Comparing The Five Aggregates And The Doctrine Of No Self

Samuel Esakoff
Charles Goodman
AAAS 105
March 15, 2018
The Five Aggregates and the Doctrine of No Self

Understanding how Buddhists arrive at the conclusion that there is no self (or a no-self) first requires an understanding of the two different types of existences that Buddhists believe in. First, there is conventional truth, which is concerned with what we can directly perceive. Conventional truth is the nominal, material aspect of the reality we occupy. It helps us process and organize sensory data from the world, guides us in making sense of our lives, and is practical. However, the conventional truth of things does not point to how or what things really are. To the extent that conventional truth doesn’t signify what a thing really is, it is “a metaphor,” a simple “verbal designation.” (Milinda 11) It is a name used in commonality to indicate something that everyone will be able to understand. To move beyond the nominal existence of something, to see its ultimate truth, requires two conditions that are not available to us. Real existence first demands that a thing be impermanent in a way that things aren’t in our physical world, and it requires that thing to have come into existence in a causally-independent manner. It must be unchanging to the fullest extent, and must reject the

Looking at the conditions of human conditions, Buddhists have concluded that there is no self in that the self is simply a term we