while its appearance as the consciousness of a separate proprietor is constructed by taṇhā-driven thought, identification, and the reciprocal senses of “me” and “mine” (Albahari 2006, pp. 51–61, 140–205). The illusion consists in mistaking the one for the other.
Two strands of her project should be distinguished. In her exegetical reconstruction of Buddhism she identifies witness-consciousness with unconditioned nibbāna, calling the identity nibbānic consciousness and adducing among its canonical grounds the description of mind as luminous (pabhassara citta) (AN 1.49–52/I 10; Albahari 2006, pp. 34–45). Her independent philosophy-of-mind argument is less committal, defending only that awareness and its unity, unbrokenness, invariance and elusiveness are unconstructed and non-illusory (Albahari 2006, pp. 140–69). The present reconstruction rests on the weaker strand: what it needs is that the dissolution of the bounded owner-self does not entail the dissolution of awareness or of perspectival experience. The stronger strand matters in one respect: it presents the transcendent horizon as disclosed within experience rather than inferred from doctrine.
The decisive step for present purposes is her assessment of the relation to ātman. She argues that the early Buddhist descriptions of nibbāna make a principled distinction between the Buddhist and Upaniṣadic positions difficult to sustain, and harder still if ātman is understood as Śaṅkara and later Advaita Vedānta understand it (Albahari 2006, p. 75, p. 215, n. 15).
Where Harvey compares what the texts predicate, Albahari proposes that what they pick out cannot readily be distinguished at the level of experience. I call the correspondence she proposes referential. It does not amount to the claim that the Buddha taught an ātman. What the two jointly establish is narrower: the difference between the traditions cannot be located in the affirmation or denial of an unconditioned reality.
Albahari’s two tiers should not, however, be identified with the two horizons proposed in this article. Her distinction is psychological and compositional: unconstructed awareness contributes one set of features, while desire-laden thought, identification, and personal ownership construct the appearance of a bounded self. The present distinction is phenomenological and relational: the conditioned and the unconditioned designate different modes of disclosure within first-person experience. Albahari decomposes the self-illusion; the present reconstruction asks the further question of how conditioned experience, awareness, and the unconditioned remain related once appropriation has ceased.
Both correspondences are used here under a restriction. Harvey’s derivation draws in part on Theravāda commentarial material, so I use it only where the relevant predicates are independently supported by the Nikāyas—the descriptive point, which the passages of Section 4 support on their own.12 The Advaita construal on which Albahari’s assessment bears hardest was systematized many centuries after the Nikāyas; I take from it only what the earlier Upaniṣadic material above supports.
Each correspondence leaves a difficulty standing, and I mark both here for treatment in Section 9. Harvey’s is internal to his result: nibbāna is at once the virtual attainment of Selfhood and selfless, and he states both halves without reconciling them. Albahari’s concerns the liberated person. Her proximate nibbānic consciousness describes the living arahant, in whom the aggregates continue to operate without the illusion of a bounded owner (Albahari 2006, pp. 21, 46–8). Pure nibbānic consciousness, however, is objectless and without a determinate psycho-physical perspective, whereas liberation is lived and known by one who continues to perceive, feel, speak and act (Iti 44/38–39; SN 1.25/I 14–15; Section 10). How non-bounded awareness belongs to the first-personal knowledge and activity of a liberated person, without reinstating a bounded proprietor, she does not fully articulate. That further task is what the present argument takes up.
6. Contemplative Variation and the Disclosure of the Transcendent Horizon
The two correspondences established so far are established from outside the practice: Harvey compares what the texts predicate, Albahari what the descriptions pick out. Neither asks what happens in the contemplative act itself. A third line of argument does, and it yields a correspondence that holds not between two descriptions but within a single act of intuition.
Consider what the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta asks the practitioner to do (SN 22.59/III 67–68). For each aggregate in turn, the discourse first argues that it cannot be self, and the argument turns on a specific consideration: were form self, it would not lead to affliction, and one could direct it at will—“Let my form be thus; let my form not be thus.”13 The reasoning is not that no self is found but that this candidate fails a condition—the condition of standing under one’s own mastery.
The discourse then prescribes a procedure. Whatever form there is, past, future or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all form is to be seen as it has come to be, with correct understanding, as “this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self” (SN 22.59/III 67–68). The same series is repeated for each of the remaining aggregates.
I want to draw attention to the form of this instruction rather than its content. What is prescribed is a systematic ranging over a field, and not the inspection of a sample. The series of oppositions—temporal, spatial, qualitative, evaluative—is constructed so as to exhaust the dimensions along which instances of an aggregate can differ. The practitioner is directed to vary the exemplar across every axis available and to find the same result at each point.
A procedure of this shape presupposes a criterion. To range across a field and register at every point that what is found is not that is to have that in view throughout; without an operative standard the exercise could yield only observations, not the single verdict the discourse reports. And the standard is not left implicit: it is recoverable from the argument that opens the discourse. What would satisfy it would be free from affliction and characterized by mastery rather than subjection. These are not merely counterfactual conditions by which the aggregates are rejected, but positive, anticipatory determinations of the eidos of selfhood; in Harvey’s terms, they anticipate central elements of the wider Self-ideal, especially complete sukha, control, and self-determination (Section 5). The inference is not novel. Frauwallner draws it from the same argument, observing that one could conclude from the assertion that whatever is perishable and sorrowful cannot be the self that the self is imperishable and free from sorrow (Frauwallner 1997, p. 177).14
Husserl’s analysis of eidetic intuition articulates this structure. The borrowing is limited to the vocabulary in which the structural point can be stated, and does not supply the content of the point. The variation series and the argument from mastery are both in the discourse, and that a procedure of this form requires an operative criterion follows from its form. This article does not claim that the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta prescribes Wesensschau, or that its authors held anything like Husserl’s account of essence.
In Husserl’s account, an essence is grasped through free variation in imagination (freie Phantasievariation): one varies an exemplar without restriction and asks what holds up through the series as “the invariant, the necessary, universal form, the essential form” (Husserl 1977, p. 54); what so holds up is apprehended as the eidos (Husserl 1977, pp. 53–9). The invariant is not one variant alongside the others but is progressively clarified through them (Husserl 1977, pp. 57–8; Belt 2022, pp. S408–10). Applied to the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta, the procedure can be distinguished into three moments. The opening argument provides a preliminary, signitive intention of the criterion—freedom from affliction and mastery. Observation of a presently given aggregate then gives empirical fulfilment to the judgment that this candidate fails the criterion. Extending the survey across the temporal, spatial, and qualitative series yields an eidetic generalization: throughout the conditioned field, the criterion remains unfulfilled (Yoon 2022, pp. 212–24).
This survey, however, is not a theoretically neutral classification of the aggregates. In the soteriological sequence of SN 22.59, the practitioner’s ultimate aim is not merely to apprehend impermanence, suffering, and not-self as such, but to attain liberation; within the wider canonical framework established in Section 4, the telos of this movement is nibbāna, the unconditioned. The contemplation of the aggregates under these characteristics is the practical means by which appropriation is relinquished and that goal is disclosed. Eidetic variation therefore operates within a practice already directed toward release, rather than generating a positive horizon ex nihilo from a series of negations.
What the variation directly discloses is the invariant failure of the conditioned to satisfy the operative criterion, while at the same time rendering the criterion itself progressively more determinate. The criterion is not another item within the conditioned field but the standard under which that field is surveyed. The procedure does not by itself establish that the horizon indicated by this criterion is the unconditioned. That identification rests on the canonical characterizations assembled in Section 4 and on the correspondences developed in Section 5. Taken together, the contemplative procedure and this prior textual identification explain how the transcendent horizon can be co-disclosed with the aggregates without becoming another object among them.
In the present argument, mastery names a requirement and not yet an accomplishment. The practitioner has seen what a self would have to satisfy, but has not thereby come to satisfy it. Nor can the unconditioned satisfy it alone: mastery is always mastery of something, and with the conditioned set aside there is nothing left for it to be mastery of. Where the requirement is met is therefore neither horizon by itself. Section 9 and Section 10 argue that it is met in the relation between them, in which conditioned life continues, the unconditioned is disclosed, and neither is taken as what one is or struck out.
