THE UPANISHADS, the late Vedic texts that preceded the rise of Buddhism, proclaimed the supreme aim of the contemplative quest to be the realization of the atman, the immortal self, the ultimate subject that remains unchanging behind the flux of experience. The atman, these texts declare, is essentially identical with brahman, the changeless ground and source of the manifest universe. The task of contemplation is to discover this nondual identity, and this realization is itself the key to immortality.
This quest relegated the actual person, the empirical self, to a secondary status. For the Upanishads, people in their individual being are mere ephemeral phenomena covering up the changeless reality, the atman–brahman, which stands silent beyond the range of thought and speech. When the Buddha appeared on the Indian scene, his revolutionary teaching of anatta, “nonself,” turned the atman project upside down. The Buddha denied that any persisting self could be found among or behind the factors of experience. He taught that all the components of experience, including consciousness itself, are to be seen with proper wisdom as anatta—as not an atman—that is, as “not mine, not I, not my self.”
This move had the effect of redirecting attention away from the search for an ineffable self and toward the mind in its concrete actuality. The Buddha’s own focus on the mind was primarily pragmatic. The mind, he said, is the source of harm and suffering, of well-being and happiness, and the task he assigns us is to cultivate and liberate the mind, which requires an understanding of the mind’s inner workings.
