Hume and Buddha, Part I

A neat installment of "existential comics" recently did a compare/contrast on David Hume and the Buddha.

Here's a link to the comic.

This is the first of a series of three posts inspired thereby. What do Hume and the Buddha have in common? The denial of the self. Hume wrote, "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, ... and never can observe anything but the perception." The implication here is that the self is just a loose bundle of the perceptions that get assigned to it, there is no permanent center to the bundle.

Buddhism is built upon much the same contention. This is formally referred to as the doctrine of anatta.

Intriguingly, the anatta did not get in the way of the Buddhist inheritance of the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation. You might think that strange and ask, what IS it that gets reincarnated, if it is not the self or soul? The Buddha answers: it is the false appearance that there is a soul that gets reincarnated, so that the illusory "I" passes into a newborn baby and the circle of life and fate continues until I can escape it by realizing that there is no I, dissolving my alleged self into Nirvana.

Nothingness is not the threat of death, it is the promise. Immortality is the threat, because the illusion of selfness has a wretched skill at self-preservation.

It any rate, it is true that anatta bears a resemblance to ideas that Hume reached by another path. More on this tomorrow.

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