I call this correspondence disclosive. It holds within the structure of a single contemplative act, and not in a resemblance between two bodies of description or in the difficulty of telling two referents apart. In that act the transcendent horizon is disclosed as the horizon against which the phenomenal horizon-as-given shows itself to be conditioned, unsatisfactory and not-self, rather than as a further object of intuition. Two earlier scholars have noticed a related affinity, though at the level of method rather than disclosure. Miyamoto observed that the Buddha’s procedure of successive negation corresponds to the neti neti of the Upaniṣadic teachers (Miyamoto 2012, pp. 172–4). Frauwallner reaches a related conclusion, describing the Buddha’s account of the self as a “purely negative formulation” while locating its underlying conception of self and liberation within the Upaniṣadic tradition (Frauwallner 1997, pp. 176, 184–5, 188). What the present argument adds is that the two procedures share more than a method of negation. They share the structure by which the negation discloses what it negates against.
Two points remain. That the discourse’s argument presupposes a conception of what a self would be is widely accepted. What conception is at issue has been specified in similar terms. Gethin reads the discourse as aimed at an absolute self free of all suffering (Gethin 1998, p. 137). Bronkhorst observes that the self in question is the distinctively Indian conception of an eternal, unchanging and blissful self, and not the everyday one (Bronkhorst 2009, p. 25). Shulman puts the point most sharply: the passage carries no logical necessity unless the Upaniṣadic self is presupposed (Shulman 2008, p. 312). Vetter adds a further observation about the form of the argument, that the three predicates make a chain rather than a list, impermanence grounding unsatisfactoriness and unsatisfactoriness grounding not-self (Vetter 1988, pp. 39–40). That this conception is specifically the Upaniṣadic ātman is an inference resting on the convergence of the three lines of argument, not on any one of them. The argument does not show that the transcendent horizon, taken in isolation, is a self. To isolate the unconditioned and appropriate it as what one is would lose the structure by which it was disclosed—the error of the second extreme.
An earlier analysis described this contemplative procedure as yielding two truths simultaneously within a single intuition (Yoon 2022, pp. 224–7). That formulation holds the two apart as propositions jointly true. The present argument develops it by recasting the relation dynamically: the two horizons do not merely co-obtain but disclose one another, each becoming available as such only through the other.
Three correspondences have now been established, at the level of description, of reference, and of disclosure. They converge on a result weaker than referential identity but sufficient for what follows: the descriptions these texts make available do not permit the two traditions to be told apart by whether an unconditioned reality is affirmed. Overlapping predicates do not establish that two discourses pick out the same thing, and the claim here is narrower: the criterion by which the traditions have usually been separated no longer separates them. Where, then, does the difference between the two traditions lie? The answer is to be found in the passage with which this article began.
7. Four Extremes
The two extremes of eternalism (sassatavāda) and annihilationism (ucchedavāda) are the standard frame within which the Buddha’s treatment of self has been read, and the frame has canonical warrant. But the discourses do not present each extreme as a single position. The Brahmajāla-sutta enumerates four varieties of eternalism and seven of annihilationism (DN 1/I 13–39). More telling than the enumeration is the variation in the grounds of rejection, which shifts from case to case within a single category. The two-term frame is thus not so much wrong as underdescribed, and recovering the distinctions it collapses requires an axis it does not supply. The axis proposed in Section 3 supplies one. If experience is articulated into two horizons, there are two domains in which the question of self can be raised, and an answer given on the existence axis will bear on both. And there are, in principle, only two ways of mishandling a horizon: one may absolutize it, treating it as a self-standing entity that is what one is, or erase it, treating it as nothing at all. These are the excess and the defect of the same axis, and—as a matter of the framework’s own construction rather than a claim about the texts—they exhaust it. Two error modes across two horizons yield four positions (Table 1).
Table 1.
The four extremes.
The discourses distinguish eternalism from annihilationism; they do not mark the horizon axis, and they do not number four extremes. The division earns its place by sorting the textual material more finely than the received frame, and by accounting for a feature of the Vacchagotta passage that frame leaves unexplained. The correspondence proposed here is functional rather than exclusive: a reason may bear on more than one horizon, but it is read in relation to the horizon on which it performs a distinct, non-redundant explanatory role.
The first extreme takes the conditioned flow of the five aggregates to be an enduring possessor of experience: what speaks, feels, and undergoes the results of action is identified with a persisting “I” that runs through the arising and ceasing of its own contents. The self so posited is not the refined ātman of Upaniṣadic speculation but something closer to the popular notion of a soul, and it is the form of eternalist view the discourses confront most often. The Sabbāsava-sutta lists it among the views generated by unwise attention (ayoniso manasikāra): this self of mine which speaks and feels and experiences the results of good and bad deeds is permanent, stable, eternal, not subject to change (MN 2/I 8). What is described is the functional profile of the aggregates, and the error lies not in noticing these functions but in taking their continuity for the persistence of an owner. Phenomenologically, this is ordinary first-personal identification within the phenomenal horizon.
The correction the discourses offer exhibits the conditionedness of the flow rather than denying the flow itself. When the monk Sāti maintains that it is consciousness that runs on and transmigrates, the rebuke turns on the Buddha having stated in many ways that consciousness is dependently arisen, and that without a condition there is no origination of consciousness (MN 38/I 258). If even consciousness arises in dependence, nothing within the phenomenal horizon can bear the weight the view assigns it.
The eternalists with whom an affirmation would have aligned him hold a view of this kind: what they absolutize is the continuity of the phenomenal horizon, taken as the persistence of an owner. The first reason therefore bears on the first extreme rather than the second, whose ground lies outside experience altogether. This is the first consequence specified to Ānanda.
The second extreme posits a self that is unconditioned—independent of the aggregates, unaffected by action and its results, and established by reasoning rather than encountered in experience. It is not answered by the same argument, since it does not claim that the aggregates are permanent. The Brahmajāla-sutta’s four eternalist views divide by their grounds. Three rest on the recollection of former lives. The fourth belongs to one who is a reasoner and investigator (takkī vīmaṃsī) and proceeds by inference alone, arriving at the view that self and world are eternal, barren, unmoving as a mountain peak, standing firm as a pillar (DN 1/I 16). I take the first three to fall under the first extreme, since what they absolutize is an experientially continuous self attested by memory, and the fourth under the second, since what it posits lies beyond all experience.
The predicates kūṭaṭṭha, unmoving, and esikaṭṭhāyiṭṭhita, standing like a pillar, are terms of substantialization, converting what can be indicated only as itself into an entity with a location and a stance. This is where the terminology of Section 3 matters: to make the transcendent horizon an object among objects is to lose the very feature by which it was disclosed. To designate it as an entity is precisely to fail to take it as itself, and that failure is the second extreme.
What blocks this position is the form of insight invoked in the reason that appeals to the arising of the knowledge that all dhammas are not-self, and not the categorical subsumption of the unconditioned under anattā. Whatever scope is assigned to sabbe dhammā anattā, the unconditioned cannot be appropriated as a self-standing entity without falsifying the non-objective mode in which it is disclosed. One may therefore hold that it is real without holding that it is what one is; it is this combination, rather than either half alone, that the second extreme fails to sustain. This is the second consequence: answering that there is a self would not have been in conformity with the arising of the knowledge that all dhammas are not-self. The ground is not that the unconditioned has first been isolated and classified as not-self. It is that reifying the unconditioned would abstract it from the conditioned horizon through which it is disclosed.
