56अनत्तलक्खणसुत्त · Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta

Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.59, Pali canon · translations by Ñāṇamoli Thera (1981), Thanissaro Bhikkhu (1993, rev. 2013) and Bhikkhu Sujato (2018)

Linked to 22 chapters: supports 8 · contradicts 7 · mechanism 4 · same claim 8 · pairing 7

The Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta is two pages long and contains one argument, run five times. The Buddha is at Isipatana outside Varanasi, days after the first sermon, addressing the five men who had kept austerities with him and had walked away when he gave them up. He takes a person apart into five constituents — body, feeling, perception, volition, consciousness — and says of each that it is not self. His reason is control: what was your self would not turn on you, and would do as it was told; these do neither. He then puts three questions about each constituent and receives the same three answers, and converts the answers into an instruction that covers every instance of each constituent, past and future, inside and outside, coarse and fine, with nothing left over. The discourse closes with the five listeners released. It is the shortest complete statement of the doctrine that divides early Buddhism from the Upaniṣadic thought around it, and it is also the text most often summarised into a claim it does not make.

At Isipatana

Isipatana is Sarnath, about ten kilometres north of Varanasi, and the deer park is where the five had settled after leaving him at Uruvelā. The Pali calls them pañcavaggiyā bhikkhū, the monks of the group of five: Koṇḍañña, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahānāma and Assaji. They had shared six years of self-mortification with him and had left in disgust when he began to eat again, and the Vinaya's account has them agreeing among themselves not to rise when he approached and then rising anyway.

The first discourse given to them in that park, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, set out the middle way and the four truths, and at its end one of the five, Koṇḍañña, saw the truth of it. This is the second. The Vinaya's Mahāvagga puts a few days between them, during which the remaining four came to the same first sight, and reports that at the end of this second discourse all five were released. Thanissaro Bhikkhu's headnote records the tradition's claim for it: "the first of the Buddha’s discourses during which his listeners became arahants."

Form is not self

The five constituents, the khandhā, are the inventory the discourse works through. Rūpa is form: the body and everything material about a person, the part that can be weighed. Vedanā is feeling in the narrow sense of the tone of an experience, pleasant, painful or neither, not emotion. Saññā is perception in the sense of recognition, the act that sorts an incoming sensation under a name and makes it a blue thing or a drum. Saṅkhārā are the volitional formations, the intending and willing and disposing that issue in action. Viññāṇa is consciousness, the bare knowing that occurs at each of the six senses when an object meets its faculty. The list is not a set of parts to be assembled into a person; it is a set of functions in which everything that can be observed about a person shows up.

Translators disagree about every one of them except the first, which is a fair warning about how much of the doctrine sits in the vocabulary.

The argument in these four paragraphs is a conditional and its denial. Suppose form were the self. Then two things would follow: form would not run to sickness, and form would answer to a wish about how it should be. Neither holds. Bodies fall ill without being consulted, and no one has ever made a body be as he asked. So form is not the self. Then the same two tests, in the same words, for feeling, perception, volition and consciousness.

Everything turns on the definition of self that is assumed and never argued for. A self, in the argument, is something that belongs to me in the strong sense, so that it is under my command and cannot harm me. That is not an idle definition; it is close to what the Upaniṣads meant by ātman, an unchanging inner controller, and the discourse is addressed to men who already held it. Read that way the argument is not a general proof about all conceivable selves. It is a test applied to five candidates by a criterion the audience already accepted, and it reports that every candidate fails.

Impermanent, suffering, not fit to be regarded as self

The second movement replaces assertion with questioning, and it reaches the same conclusion by a different road. Nothing here is about control. The three steps are: what changes is impermanent; what is impermanent is suffering, because what changes cannot be held and the holding of it is the pain; and what is impermanent and painful and liable to change is not a fit thing to take as mine, as me, as my self. The three marks of existence are being run as a chain, and the third is derived from the first two rather than asserted alongside them.

The verb in the last question is samanupassituṁ, to regard or to consider, and the object is a way of seeing rather than a fact about the world. The question is not whether form is a self but whether it is fit to be looked at as one. The three phrases the five reject — this is mine, I am this, this is my self — correspond to craving, to conceit and to view, and the tradition reads them as three separate habits rather than as three ways of saying one thing.

This is not mine

The formula is the working form of the doctrine, and the list of eleven terms attached to it is what makes it exhaustive. Three times, two of place, two of coarseness, two of standing, two of distance: eleven positions covering every instance of the constituent. The point of the list is that nothing is exempted. A self that had been ruled out of present, coarse, internal form might still be hiding in subtle or remote or future form, and the sentence closes that off before the thought can be had. Sabbaṁ rūpaṁ, all form, is the operative word, and the same closure is stated for each of the other four.

