Reading guide
A totalizing claim about the scope of self-view
The discourse's opening move covers extraordinary ground in a single sentence: every ascetic and brahmin who regards anything at all as self is, in every case, regarding the five grasping aggregates or one of them. This is not a claim about Buddhist practitioners specifically but about the entire field of contemporary religious and philosophical speculation on selfhood, asserting that it all reduces, without remainder, to the same fivefold classificatory scheme this book has been using throughout.
From the fourfold formula to the conceit "I am"
The discourse then narrows to its psychological analysis: someone not rid of the fourfold self-identification formula is, by that very fact, not rid of the conceit “I am” (asmimāna). As long as that conceit persists, the five faculties (the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body) are “conceived” — taken up as belonging to or constituting a self — along with the mind, ideas, and what the discourse calls “the element of ignorance.”
A specific list of nine self-referential thoughts
Struck by feelings born of contact with ignorance, an unlearned ordinary person generates a specific sequence of nine thoughts: ‘I am’, ‘I am this’, ‘I will be’, ‘I will not be’, ‘I will have form’, ‘I will be formless’, ‘I will be percipient’, ‘I will not be percipient’, ‘I will be neither percipient nor non-percipient’. This sequence moves from a bare present-tense assertion of existence through increasingly specific speculations about the nature of a future self — embodied or formless, conscious or unconscious in various ways.
The faculties stay put; only the response to them changes
The discourse's resolution is precise: the five faculties themselves “stay right where they are” — nothing about sensory experience itself needs to change. What changes for a learned noble disciple is that ignorance about them is given up and knowledge arises instead, and with that shift, none of the nine self-referential thoughts arises any longer. The problem, on this discourse's account, was never the faculties themselves but the ignorance interpreting them.
Key terms
The text
§1“Mendicants, whatever ascetics and brahmins regard various kinds of things as self, all regard the five grasping aggregates, or one of them. What five? It’s when an unlearned ordinary person has not seen the noble ones, and is neither skilled nor trained in the teaching of the noble ones. They’ve not seen true persons, and are neither skilled nor trained in the teaching of the true persons. They regard form as self, self as having form, form in self, or self in form. They regard feeling … perception … choices … consciousness as self, self as having consciousness, consciousness in self, or self in consciousness.
§2So they’re not rid of this way of regarding things, and the conceit ‘I am’. As long as they’re not rid of the conceit ‘I am’, the five faculties are conceived—the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. The mind, ideas, and the element of ignorance are all present. Struck by feelings born of contact with ignorance, an unlearned ordinary person thinks ‘I am’, ‘I am this’, ‘I will be’, ‘I will not be’, ‘I will have form’, ‘I will be formless’, ‘I will be percipient’, ‘I will not be percipient’, ‘I will be neither percipient nor non-percipient’.
§3The five faculties stay right where they are. But a learned noble disciple gives up ignorance about them and gives rise to knowledge. With the fading away of ignorance and the arising of knowledge, they don’t think ‘I am’, ‘I am this’, ‘I will be’, ‘I will not be’, ‘I will have form’, ‘I will be formless’, ‘I will be percipient’, ‘I will be non-percipient’, ‘I will be neither percipient nor non-percipient’.”
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