The third extreme takes the aggregates to cease absolutely at death, so that a person is no more than a temporary conjunction of material elements and the continuity of action and result lapses with it. Its classical statement is attributed to Ajita Kesakambalin: at the breakup of the body fool and wise alike are annihilated and do not exist after death (DN 2/I 55–56); related positions are collected in the Diṭṭhi-saṃyutta (SN 24/III 202–224). Phenomenologically, this is the confusion of impermanence with non-existence. That the given arises and ceases in dependence describes how it proceeds, not that it fails to; annihilationism converts the manner of the flow into its abolition, erasing the conditioned continuity along with the permanence it rightly refuses. The Kaccānagotta passage marks the error directly (SN 12.15/II 17). This is the third consequence.
The fourth extreme denies the transcendent horizon altogether, and differs from the other three in its provenance: the first three are positions the discourses ascribe to others, whereas the fourth arises from a misconstrual of the Buddha’s own teaching. It reads “the aggregates are not-self” as the announcement that a self which had existed has been destroyed, and concludes that nothing remains beyond the conditioned. The error has been named as such within the Theravāda tradition: to deny not merely that nibbāna is found in the world of the aggregates but that it is real at all is to fall into the annihilationist view (uccheda-diṭṭhi) (Nyanaponika 2010, p. 104). The misconstrual is recorded as a charge brought against the Buddha—that the ascetic Gotama teaches the annihilation of an existing being—and his reply is that formerly as now he makes known suffering and the cessation of suffering (MN 22/I 140).
This is the fourth consequence: answering that there is no self would have driven an already bewildered questioner into the thought that a self he formerly had is now gone. Vacchagotta’s anticipated confusion must be distinguished from the third extreme. The annihilationism of the third extreme holds that the continuity of the conditioned person ends at death; what the discourse anticipates in Vacchagotta is not that he will cease but that something he formerly had is already gone—a loss registered in the present. Moreover, at the very moment such a thought would arise, his perceiving, thinking, and questioning continue unbroken, so what he takes himself to have lost can hardly be identified with that conditioned stream.
On the present reconstruction the loss is directed instead at a standing that had been supposed to lie beyond empirical continuity. The misreading runs in three steps: the predicative denial that the aggregates are not self is converted into the existential denial that no self exists, and this in turn into the representation of a self that once was and is now gone. This slide from predicative to existential denial is the one against which the distinction of Section 2 was introduced. In this respect the fourth extreme is the mirror image of the second. The second fixes the transcendent horizon as an independent entity; the fourth presupposes that same horizon as an independent object and then erases it.
The four reasons can accordingly be read through the four extremes: each answer is refused twice because each, given on the existence axis alone, risks a distinct error at each horizon. The fourfold structure of the passage is best explained as the trace in the text of a distinction the answer would have collapsed.
The four also reduce to two patterns. The first and second extremes are failures to keep the horizons distinct, and the ascription runs in opposite directions. In the first, determinations belonging to the unconditioned are projected onto the flow of the aggregates. In the second, what is imposed is a mode of presentation, the unconditioned being handled as though it were given. Opposite in content, identical in structure—in each, one horizon encroaches on the other’s place. I call this horizon confusion. In the third and fourth, one horizon is denied outright: nothing is transferred, and a term is struck out. I call this horizon erasure.
8. The Root of the Four Extremes: Non-Declaration as Positive Silence
What all four extremes share can now be stated precisely, and the statement bears much of the weight of what follows.
Each of the four operates on a single horizon taken by itself. The first inflates the phenomenal horizon in isolation; the second inflates the transcendent horizon in isolation; the third and fourth delete one or the other in isolation. Every one of these operations presupposes that a horizon is the kind of thing that can be taken on its own—that the two stand as separable terms, each available independently, so that one may be picked up and made absolute, or picked up and discarded, without disturbing the other.
I suggest that this presupposition is the root error, and that the four extremes are its four possible expressions. If the two horizons are neither collapsible into one nor separable into two, then no operation performed on either in isolation can be correct, and the exhaustiveness of the fourfold division is thereby explained, since the framework generated by that presupposition permits exactly four operations.
The diagnosis is not foreign to the discourses. When the Buddha declines both “everything exists” and “everything does not exist” and teaches instead by the middle, the middle is not a moderated position between two claims. It is dependent origination—a rejection of the framework in which the alternatives were formulated (SN 12.15/II 16–17). What is refused is not each answer in turn but the assumption that the terms in question can be handled one at a time.
A canonical parallel shows that the Buddha’s refusal of the two extremes turns on truth rather than on affiliation. In the Acelakassapa-sutta he replies that to say the one who acts is the one who experiences the result arrives at eternalism, and that to say one acts while another experiences arrives at annihilationism; he then declines both and teaches by the middle, setting out dependent origination (SN 12.17/II 19–20). Two features of the reply bear on the present question. The verb marks a destination: what is described is where a thesis leads, and not whose company its holder keeps. And having refused both alternatives the Buddha does not fall silent but supplies an account in their place: a refusal made to avoid unwelcome company would not call for a replacement teaching, whereas one made because both alternatives misdescribe the case does. The same pattern governs the pair at issue here. The Sabbāsava-sutta lists both “a self exists for me” and “no self exists for me” among the views generated by unwise attention (MN 2/I 8; Vetter 1988, p. 41, n. 11). The discourse does not there argue that the second is false, and I do not read it as doing so; what it places on the list is the framework in which either could be asserted. That is the framework the fourfold refusal declines to enter.15
This diagnosis supplies what the appeal to non-declaration lacked. Katsura’s non-declaration thesis holds that the Buddha’s final position on attā was avyākata; I accepted this in Section 2 as descriptively correct and objected only that it was left without content. The content can now be supplied.
One feature of SN 44.10 explains why this episode can bear the weight placed on it here. In most cases of non-declaration the Buddha simply does not answer, and the interpreter is left to reconstruct his grounds. In SN 44.10, however, the Buddha later explains his silence at length to Ānanda after Vacchagotta has withdrawn. The passage is thus a silence accompanied by its own exegesis, and the four reasons are not our inference but the text’s own account of the refusal. Whatever the silence is, it is not opaque.
Section 2 distinguished three things a silence may be, and the analysis of the four extremes now permits the discrimination. The silence is not suspensive: a speaker who had no view could not specify two distinct commitments for each answer, tracking two distinct domains. Conformity with the arising of knowledge is moreover a test only a speaker who knows the direction in which insight lies could apply. Nor is it merely pedagogical—though this qualification requires care, since a well-established reading of the undeclared questions takes them to be set aside as unprofitable, on the model of the physician who does not investigate the fletcher’s caste before removing the arrow (MN 63/I 426–432). That reading captures the fourth reason exactly, but not the other three. Alignment with eternalism or annihilationism holds whoever is asking, and conformity with the arising of knowledge is a matter of what is the case, not of what is helpful. A merely therapeutic silence would require the fourth reason alone.
A second consideration tells against reading the silence as pragmatic reticence alone. If anattā were a metaphysical denial withheld only because asserting it would reinforce the conceit “I am,” the discourses could be expected to avoid first-personal self-reference quite generally. They do not. The living arahant is described as retaining unimpaired sensory faculties and as continuing to undergo the agreeable and the disagreeable (Iti 44/38–39). He is allowed to say “I speak” and to be spoken to, using ordinary usage without conceit (SN 1.25/I 14–15). And when the Bhāra-sutta raises the question of the burden’s bearer, it answers with the person rather than declining the question (SN 22.22/III 25–26). An account that explains the absence of the denial but not the presence of these affirmations explains half the evidence.
What remains is the third possibility: that no available answer could carry the structure without distorting it. Section 7 supplies the content of that claim, extreme by extreme, and the diagnosis above supplies its root. The refusal is thus not indecision between two candidate answers; it is the recognition that both are formulated in a register whose adoption is already the error.
An objection presents itself. If the difficulty is that attā ranges over two horizons, the remedy would seem to be stipulation rather than silence. The Buddha might have distinguished the senses and answered in each—no self in the one, a reality that is not a self in the other. Why decline altogether? Three considerations bear on this.
