“Menander protests that what he had said was not false. ‘It is on account of all these various components, the pole, axle, wheels and so on, that the vehicle is called a chariot. It’s just a generally understood term, a practical designation.’
‘Well said, your Majesty!’ Nagasena replies. ‘You know what the word chariot means! And it’s just the same with me. It’s on account of the various components of my being that I am known by the generally understood term, the practical designation, Nagasena.’1
There were many such clear and simple exchanges in the book, illustrating the Buddhist view of individual identity as a construct, a composite of matter, form, perceptions, ideas, instincts and consciousness, but without an unchanging unity or integrity.”
Buddhist anti Cartesianism
“I think, therefore I am,’ Descartes had said; and when I first came across these famous words as an undergraduate they expressed all that then seemed holy to me: individuality, the life of the mind. It was comforting to believe that the human mind was capable of acting rationally, logically and freely upon the inert outside world. I was attracted, too, by the idea of the authentic self, which I had picked up from the French existentialist philosophers, who for some reason were very popular in India. These descriptions of the self – as a discrete entity shaped through rational thought and act – helped offset the uncertainties (financial, emotional, sexual) that I lived with then.”
Non self series of Consciousness
“as this self is nothing but a series of thoughts. It suggested that the ‘I’ was not a stable and autonomous entity and indeed was no more than a convenient label for the provisional relations among its constantly changing physical and mental parts. It also matched better my experience: of finding incoherence where there was supposed to be a self, of being led on by stray thoughts, memories and moods, and thinking that nothing existed beyond that flux.”
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