[MD] Selfishness a Buddhist idea?

[Ant McWatt]

Platt originally asked Sept 15th:

Can anyone explain the “Buddhist idea that you have to take care of 
yourself?”

Khaled replied Sept 15th:

Ant, Platt

Here is how I see it.

It’s like when the oxygen mask drops down in the airplane due to lack of
pressure. First you have to put on that mask, before you attempt to help
others.  If you think that you are the capable, and able person, the one
siting by that emergency door, you need to be able to function. Putting
the oxygen mask on your children first (if you are a parent), may causes
you to pass out before you are done rendering you useless when more
emergencies arise.

Having taken care of yourself first, --and here again, you know that you
are in charge of your family and need to take care of them, and no you
were not democratically elected to that position-- now you are able to
take care of the rest.

Ant McWatt commented Sept. 16th:

Sounds like a good answer to me, Khaled.  BTW, if the self is fundamentally 
an illusion so is selfishness.  Anyway, I think most people eventually 
grow-up and get beyond the “selfishness stage” especially after they have 
children.

Platt then asked Sept 16th:

Some doublespeak going on here. First Khaled says you have to take care of
yourself first. Ant agrees. Then says the self is a fantasy. So which is it 
fellas?
Is yourself real or a spook?


Ant McWatt comments:

Platt,

Doublespeak it is because it depends whether you’re looking at the self from 
the static viewpoint of the MOQ (where the self is real) or from the Dynamic 
perspective where it’s just a spook.  To clarify, in the section of “Lila’s 
Child” titled “Questions and Answers”, note Pirsig’s answer here:

“The Buddhists would say [the self] is certainly central to a concept of 
reality but it is not central to or even a part of reality itself. 
Enlightenment involves getting rid of the concept of ‘I’ (small self) and 
seeing the reality in which the small self is absent (big self).”

This analogy is explained further by Pirsig in the following quote:

“In Zen Buddhism ‘Big-Self’ and ‘small-self’ are fundamental teaching 
concepts.  The small-self, the static patterns of ego, is attracted by the 
‘perfume’ of the ‘Big-Self’ which it senses is around but cannot find or 
even identify...  Through suppression of the small-self by meditation or 
fasting or vision quests or other disciplines [such as taking peyote or LSD 
in a controlled environment], the Big-Self can be revealed in a moment 
sometimes called 180 degrees enlightenment.  Then a long discipline is 
undertaken by which the Big-Self takes over and dissolves the small-self 
into a 360 degrees enlightenment or full Buddhahood.”  (Pirsig to McWatt, 
January 15th 1994)

As already noted in my earlier “Pirsig’s idea of the individual” post of 
August 30th to Ham, an enlightened person “…is once again aware of [static 
patterns such as] mountains as genuinely present, but in a quite different 
register of awareness from his original, naïve one.  It is not simply that 
he appreciates their dependent status: rather he has become capable of those 
‘double exposures’ through which a mountain both ‘dissolves’ into and 
‘condenses’ a world, and is both a unique, palpable particular, yet an 
expression of a ‘wondrous’ [Dynamic] whole.”

David E. Cooper, ‘Emptiness: Interpretation and metaphor’ in Contemporary 
Buddhism, Vol.3, Issue 1 (May 2002), p.18

Furthermore, as already noted in my earlier “Pirsig’s idea of the 
individual” post from September 15th, the MOQ understanding of the self can 
be written in the form of a (positive) tetralemma:

The self is real (i.e., it exists in static reality along with everything 
else we derive from experience)

The self is not real (from a Dynamic perspective)

The self is both real and not real (it is real from a static perspective but 
not from a Dynamic perspective)

The self is neither real nor not real (neither ultimately real from a 
Dynamic perspective nor completely non-existent from a static perspective)

“The positive tetralemma is an expression of the conventional validity of 
the two truths. The positive import of the two truths is that whilst it is 
stated that nothing is inherently real, i.e., nothing exists by virtue of 
its own independent essence, the familiar everyday world is, nonetheless, 
conventionally real and exists in a way which does not contradict 
experience. With this acceptance of conventional truth we are not left with 
an absurd conception of reality in which nothing exists in any sense 
whatsoever. Thus the contradictory standpoints of (naïve or philosophical) 
reification and nihilism are repudiated in favour of a ‘middle way’. The 
four formulations of propositions are traditionally presented in an order in 
which each view presents a progressively better expression of the middle way 
perspective whilst each is valid with qualification.”

Paul Turner

http://www.robertpirsig.org/Tetralemma.htm


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