The first is that the difficulty lies in the isolation that the proposed answer would require, and not in existential affirmation as such; the Udāna itself affirms the unconditioned. To say that there is something in the transcendent horizon as a separately specifiable term would detach it from the conditioned horizon through which it is disclosed. It would thereby convert a horizon that appears only within a relation of disclosure into a self-standing entity available for predication and appropriation. That conversion, rather than affirmation itself, is what instantiates the second extreme. The difficulty is therefore not simply that one word is equivocal between two objects, but that neither horizon can be isolated from their relation and handled as an independently given object.
The second is that the two horizons are not separable in the way stipulation would require. A stipulation assigns distinct senses to distinct subject matters, each specifiable on its own; if the diagnosis given above holds, the correct grasp is not of two things severally but of a relation, which is not conveyed by a conjunction of two claims about its terms.
The third is that the discourses elsewhere adopt this posture in a case where the reason is made explicit. When Vacchagotta asks where a liberated one reappears after death, the Buddha says the question does not apply, and offers the simile of a fire gone out, of which it cannot be said in which direction it has gone (MN 72/I 484–489). The refusal is grounded neither in ignorance nor in the unprofitability of the question, but in the inapplicability of the categories the question employs—and the Tathāgata is described there not as absent but as deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom (MN 72/I 484–489). That the same interlocutor receives the same treatment on the question of self is not a coincidence of persons but a consistency of grounds.
Two of the three conditions set in Section 2 are now met. The analysis explains why the affirmation “there is a self” is refused and why the denial “there is no self” is refused, and it does so in a way that matches the fourfold structure the passage exhibits. What remains is the third—to say what the silence preserves. Non-declaration is not a gap in the teaching but a determinate act: a refusal to let a single word settle, in a single register, what belongs to a structure the register cannot hold. But the content remains negative. We have said what the answers would have imposed; we have not said what the declining preserves, and a silence characterized solely by what it avoids is still, in Katsura’s sense, undeclared. If the four extremes converge on the presupposition that the horizons are separable, then what the silence protects is the relation that presupposition denies. What Section 2 left open as a possibility is thereby narrowed. The question was whether any form of selfhood could stand once the predicative denial had been granted; the fourfold refusal answers that if any does, it can stand only in that relation and in no other place.
9. Mutual Co-Presence
Section 8 argued that each of the four extremes takes one horizon on its own, and that the presupposition licensing this is the root error. What the extremes fail to grasp is therefore not either horizon but the relation between them. This section sets out the form of that relation. The materials are already to hand: Section 6 exhibited the relation in a single case, the contemplative procedure of the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta. What remains is to state it in general terms and to show that it holds beyond that case.
In the contemplation the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta prescribes, the aggregates are seen as impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self only against a criterion held in view throughout. The criterion, in turn, receives intuitive fulfilment only through the survey that fails at every point to instantiate it. Neither disclosure is prior. I call a relation of this form reciprocal disclosure: each horizon becomes available as such only through the other. The conditioned may occur prior to insight, but it is disclosed as conditioned only against the transcendent horizon; the transcendent is disclosed only through insight into the conditioned.
The relation is attested outside the contemplative context. The Udāna passage examined in Section 4 asserts the unconditioned in a relation: were there no not-born, no escape from the born would be discerned (Ud 8.3/80). The unconditioned is introduced as what makes escape from the conditioned intelligible. Conversely, it is indicated only from within experience, through insight into what is given, and the discourses supply no access to it that bypasses the phenomenal horizon.
The reciprocity claimed concerns disclosure and not existence. The two horizons are not separately given to a first-person view, and each shows what it is only in showing the other. Nothing here implies that the unconditioned depends for its being on anything.
The relation can be specified as the negation of the two error patterns. The two horizons are not one: they differ in mode of givenness, and to assimilate them is to produce horizon confusion. They are not two, in the sense of being separately available: to treat them as independently specifiable terms is to license taking one up on its own, and every operation so licensed is an extreme. The formula “neither one nor two” thus needs no warrant from outside this argument; it states, in negated form, the assumption shared by the four extremes. Its position is that of dependent origination with respect to “everything exists” and “everything does not exist” (Section 8): not a third answer on the axis, but the refusal of the axis.
I call the relation just specified mutual co-presence. In it the two horizons are not grasped as two separate objects. They appear within a single experience, each through the other.
The term carries a claim about where selfhood is located. Selfhood belongs to neither horizon, and it is not divided between them. It holds in the relation between them. This is why neither answer could have been given to Vacchagotta. To answer that there is a self would have placed selfhood in one horizon; to answer that there is none would have removed a horizon from view. Either move dissolves the relation, and with it the selfhood that holds there. The term is mine, as is the reconstruction it names; the discourses distinguish the conditioned from the unconditioned but do not thematize their relation in these terms. Section 5 left a difficulty in Harvey’s account and another in Albahari’s. Both are symptoms of an assumption that can now be named: that selfhood must be located in one horizon or the other, and must there either qualify as a self or fail to.
Harvey arrives at something that satisfies nearly every criterion of Selfhood yet is selfless, and on the present reconstruction the halves are not in tension. Ontologically, nibbāna is unconditioned and therefore satisfies the overlapping determinations of permanence and freedom from dukkha; phenomenologically, it is disclosed not as an isolated pole but as the horizon of release within mutual co-presence. The mastery anticipated in Section 6 is not a missing property to be added to nibbāna as an isolated entity. It is realized as freedom from appropriative subjection in the mutual co-presence of continuing conditioned life and the unconditioned. The absence of I-ness therefore marks not a defect in an otherwise complete inventory but the phenomenological fact that the unconditioned is not disclosed in isolation.
Albahari arrives at a real and invariant awareness whose relation to a determinate first-personal subject remains under-theorized. On the present reconstruction the phenomenal horizon is one of the two poles of selfhood, rather than something excluded from it. What obtains is accordingly a selfhood that holds in the relation of witnessing and what is witnessed, and not a subjectless witnessing alongside which a person merely persists. This is why the liberated one can continue to perceive, to feel, and to speak of himself in the first person without conceit (Iti 44/38–39; SN 1.25/I 14–15)—descriptions that awareness left unrelated to the person cannot underwrite. Mutual co-presence supplies the connection her account leaves open.
What obtains in mutual co-presence I call middle-way selfhood: the mode of being in which a continuing person is himself without identifying himself with either horizon. Conditioned experience is inhabited without appropriation, and the unconditioned is disclosed without being seized as what one ultimately is. The name records how the mode is arrived at. It is middle-way because it is specified only by the exclusion of the four extremes, and so is fixed at neither pole and divided between neither. It is selfhood because the place so specified is the place Vacchagotta’s question was directed at, which Section 1 fixed as the object of this inquiry: what was there called the Buddha’s selfhood is what obtains in this relation. The structure is not brought into being by liberation: insight progressively brings the relation into view, and liberation is its unobstructed manifestation.
The term invites an obvious alternative. One might call what obtains simply the integration of aggregates cleansed of craving and appropriation. An account confined to the aggregates explains why the affirmation is refused: no aggregate is what one is. It does not explain why the denial is refused as well. If what remains were the purified aggregates and nothing more, “there is no self” would be true. Its refusal would then fall back on the hearer’s condition—an explanation Section 7 and Section 8 argue to be incomplete. An account that keeps both horizons in view explains the two refusals together, and what obtains in their relation is what the term is meant to mark.
The Alagaddūpama-sutta brings the question of self under the vocabulary of appropriation. Its six standpoints for views (diṭṭhiṭṭhānāni) are each formed by regarding something as “this is mine, this I am, this is my self,” and the fifth and sixth reproduce Upaniṣadic formulae (MN 22/I 135–136; Jones 2020, pp. 82–5). The ātman teaching thus enters as one further case of such regarding, and the holding of a theory of self is classed as clinging, attavādupādāna (MN 22/I 137).
