The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness and Nirvana in Early Buddhism

The book is organized into two major parts. Part I, “Exploring the Notion of Selflessness,” examines the question of Self, the meaning of “not-Self,” the Buddhist critique of metaphysical selfhood, the criteria for selfhood, the role of the “I am” attitude, the development of a self without boundaries, personal continuity, responsibility across lives, the relation between world and self, and debates over the life-principle and the between-lives state. Part II, “Saṃsāric and Nibbānic Discernment,” turns to the dynamics of consciousness and liberation, analyzing the centrality of discernment, conditioned arising, the perceptual process, the nature of viññāṇa, bhavaṅga and the brightly shining mind, nibbāna as timeless stopping, nibbāna as a transformed state of discernment, and the status of the tathāgata. The conclusion draws these themes together by presenting early Buddhist selflessness as a rigorous analysis of conditioned personality, karmic continuity, consciousness, and liberation, in which freedom is achieved not by discovering a permanent Self, but by ending attachment to the processes wrongly appropriated as self.