http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/wings/part1.html#part1-a

You completely misrepresented the essay and my post. I know full well that the sense of self is due to the activity of the khandhas. The point of the essay is that in Buddhism you’re trying to refine your sense of self until you’re ultimately ready to adopt the phenomenological mode of dependent co-arising and move beyond perceptions of self/not-self. Most Buddhists try to turn Buddhism into a philosophy instead of realizing that it is a graduated practice so they completely misconstrue the Buddha’s teachings and take them out of context. Moving beyond self/not-self is reserved for people who have thoroughly mastered a phenomenological mode of perception, not for beginner Buddhists or everyday people:

“As §195 states, this clear knowledge is based on knowledge of the four noble truths. These truths are best understood not as the content of a belief, but as categories for viewing and classifying the processes of immediate experience. In §51, the Buddha refers to them as categories of “appropriate attention,” a skillful alternative to the common way that people categorize their experience in terms of two dichotomies: being/non-being, and self/other. For several reasons, these common dichotomies are actually problem-causing, rather than problem-solving. The being/non-being dichotomy, for instance, comes down to the question of whether or not there exist actual “things” behind the changing phenomena of experience. This type of questioning deals, by definition, with possibilities that cannot be directly experienced: If the things in question could be experienced, then they wouldn’t be lying behind experience. Thus the being/non-being dichotomy pulls one’s attention into the land of conjecture — “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views” [MN 72] — and away from the area of direct awareness where the real problem and its solution lie [§186].

As for the self/other dichotomy, there is the initial difficulty of determining what the self is. Any true self would have to lie totally under one’s own control, and yet nothing that one might try to identify as one’s self actually meets this criterion. Although the sense of self may seem intuitive enough, when carefully examined it shows itself to be based on confused perceptions and ideas. If one’s basic categories for understanding experience are a cause for confusion in this way, they can lead only to confused, unskillful action, and thus to more suffering and stress. For example, when people view the source of their problems as poor relationships between themselves and others, or inadequate integration of the self, they are trying to analyze their problems in terms of categories that are ultimately uncertain. Thus there is a built-in uncertainty in the efforts they make to solve their problems in terms of those categories.

A second problem, no matter how one might define a self, is the question of how to prove whether or not it actually exists. This question entangles the mind in the unresolvable problems of the being/non-being dichotomy mentioned above: Because the problem is phrased in terms that cannot be directly experienced, it forces the solution into a realm that cannot be experienced, either. This fact probably explains the Buddha’s statement in §230 to the effect that if one even asks the question of whether there is someone standing outside the processes of dependent co-arising to whom those processes pertain, it is impossible to lead the life that will bring about an end to suffering. Regardless of whether one would answer the question with a yes or a no, the terms of the question focus on an area outside of direct experience and thus away from the true problem — the direct experience of suffering — and actually make it worse. If one assumes the existence of a self, one must take on the implicit imperative to maximize the self’s well-being through recourse to the “other.” This recourse may involve either exploiting the “other” or swallowing the “other” into the self by equating one’s self with the cosmos as a whole. Either approach involves clinging and craving, which lead to further suffering and stress. On the other hand, if one denies any kind of self, saying that the cosmos is totally “other,” then one is assuming that there is nothing with any long-term existence whose happiness deserves anything more than quick, short-term attempts at finding pleasure. The imperative in this case would be to pursue immediate pleasure with as little effort as possible, thus aborting any sustained effort to bring about an end to suffering.

These problems explain why the Buddha regarded questions of existence and non-existence, self and no-self, as unskillful, inappropriate ways of attending to experience.”

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/wings/part3.html#part3-h-1

“It is important to note that dependent co-arising makes no statements as to the existence or lack of existence of any entity to which these events pertain or to whom they belong [§230]. As we noted above, such terms of analysis as “being,” “non-being,” “self,” or “other,” pertain properly to the modes of cosmology and personal narrative, and have no place in a radically phenomenological analysis. Questions and terms that derive from the conventions of narrative and the construction of a world view have no place in the direct awareness of experience in and of itself. This is one reason why people who have not mastered the path of practice, and who thus function primarily in terms of a world view or a sense of their own personal story, find the teaching of dependent co-arising so inscrutable. Even though the Buddha’s phenomenological approach answered his questions as to the nature of kamma, it also reshaped his questions so that they had little in common with the questions that most people bring to the practice. As with all insights gained on the phenomenological level, dependent co-arising is expressed in terms closest to the actual experience of events. Only when a person has become thoroughly familiar with that level of experience is the analysis fully intelligible. Thus, although the detailed nature of dependent co-arising is one of its strengths, it is also one of its weaknesses as a teaching tool, for the subtlety and complexity of the analysis can be intimidating even to advanced practitioners.”