The discourse then shows what remains when that appropriation is relinquished. The gods with Inda, Brahmā and Pajāpati search for the monk whose mind is liberated, seeking to complete the specification “this (idaṃ) is what the Tathāgata’s consciousness depends on (nissitaṃ).” They do not ascertain it, and the Buddha adds that even in this very life the Tathāgata is not to be found (MN 22/I 140). The one not to be found is present and teaching; in the parallel flourish he continues to think and is honoured as the highest person (SN 22.79/III 90–91; AN 11.9/V 326). The same passage raises and rejects the charge that an existing being is being annihilated—the rejection Section 7 read as marking the fourth extreme. What fails is therefore the demonstrative and not the person. Nothing is ascertained that could be pointed to and seized, which is what appropriation requires and what the search sought. The Suttanipāta puts the point directly, and in answer to the very disjunction at issue. Asked whether such a one does not exist or endures forever, the verses reply that for one gone to the end there is no measure, and that nothing is left by which he might be spoken of (Sn 1075–1076). The dependence relinquished is appropriative rather than causal, since conditioned life continues in the one whom the search cannot reach. This is the profile the present section has derived: something obtains, first-personally, and is not available as an item.
Why what obtains there should be called selfhood is settled by what the scene retains. It may invert Indra’s search for the self in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.7–12, keeping its verbs of seeking, knowing and finding while reversing their terminus (Jones 2020, pp. 87–91). The Upaniṣadic search completes in finding. This one completes in the failure of specification, and yet the one standing at its terminus is honoured in that search’s own vocabulary as the highest person. The question the ātman inquiry posed is thus retained and answered, not retired. To call what obtains there selfhood records that continuity.
Middle-way selfhood is real in the limited sense that the mode it names obtains. The claim is not drawn from the silence, which establishes nothing of the kind, but from the canonical affirmations of the unconditioned assembled in Section 4 and from the knowledge that one is liberated (SN 22.59/III 68), examined in Section 10. It is non-substantial in that it is not an item: not the aggregates, not the unconditioned, and not a further entity standing behind them as their support. The unconditioned itself is real, as Section 4 established; middle-way selfhood is a mode rather than a thing.16
The term is one of philosophical reconstruction, not a rendering of attā, and its neighbours must be kept distinct. Subjectivity records that experience is given in the first person; mutual co-presence names the structure in which the two horizons are disclosed together; middle-way selfhood designates the first-personal mode in which the continuing person inhabits that structure. Personhood will not serve in its place. In the Nikāyas the conventional person persists before and after liberation; the worldling and the arahant alike perceive, feel, and speak, so personhood cannot register what changes between bondage and release. What liberation removes is the manner in which one horizon or the other is seized as what one ultimately is, and that question passes to the mode in which the person is themself—the mode middle-way selfhood names. The Vacchagotta passage marks the distinction itself. The fourth reason presupposes a continuing conventional person who would become more bewildered and form a new first-personal belief. What the Buddha withholds is the denial “there is no self.” The discourse thus presupposes personhood without equating it with selfhood, and the conventional person alone cannot resolve the question to which the answer is withheld. Where “subject” is used below, it names the role that first-personal predication requires—the one of whom a condition is said—and not a further entity alongside the conventional person and middle-way selfhood.
The Vajirā-sutta bears directly on this. Asked by Māra who fashioned the being, the nun Vajirā replies that no being is to be found, only a heap of formations: as “chariot” is used when the parts are assembled, so “being” is a convention where the aggregates are (SN 5.10/I 296–297). Nothing in the present account resists this. What the discourse rejects is an ultimately identifiable being or owner over and above the aggregates, and middle-way selfhood is no such entity; what it grants is the convention Section 10 shows persisting through liberation. On how a person so constituted stands to the conditioned and the unconditioned, the discourse is silent, and that silence neither supports nor forecloses this reconstruction.
If the reconstruction is right, the divergence between the Buddha’s position and the ātman discourse can finally be located. Section 5 and Section 6 established something weaker than referential identity but sufficient for the purpose: the descriptions the texts make available do not permit the two traditions to be told apart by whether an unconditioned reality is affirmed. The difference must therefore be located elsewhere—in whether the unconditioned is absolutized as a self standing on its own or disclosed within the mutual co-presence in which middle-way selfhood obtains. This is the divergence anticipated in Section 3: the same method of successive negation, and a different conclusion drawn from where it arrives.
Section 2 required that an adequate reconstruction give the refusal positive content, and the third condition is now met. Read through the four extremes and the presupposition they share, the silence is a refusal whose content is determinate: what could not be said in the register of existence and non-existence is not a fact about a hidden entity but a relation that any answer in that register would have dissolved. The silence does not by itself establish that anything obtains in that relation. It fixes the only place where anything could. The refusal is not the withholding of an available answer but the preservation of a structure that no available answer could carry. Whether the reconstruction is correct cannot be settled by its capacity to resolve difficulties in prior scholarship; what is required is that it hold where the discourses describe the process in which selfhood is at stake.
10. Middle-Way Selfhood in the Process of Liberation
The Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta sets out the process of liberation in a sequence whose stages are marked explicitly. They are seeing as it has come to be with correct understanding (yathābhūtaṃ sammappaññāya daṭṭhabbaṃ), disenchantment (nibbidā), dispassion (virāga), being liberated (vimuccati), and the knowledge that one is liberated (vimuttam iti ñāṇaṃ) (SN 22.59/III 68). I take this sequence as a test case for the possibility fixed in Section 8 and Section 9: that selfhood, if it obtains at all, obtains in the mutual co-presence of the two horizons. If the two horizons stand in that relation, it should be traceable through the process rather than appearing only at its terminus; and if it is not traceable there, the possibility remains merely formal.
Seeing as it has come to be. Section 6 argued that this contemplation discloses the aggregates as impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self while progressively clarifying the criterion against which they are measured, and that the horizon so indicated is the unconditioned the discourses affirm. If that argument holds, the process does not begin with the phenomenal horizon alone and arrive at the transcendent later. Both are in play from the first stage, which is what the reconstruction predicts.
Disenchantment. The second stage is standardly rendered by terms suggesting aversion, and this rendering has been questioned. Bhikkhu Bodhi has argued that nibbidā is not an emotional recoil but a disengagement issuing from insight—the falling away of the fascination that took the aggregates as “mine,” “I,” and “my self” (Bodhi 1980). What nibbidā undoes is precisely appropriative identification with the phenomenal horizon, the operation the first extreme performs. Within the soteriological sequence of SN 22.59, however, nibbidā is not a merely negative cessation of identification. It passes through virāga into liberation, and the Nikāyas identify the goal of this movement as nibbāna, the unconditioned (Section 4). Its orientation toward the transcendent horizon therefore derives not from a general claim that every disidentification requires another term, but from the canonical direction of the process itself. As craving and appropriation weaken, the unconditioned becomes more clearly disclosed as the horizon of release.
Dispassion. At the third stage, attachment to the aggregates fades. The sequence presents this not as a further act performed by the practitioner but as a transformation that occurs: the practitioner does not suppress attachment; attachment fades. Virāga names the deepening of the movement already begun in nibbidā: the weakening of appropriative attachment to the conditioned and the clearer disclosure of the unconditioned are two aspects of the same transition toward liberation. In this sense, virāga manifests the disclosive efficacy of mutual co-presence.
Liberation and its knowledge. At the fourth stage, disenchantment and dispassion issue in liberation from bondage; the fifth adds no further transformation, but reports the condition attained. Together they describe the liberated manifestation of middle-way selfhood, with nibbāna as the horizon of release within that mutual co-presence. What ceases at liberation is appropriative identification, and what the discourse reports on the far side of that cessation is not the extinction of first-personal life but its unobstructed form. This unobstructed form is the existential realization of the mastery anticipated in Section 6. It consists in freedom from the appropriative sway of the aggregates while conditioned life continues, and not in the power of a separate self to command them.
