Samsara & Selfhood: This “Me” Character

My post this week will be my last as an IDP blogger. Among other things, I’ve realized the need to refocus my practice. I want to dedicate more time to my sitting meditation and yoga training and, in doing so, spend less time with my contemplative (off the cushion) endeavors. It’s all too easy for me to devote hours of my time thinking, listening, and reading about various aspects of the Buddhist philosophical tradition. Indeed, as a graduate student, I spend most of my days in my mind working with one philosophical question or another.

And although this contemplative practice is useful and important, I’ve begun to realize over the last few weeks that I’ve allowed the ease of contemplation to pull me away from the being of Buddhism. What I’ve always loved about Buddhism is that it’s not something that you are. Or something that you become. It’s something that you do. To “be” Buddhist is to cultivate a Buddhist practice. And to cultivate something is to do something.

Sure, contemplation is undoubtedly a part of this doing, this on-going process of both becoming friends with yourself, and learning to move through the world with intention and compassion. But for me, I have realized, somewhere along the line my ease and comfort with contemplation has turned this kind of thinking and learning into yet another facet of the ego. Thinking, reading, writing, and contemplating – even about Buddhism – has become “who I am.” Take for instance the fact that in just these three short paragraphs I’ve said the words me, my or I almost twenty times already...

Which interestingly enough brings this blog back to where it started. Almost a year ago, when I began writing for the IDP blog I decided to frame my posts each week under the heading “Samsara & Selfhood” for this very reason. I understand the two to be one in the same. It is this “me” character that traps us in the cycles of samsara. It is our ego, our attachment to our “selves,” that more often than not causes us to suffer. Speaking from my own experience, it has been my struggle to distance myself from my self that has always left me stuck. It has been the Buddhist notion of anatman that I’ve always instinctively known to be true, but also always struggled to negotiate with my lived reality.

Unsurprisingly this is also where my academic interests overlap and intersect with Buddhist philosophy. Bear with me for a moment. As a queer theorist, my work and understanding of the self is primarily informed by poststructuralist thought, or more specifically, what is called “the discursive turn.” Without diving too deep into gender/feminist/queer studies 101 this “turn” was simply the moment where western academics realized what the Buddha knew thousands of years ago. This “me” character is something we create out of the stories that we tell. As such, it is socially constructed into being, and only exists through the repetitive, performative nature of its telling. There is no self, no essence, no “me” outside of or underneath the actions and doings we embody, and because others are always already implicated in these very doings we – as beings – exists interdependently through the very discourses we have learned to speak. In short, there is no self.

Yet. I sit here typing these sentences. And you sit there reading these words. There is an on-going debate in feminist studies about this paradox. Its what I understand some Buddhist thinkers to have termed the negotiation between the “ultimate” view and the “relative” view. Ultimately, there is no self, no me. Yet, relatively I am breathing this air, going to this graduate school, and existing in this world. Like all great paradoxes, and the Buddhist path itself, the answer is found in the middle. Both can be true at once.

Though they use very different languages to say it, both Buddhist and feminist thinkers have found that suffering (and you know, oppression…) is caused when there is attachment to the stories that we tell on either the personal or societal level. My work focuses on the stories of the self. Other feminists focus on the stories of the nation, family, race, gender, economy, etc. etc. At any rate, it seems to me that much of the struggle comes back to the negotiation of the ultimate v. the relative. For example, we know that race has been historically and socially constructed in order for some people to control and exploit others. Yet, to be a person of color in this world means dealing with the very real effects of racism, colonization, and systemic disenfranchisement (none of which we are “post” yet, btw).  

And so, after all of that, I want to conclude my final IDP post with these questions: How do you negotiate the ultimate and relative view of the self as you live in the world that we live in? How do you distance yourself from your self, knowing it is nothing more than a story that you tell? What aspects of your practice, or kinds of practices, help you stay grounded in a distant view of your “me” character while still moving in the world inadvertently telling your “me” story?  In short, how to do you negotiate samsara and selfhood?

I have thoroughly enjoyed participating as an active member of the IDP blog, and sincerely cherish every piece of insight and support that this online Sangha has given me over the last year. It is with great appreciation, respect, and tenderness that I sign off now and forward with my personal practice away from the interwebs… with peace, Angela.