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/wings/part1.html#part1-b

“The first step is simply to identify the hindrances and factors for Awakening as they are experienced, noting their presence and absence in the mind — a movement toward what the Buddha called “entering into emptiness” [II/B]. As III/D makes clear, there are several preliminary steps in concentration practice leading up to the ability to do this. When these are mastered, one can focus on, say, the hindrance of ill-will not in terms of the object of the ill-will, but on the quality of ill-will as a mere event in the mind. The question here is not, “What am I angry about?” or “What did that person do wrong?” but simply “What is happening in my mind? How can it be classed?” Given the well-known Buddhist teaching on not-self, some people have wondered why the questions of appropriate attention at this step would use such concepts as “me” and “my,” but these concepts are essential at this stage — where the mind is still more at home in the narrative mode of “self” and “others” — in pointing out that the focus of the inquiry should be directed within, rather than without. This helps to bring one’s frame of reference to the experience of mental qualities as phenomena in and of themselves, and away from the narratives that provoked the anger to begin with. Only when this shift in reference is secure can the concepts of “me” and “my” be dispensed with, in the third step below.”

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/wings/part2.html#part2-a

Without benefit of yet having read the Pinker, it seems like it could dovetail with the following website (through which, alas, I’ve only skimmed); maybe you’ll find it interesting:

http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/descriptions.htm

Tak

You’ve managed to perform psychoanalytic diagnostics on millions of people you’ve never met, simultaneously.

It’s not psychoanalysis. It’s Buddhism. (See comment #18)

But if you live long enough, you notice patterns. Pretty much whenever somebody goes off the wall on some issue, ego-attachment is involved.

And I don’t have to know you very well to diagnose that you are an asshole.

Fascinating! You’ve managed to perform psychoanalytic diagnostics on millions of people you’ve never met, simultaneously. And it is totally sad and myopic how They are always setting up Their “ol’ Us-Them dichotomy”, isn’t it? Oh well…that’s just the way They are.

That doesn’t strike me as something that the Buddha taught at all. Granted, my knowledge lies with the Theravada tradition and I’m not well schooled in Zen ideas. It doesn’t seem like he taught that the ego was evil, but that the concept of ego could be used in either skillful or unskillful ways.

Oh, dear, James, this is Basic Buddhism 101, Lesson 1, in all schools of Buddhism. The Four Noble Truths. Remember those?

The truth of suffering (dukkha)
The truth of the cause of suffering (samudaya)
The truth of the end of suffering (nirhodha)
The truth of the path that frees us from suffering (magga)

Put into English: (1) Life is suffering (also imperfect, unsatisfactory, temporary). (2)This suffering is caused by thirst (tanha) or grasping, and this includes physical and emotional thirsts or desires or greed, and at the root of the thirst is ignorance of the nature of the self (a lot gets packed into the Second Truth). (3) There is a way out of this suffering, and (4) that way is to follow the Eightfold Path.

The Four Noble Truths are the entirety of the Buddha’s teaching. The rest is pretty much commentary.

The Buddha taught in his very first sermon that tanha grows from ignorance of the self. We go through life grabbing one thing after another to get a sense of security about ourselves. We attach not only to physical things, but also to ideas and opinions about ourselves and the world around us. It is this grasping that is the source of dukkha The ENTIRE POINT OF ALL SCHOOLS OF BUDDHISM is to resolve this ignorance of the nature of the self..

The essay you linked to is, IMO, bizarre, and not at all in line with Theravada teaching, much less Zen. Note also that I did not say the ego was evil, but any Theravadin should tell you that the ego is a by-product of the skandhas (or khandhas in Pali; I tend to use the Sanskrit names of things) therefore, ego is dukkha.

The skandhas should come up in Basic Buddhism 101, Lesson 2. And this is right out of the Pali Canon; it’s not a Mahayana thing. Very briefly, the skandhas are form (body), senses, conception, volition, and consciousness. When these elements come together, they make a being. But the being is void of intrinsic permanent self (anatman).Needless to say, there are entire libraries of commentary on all this. This is just the intro to the intro.

Now, Theravada and Mahayana do understand the doctrine of anatman somewhat differently. Indeed, it is the point that most sets them apart. Very basically, Theravada considers anatman to mean that an individual’s ego or personality is a fetter and delusion. Once freed of this delusion, the individual may enjoy the bliss of Nirvana.

While the skandhas are still together and functioning there will be an ego or personality clanking around in them, but the point of Theravada is to perceive that the ego/personality is not your true and unchanging self, but just a temporary creation of the skandhas.

(Hence, the essay you linked to was extremely weird, and I wonder if the person who wrote it was even a Buddhist in spite of the Buddhist-sounding name. To claim that the point of Buddhism is to create a well-integrated ego and personality is something like saying that the point of carpentry is to start fires.)

Mahayana, on the other hand, considers all physical forms to be void of intrinsic self (a teaching called shunyata, which means “emptiness”) and individual autonomy to be a delusion. Therefore, according to Mahayana, individual enlightenment is not possible. The ideal in Mahayana is to enable all beings to be enlightened together, not only out of a sense of compassion, but because all beings are One Being.

Ego-attachment is kind of a Zen term, but Theravada teaches the same thing. Any kind of grasping — mental, emotional, or physical — comes under the heading of samudaya, which is the cause of dukkha.

That doesn’t strike me as something that the Buddha taught at all. Granted, my knowledge lies with the Theravada tradition and I’m not well schooled in Zen ideas. It doesn’t seem like he taught that the ego was evil, but that the concept of ego could be used in either skillful or unskillful ways. I recommend the following essay:

http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Uncollected/MiscEssays/The%20Problem%20Of%20Egolessness.pdf