Liberation and the knowledge that one is liberated are both first-personal: one is undergone, the other known as one’s own condition. That knowledge has determinate content—birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived, what was to be done has been done (SN 22.59/III 68). Each of these clauses reports a condition, and a condition is someone’s. The knowledge is therefore predicated of the one whose condition it is, and is not an impersonal registering. Predication of this kind requires a subject. It does not require a substance. The subject so required is not simply the bearer of continuity, since the conventional person persists in bondage no less than in release. What the knowledge reports is a changed condition, and the question is of whom that changed condition holds.17
Liberation is predicated of the continuing conventional person. Middle-way selfhood does not name an additional bearer of that predicate standing beside the person. It names the mode in which the person now inhabits the co-presence of the two horizons, seizing neither as what he ultimately is. This division answers the question just posed: the persistence the knowledge presupposes belongs to the person, and the change it reports is a change of mode. What the fifth stage attests is that the changed condition obtains, and obtains first-personally. That the condition is the unobstructed co-presence of the two horizons is shown by the stages it completes. Something would count as a substance here only if it were available as an object that could be taken as “I” or “mine,” and Section 9 argued that a relation of reciprocal disclosure offers nothing available in that way. A mode of inhabiting it is no more available.
Liberation leaves the phenomenal horizon in place. The liberated one continues to perceive and to feel, and is no longer caught in the misidentification that took the aggregates as a substantial “I”; it is on this basis that the brahmacariya is described as having been lived. The discourses elsewhere describe the living arahant as retaining intact sensory faculties, through which the agreeable and the disagreeable are still met with, and as using the ordinary first-personal expressions of speech without the conceit that once attended them (Iti 44/38–39; SN 1.25/I 14–15). The instruction to dwell with oneself and with the Dhamma as island and refuge shows that self-reference is not itself what the teaching removes (DN 16/II 100), though it belongs to a different register, being addressed to those still in training. Shulman has argued, from a different body of material, that liberation in important strands of the early tradition is not release from bodily experience but a certain way of being in the body (Shulman 2021, p. 11). On both accounts what liberation transforms is the manner of inhabiting the given, not the fact of it.
An objection may be raised from the two nibbāna-elements. The Itivuttaka distinguishes the element with a residue remaining, in which the faculties persist and the agreeable and the disagreeable are still met with, from the element without residue, in which what is felt, being no longer delighted in, becomes cool (Iti 44/38–39). If the unconditioned admits of description apart from any continuing conditioned life, the two horizons are separable after all, and mutual co-presence describes at most a temporary arrangement.
The passage does not itself describe the unconditioned as standing apart from conditioned life. If the element without residue is nevertheless read as the liberated one’s postmortem condition, the objection must characterize that condition as an instance of such separability. Yet the Nikāyas refuse the positive characterization of that condition required by the objection. When asked about the Tathāgata after death, the Buddha declines all four existential predicates and offers the simile of the fire gone out (MN 72/I 486–488). This related refusal is consistent with the categorical non-declaration reconstructed from SN 44.10. It does not establish that mutual co-presence continues after death, but it prevents the postmortem condition from being treated as a positively described instance of separability. The element without residue therefore does not provide the counterexample the objection requires.
The discourses themselves also raise the question of a bearer rather than treating liberation as the disappearance of the conventional person. In the Bhāra-sutta the Buddha undertakes to teach the burden, its bearer, the taking up of the burden and its laying down, putting each question and answering it himself. The burden is the five aggregates of grasping; the bearer is the person—the venerable one of such a name, such a family, such a lifespan (SN 22.22/III 25–26). No bearer beyond the conventional is posited, and none is refused either.18 The discourse does not describe the laying down of the burden as the disappearance of the bearer; it identifies the laying down with the cessation of craving. What liberation alters is therefore the person’s relation to the burden, not the continued functioning of the conventional person. Middle-way selfhood is accordingly not brought into being by liberation. It is what liberation lets appear as it is.
The most developed recent alternative reaches a different conclusion from overlapping materials. Polak argues that what the Nikāyas conceptualize as the aggregates corresponds to ordinary access consciousness, and that such consciousness is not a constant feature of being engaged in the world. The transformation at issue, on his account, consists in a change of perspective in which one no longer identifies with one’s own consciousness (Polak 2023b, pp. 12–3, 23–4). Much of this I accept; his central negative claim—that we are not our viññāṇa, and that the burden of anattā falls on identification rather than on existence—is the claim advanced here under the description of appropriative identification. The disagreement concerns what remains. If liberation consists in the absence of consciousness that is introspectable and reportable, the knowledge that one is liberated becomes difficult to place, since such knowledge is, by any account, both introspectable and reportable.19
Traced through the five stages, the relation holds at each. In seeing as it has come to be, the two horizons are co-disclosed. Disenchantment loosens identification with the phenomenal horizon within a movement the discourses direct toward release in the unconditioned. Dispassion manifests the disclosive efficacy of mutual co-presence in the fading of attachment. Liberation is release from appropriative bondage, and the knowledge of it requires both a subject of whom liberation can be predicated and a phenomenal horizon retained rather than vacated. What anattā dismantles is the appropriative identification that takes one horizon as what one is; what remains is not nothing, and not an impersonal residue, but one who still says “I speak” and is still spoken to, now without the conceit that once attended the saying.
11. Objections and Limits
Three objections bear directly on the reconstruction, and I take them in order of severity; a further observation, concerning the uniformity of the four reasons, is addressed at the end of the section. Two further objections have been addressed where they arose: the charge of anachronism in the use of Husserl’s analysis, in Section 6, and the question of how much weight a single episode can carry, in Section 8.
The most serious objection is that the position defended here differs from an ātman doctrine in presentation only. It affirms an unconditioned reality; it concedes that this reality shares many of the determinations by which ātman discourse characterized what it sought; it holds that the reality is disclosed within first-person experience; and it maintains that selfhood obtains in relation to it. What, an objector may ask, has been withheld? Four differences answer the question, each grounded in the texts rather than in terminological preference.
First, the direction of appropriation is reversed. The Upaniṣadic teaching arrives at identification—tat tvam asi—and liberation consists in knowing that what one is, is that (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7). The position defended here denies precisely this—not by extending anattā categorically to the unconditioned, but by denying that it stands on its own as what one is: Section 4 found the discourses affirming the unconditioned while nowhere setting it out as a self. The two traditions arrive, by comparable procedures, at substantially overlapping descriptions of an unconditioned horizon, but do opposite things with what is disclosed there.
Second, the phenomenal horizon is not demoted. On the Advaita construal that presses the objection hardest, the empirical world is ultimately something to be seen through; Section 10 argued that the sequence in the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta moves the other way.
Third, and most sharply, what is withheld is withheld from the unconditioned itself. The unconditioned is real, but it is not what one is on its own. This is not a point on which the two traditions merely differ in emphasis. Self-standing is precisely what the ātman discourse under comparison asserts of the term it affirms, and it is precisely what is withheld here.
Fourth, selfhood is located in neither term but in the relation between them (Section 9). The relation is not a third location alongside the other two. Naming it refuses the question in the form that would require any location at all.
An objector may grant all four and press further: if the two traditions cannot be told apart by what they affirm, and differ only in whether it is appropriated, the difference is thin. Everything of substance is held in common, and what remains is an attitude. I accept the description and deny the evaluation. In the Nikāyas, appropriation is not an attitude that supervenes on an otherwise settled picture; it is the mechanism of bondage itself. Craving, clinging, and the conceit “I am” are what the path is directed against, and the aggregates are said to be dukkha in their appropriated form (SN 56.11/V 421). The holding of a theory of self is itself classed as clinging (attavādupādāna) (MN 22/I 137). If two traditions cannot be separated by what they affirm and diverge in whether what is affirmed is taken as what one is, the divergence falls at the exact point where, on the early Buddhist analysis, liberation and bondage are decided. A difference located there is not thin; it is the only difference that could matter.
The second objection grants that neither horizon is set up as a self and holds that the relation now does what a self would do. Middle-way selfhood is real; it obtains before and after liberation; the change liberation makes is a change in it. Whatever satisfies those descriptions is functioning as a substance, whatever it is called.
The reply turns on what middle-way selfhood is. It has no identity independently of the relation in which it obtains, since were either horizon absent there would be no such mode of being. Absolutization and erasure do not literally destroy the horizons but obscure the co-presence in which this selfhood becomes manifest. Nor does it admit of an intrinsic characterization independently of that relation. It can be described structurally and phenomenologically, but not as an item possessing a self-standing nature of its own. It is accordingly not a third term standing behind the two horizons, nor a further entity in which the two participate. What has no identity and no character apart from a relation is not available as an object—standing over against one, specifiable, and therefore seizable. This is why it cannot be taken as “I” or “mine,” and why the relocation the objection describes has not taken place. The objection identifies a real requirement—that something answer to these descriptions—and misidentifies what satisfies it.
The third objection is one of parsimony. Reductionist readings hold that a person is a conditioned series and nothing further, that anattā denies any locus of identity beyond it, and that liberation is the cessation of the conditions of suffering within the series (Collins 1982, pp. 7–10). On such a reading no second horizon is needed, no relation between horizons is needed, and no reconstruction of selfhood is needed. Why incur the cost? The simpler reading is serious, and considered alone it has the better claim on parsimony.
The aim is not to refute the reductionist reading but to identify the explanatory cost it incurs in relation to two features of the evidence. The first is the set of affirmations of the unconditioned assembled in Section 4 across three registers. A reductionist reading must interpret these as descriptions of the cessation of the conditioned series. But the mere ending of a series does not explain the Udāna’s counterfactual claim that, without the unborn, escape from the born could not be discerned (Ud 8.3/80). Even Smith, arguing for anti-realism, reads that counterfactual as a metaphysical claim rather than a deflationary one (Smith 2021). Frauwallner presses the point from the side of Indology, holding that to read extinction as annihilation imports an alien conception, since in the idiom the discourses draw on an extinguished fire becomes imperceptible rather than ceasing to be (Frauwallner 1997, pp. 178–9). The second is the structure of the Vacchagotta passage. The Buddha declines to say that there is no self, and that refusal is hard to place on a reading which attributes something close to that position to him. His statement that the denial would have aligned him with the annihilationists cannot be dismissed as pedagogical accommodation. Nor does the reading explain why each answer is refused twice.
The reductionist cannot simply accept these affirmations of the unconditioned at face value, because the reading’s advantage is its economy: one order of fact where this article posits two in relation. Suppose the objector grants that the not-born of the Udāna is real and is what makes the escape discernible. A term has then been admitted that is not a member of the series. With it come the questions this article takes up: how that term is disclosed, what relation the liberated person stands in to it, and why neither answer on the existence axis could be given. The saving that comes of admitting only the series and its termination is gone, and with it the objection’s advantage. The remaining option is to construe the affirmations as descriptions of cessation, and that is the figurative construal whose price has just been stated. The dilemma belongs to the reading itself: the negative construal is the condition of the parsimony that recommends it.
The point is therefore comparative: the reductionist reading remains available, but its parsimony is purchased by treating the canonical affirmations of the unconditioned as figurative and the fourfold structure of the refusal as explanatorily redundant. A reading that takes both at face value pays a different price, and which price is higher is a matter of judgment.
One evidential constraint holds on either verdict. The fifth stage of the liberation sequence—the knowledge that one is liberated (SN 22.59/III 68)—reports a determinate first-personal condition, and the descriptions of the living arahant preserve perception, practical agency, and ordinary self-reference. Neither reading licenses the erasure of first-person continuity or of reflexive knowledge of one’s own condition. What ends is appropriative identification rather than phenomenal life.
The four reasons are not uniform in kind. Only the reason appealing to the arising of the knowledge that all dhammas are not-self invokes a doctrinal formulation directly. The others identify an answer by the position it arrives at—eternalism in the one case, annihilationism in the other—or by the misunderstanding a particular hearer would form. As Section 8 argued, to arrive at a view is a matter of what a thesis commits one to, and not of whose company its holder keeps. The weight the reasons carry accordingly differs: the third measures an answer against a doctrinal formulation, the first two do so by way of a destination, and the fourth turns on what one hearer would understand.
This non-uniformity among the four reasons does not disturb the fourfold structure, because the structure is not derived from the manner in which the reasons are stated. It is derived from the error space opened by a single presupposition. The two horizons are not reducible to one and are not separable into two independently standing terms; to detach either from the relation and treat it as an independent item is already the false starting point. Once that starting point is granted, the horizons available are two and the operations that can be performed on them are two—absolutization and erasure—so the extremes it generates are exactly four. How each error is then pointed out may vary from case to case. The fourfold division stands on the presupposition, not on any uniformity among the reasons given. The schema shows the structure of the error types, and no more than that. The positive conclusions of Section 9 and Section 10 rest not on the schema alone but on its convergence with the passages assembled there.
What has been argued is therefore a claim about explanatory cost. A textual pattern in the Nikāyas—the affirmation of the unconditioned with no statement setting it out as a self, the fourfold refusal, and the five-stage sequence of liberation—is accounted for by this reconstruction more economically than by the alternatives considered here. The limits stated in Section 1 continue to hold. The apparatus is mine and not the discourses’; the corpus is stratified and preserves more than one approach to liberation, and the pattern examined here is one of them.
12. Conclusions: What the Silence Preserves
This article began with a passage in which the Buddha is asked whether there is a self, says nothing, and afterwards explains his silence to Ānanda in four reasons rather than two. Each answer is refused twice, on grounds that do not reduce to one another, and I have taken this fourfold structure as a datum requiring explanation rather than as rhetorical amplification.
The explanation proceeds from a single move: the reframing of the question from the axis of existence and non-existence to the structure of first-person experience, articulated into two horizons. Crossing them with the two ways of mishandling a horizon—absolutization and erasure—yields four extremes, through which the four reasons are best read. The affirmation “there is a self” is refused because it either converts the flow of the aggregates into an enduring owner, or converts what can be indicated only as itself into an entity with determinate standing. The denial “there is no self” is refused because it either strikes out the conditioned continuity along with the permanence rightly refused, or strikes out what the discourses affirm. Non-declaration thus neither conceals an enduring self nor eliminates every form of selfhood: it refuses two operations at once, the appropriation of either horizon as what one is and the elimination of either as nothing at all. What survives both refusals is a relation of reciprocal disclosure in which neither horizon stands alone and middle-way selfhood obtains: a real yet non-substantial, first-personal mode of being—conditioned experience inhabited without appropriation, the unconditioned disclosed without being seized.
Two consequences for the state of the question deserve statement. The first is that Katsura’s non-declaration thesis can be retained and completed rather than displaced. Non-declaration was descriptively correct and left without content; the content is now specifiable, since the silence is neither suspensive nor merely accommodated to its questioner, but structural. What was a report of the text’s surface becomes a determinate philosophical position.
The second concerns the long dispute over whether the Buddha accepted the Upaniṣadic ātman. On the reconstruction offered here, that question is badly posed, and its resistance to settlement is a symptom of the fact. Three convergent lines of argument—the descriptive and referential correspondences developed in prior scholarship, and the disclosive correspondence advanced here—support a result that stops short of referential identity. The descriptions available in these texts do not permit the two traditions to be distinguished by whether they affirm an unconditioned reality. The divergence lies instead in whether the unconditioned is appropriated as what one is or disclosed within mutual co-presence, in which middle-way selfhood obtains and nibbāna is the horizon of its first-personal manifestation. That the difference falls at the point of appropriation does not make it a small difference; it places it exactly where, on the early Buddhist analysis, liberation and bondage are decided.
The reconstruction also opens a line of inquiry that lies beyond this article’s evidence. Later Buddhist traditions that affirm an unconditioned reality—Buddha-nature doctrines among them—have often been read as departing from an early Buddhism understood to deny any such reality. If the Nikāyas affirm the unconditioned while denying that it stands alone as what one is, one common premise of that reading is weakened. Whether the later affirmations develop rather than depart from the pattern reconstructed here is a question for a separate study.
The argument has moved in four steps, and its conclusion should be stated in their terms. Section 2 opened a possibility: the predicative denial does not by itself close the question Vacchagotta asked. Section 7 and Section 8 narrowed it, since the four extremes fail together and fail for one reason, leaving the relation of the two horizons as the only place in which anything could stand. Section 9 and Section 10 tested whether anything does stand there, and found the relation traceable through the process the discourses describe. Section 11 fixed what such a finding amounts to: a claim of explanatory cost, not a proof. What Section 1 named the Buddha’s selfhood has been treated in that form throughout—opened as a possibility, narrowed to a single place, and examined where the texts describe selfhood as being at stake.
Two further tasks remain. The first is corroboration: the textual pattern examined here is drawn from a limited set of passages, and a fuller canonical basis would strengthen—or qualify—the reconstruction. The second is the relation to later Indian Buddhist thought, and in particular to the Madhyamaka analysis of svabhāva, which bears on the sense in which anything at all may be called unconditioned. Section 4 confined itself to what the Nikāyas themselves affirm, and the comparison remains to be made.
What I hope to have shown is narrower than either of these. The Buddha’s silence on the question of self has most often been read as the withholding of an answer—whether from ignorance, from prudence, or from the judgment that the question does not conduce to liberation. The passage with which this article began suggests something else. A silence explained in four reasons, arranged in two pairs, is not a gap in a teaching. It is the shape of a teaching that could not be given in the terms the question supplied.
Funding
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5B5A17090162).
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Acknowledgments
During the preparation of this manuscript, the author used Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic) and ChatGPT GPT-5.6 (OpenAI) to assist with sentence translation and revision, condensing selected passages, literature and cross-reference checks, and drafting and revising the abstract. All AI-assisted output was subsequently reviewed and revised by the author. The author takes full responsibility for the content of this publication.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
Abbreviations
| AN | Aṅguttara-nikāya |
| Dhp | Dhammapada |
| DN | Dīgha-nikāya |
| Iti | Itivuttaka |
| MN | Majjhima-nikāya |
| PTS | Pali Text Society |
| SN | Saṃyutta-nikāya |
| Sn | Suttanipāta |
| T | Taishō shinshū daizōkyō |
| T 99 | Saṃyukta-āgama |
| T 100 | Saṃyukta-āgama, second Chinese translation |
| Ud | Udāna |
Notes
| 1 | Translations from the Pāli are my own; in preparing them I have consulted the standard modern renderings, and references give the discourse number followed, after a slash, by the PTS volume and page. |
| 2 | The exclusion reflects the question rather than a judgment about these materials. What is at issue is what the Nikāya presentation itself commits one to. The Abhidhamma and the commentaries answer that question in the terms of a later systematization, and the Chinese Āgamas transmit the teaching in a different recension; to argue from either would be to settle the reading rather than to test it. Where a parallel is consulted below, it is consulted to fix the range of a claim and not to support one. The same consideration governs the use made of Husserl: he supplies formal description and no interpretation of any discourse, whereas a commentator would supply precisely that. |
| 3 | This is a hypothesis and not a historical claim. The discourses are stratified, and the text-critical questions of which strata preserve what are neither settled here nor presupposed; the hypothesis earns its place, if at all, by what the reconstruction it permits can explain, and it is defeasible by material that reconstruction cannot accommodate. The same applies to the relation between the silence before Vacchagotta and the explanation given afterwards to Ānanda. I read the latter as supplying the grounds of the former, which is how the narrative presents it, but whether the two passages stand in that relation historically is a compositional question I do not take up here. On that question, and specifically on the proposal that the dialogue with Ānanda is a later addition to the report of the silence, see (Vetter 1988, p. 41, n. 11), citing Schmithausen. The present reading of the fourth reason differs from his. Section 11 states the corresponding limits. |
| 4 | The Samanupassanā-sutta (SN 22.47/III 46) might be thought to supply it, since it traces every view of self to the five aggregates. I argue below that the passage anatomizes how views of self are formed rather than delimiting what attā could refer to. |
| 5 | The gap between non-apprehension and non-existence is modeled within a single discourse. MN 22 declares self and what belongs to self not apprehended (saccato thetato anupalabbhamāne), and shortly after describes the Tathāgata as not to be found even in this very life (MN 22/I 137–138, 140). Section 9 examines the passage. |
| 6 | Krummel (2005) likewise relocates the Buddhist middle from a theory of whether a self exists to a praxis of freedom from attachment to eternalist and annihilationist views, while the present reconstruction asks what structure the doubled grounds of SN 44.10 disclose. |
| 7 | “Phenomenal” is used here in its phenomenological sense, marking that which appears, and not in the narrower sense current in philosophy of mind, where it designates the qualitative character of a mental state. |
| 8 | In phenomenological usage the transcendent is standardly opposed to the immanent; the sense intended here is narrower. Nor is this the Kantian thing-in-itself: no claim is made about a reality lying behind appearances and inaccessible in principle, since the qualifier concerns how something is encountered rather than where it is situated. |
| 9 | On the horizon as the co-intended field of potentialities implicated in every actual experience, see (Husserl 1960, §19, pp. 44–5). The distinction between the phenomenal and transcendent horizons is the present reconstruction. |
| 10 | The three marks are stated in the Dhammapada in three successive verses whose subjects are not identical: impermanence and unsatisfactoriness are predicated of saṅkhārā, formations, while not-self is predicated of dhammā (Dhp 277–279). On an inclusive reading the latter term may extend beyond the conditioned. |
| 11 | For Harvey, contemplating the aggregates as not-Self is a practical operation aimed at dismantling attachment rather than a metaphysical declaration; the act of so contemplating is itself not-Self and is not to become an object of attachment in turn (Harvey 1995, pp. 45–6). |
| 12 | Harvey’s account of the predicates applied to nibbāna is at its sharpest in the post-canonical texts and should not be transferred wholesale, though the argumentative form in which candidate selves are rejected is a Nikāya pattern rather than a commentarial innovation. Readings that ascribe quasi-substantial standing to nibbāna have also been contested, the counter-reading being that such language is soteriological rather than ontological; the argument here does not require Harvey’s conclusion in its strongest form. |
| 13 | The present analysis follows the received Pāli reading, recently defended by Harvey (2025, pp. 74–82); for a radical emendation relocating the negative particle, see Ruzsa (2024, pp. 220–7). |
| 14 | Compare Ud 2.9/18: “Sabbaṃ paravasaṃ dukkhaṃ, sabbaṃ issariyaṃ sukhaṃ” (“All subjection is suffering; all mastery is happiness”) and MN 32/I 214: “Bhikkhu cittaṃ vasaṃ vatteti, no ca bhikkhu cittassa vasena vattati” (“The bhikkhu brings the mind under his sway and is not brought under the mind’s sway”). |
| 15 | Consulted to delimit the claim rather than to support it (see Section 1). The fourfold form is peculiar to the Pāli recension: the Saṃyukta-āgama parallel gives one ground against each answer rather than two and lacks the criterion of conformity with the arising of knowledge (T II 245b), and the second Chinese translation, which has that criterion, pairs the grounds differently (T II 444c). Both parallels, however, make explicit what the Pāli here leaves implicit, in that the Buddha declines both answers and then sets out dependent origination as teaching by the middle. |
| 16 | The objection that a substance has merely been relocated from a term to a relation is taken up in Section 11. |
| 17 | On subjectivity without the conceit “I am,” see Nizamis (2012); on why first-personal reflexivity does not by itself warrant an experiential self, see Fink (2012). |
| 18 | Nothing in the present argument requires the puggala to be an ultimate constituent. The Theravāda reading, on which it is a conventional designation (paññatti), is sufficient for the use made of it here. |
| 19 | Two further considerations favor the reading offered here, as reasons for preference rather than refutation: the unconditioned is introduced in the Udāna as what makes the discernibility of escape intelligible, a role that a purely privative reading must explain rather than assume (Ud 8.3/80); the discourses take pains to forestall the reading on which nibbāna is a nothing (Sn 758). The two readings are answerable to overlapping evidence and are not decidable by any single passage; what I claim is that the Nikāyas affirm the unconditioned in terms a privative reading strains to accommodate. |
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