Thanissaro's one note on the discourse is about that word. Sabba, every, is the same word as "all", and he points to a set of discourses which, on his reading, indicate "a type of consciousness that lies outside the range of 'all'" and so falls outside the constituent named here. Whether the closure is total therefore depends on a question the text itself does not raise. Ñāṇamoli's 1981 translation, made for the Buddhist Publication Society's Three Cardinal Discourses of the Buddha, carries no note on the point at all; it gives the text plain and leaves the reader with the eleven terms as they stand.

Weariness, fading, release

The closing sequence is four steps in nine Pali words, and each is the cause of the next. Nibbidā, the weariness or turning away that the translators render as estrangement, disenchantment and disillusionment, is what seeing the eleven-fold formula produces. From weariness comes virāga, the fading of passion, the draining of the pull toward the five. From the fading of passion comes vimutti, release. And release is not a state to be inferred; it announces itself, and the knowing of it is the last step.

The last word of the Pali, sattamaṁ, is the editors' numbering: this is the seventh discourse of the upaya group in the collection on the constituents. The final clause says that the five were freed anupādāya, by not clinging, while the discourse was still being spoken. The Vinaya, which tells the same episode, adds the count that the tradition has kept: with these five there were then six in the world who were free.

What the discourse does not say

The sutta says of each of five things that it is not self. It nowhere says that there is no self. The distinction is not a modern nicety; it survives a change of language badly, and almost every short summary of the text loses it.

Two facts about the canon keep the question open. The first is that the Buddha, asked directly by the wanderer Vacchagotta whether there is a self and then whether there is not, answered neither; Thanissaro's edition of this discourse points the reader to that exchange. The second is that elsewhere the formula is extended past the constituents: sabbe dhammā anattā, all things are not self, which is either the general thesis stated at last or the same predication applied to a wider list, depending on what dhammā is taken to cover.

The Theravāda commentarial tradition and most modern translators read the discourse as exhaustive. The five constituents are all there is to a person; each has been shown not to be self; the eleven terms leave no instance outside the argument; therefore there is no self to be found, and the silence to Vacchagotta was a pedagogical refusal, not a reservation. Thanissaro argues the other way, that not-self is offered as a way of regarding things and a means of letting go rather than as an answer to an ontological question, and that the texts deliberately keep the question unanswered. K. R. Norman made the philological case in 1981 that anattā in these formulas is a predicate, "X is not the self", and not an existential denial. Joaquín Pérez-Remón pressed the argument that the early texts leave room for a self; Steven Collins in Selfless Persons (1982) and Peter Harvey in The Selfless Mind (1995) answered it at length and are generally taken to have had the better of the exchange. What is not in dispute is the reading of the sentences themselves. The disagreement is entirely about what silence, and an exhaustive list, add up to.

Since the fifth century BC

The discourse sits at SN 22.59, the seventh sutta of the group on involvement in the collection on the constituents, at page 66 of the third volume of the Pali Text Society's edition. The Vinaya's Mahāvagga carries the same episode inside its account of the first months after the awakening, which is why the text has always been read as narrative as well as doctrine. A counterpart survives in the Chinese Saṁyukta Āgama, and the episode of the five is told again in the Sanskrit Catuṣpariṣatsūtra, so the discourse is older than the division of the schools that transmitted it.

Inside the tradition, the argument was worked on rather than merely repeated. The Abhidhamma took the five constituents apart into the moment-by-moment events that compose them, and the first and longest chapter of the Kathāvatthu is a debate with the Puggalavādins, who held that a person is neither identical with the constituents nor different from them. That school kept its position for centuries and was answered rather than ignored. Later Madhyamaka extended the denial from the self to the constituents themselves, so that the very things this discourse leaves standing became the next thing to be emptied. Buddhaghosa's commentary on the collection, the Sāratthappakāsinī, settles the Theravāda reading of the text as an exhaustive demonstration.

Modern scholarship has moved the discussion from what the doctrine asserts to what it was aimed at. Richard Gombrich reads the control argument as a direct answer to the Upaniṣadic ātman, the inner controller, and the five constituents as an account of processes rather than of parts. Sue Hamilton argued in Identity and Experience (1996) that the constituents are not an inventory of a person at all but of the factors of experience, which changes what the exhaustiveness claim covers. The debate over whether the early texts deny a self or decline to discuss one has run since the 1970s and has not closed.

The practical descendants are easier to trace. Insight meditation as it was reorganised in Burma in the twentieth century turned the catechism of paragraph 6 into a method: Mahāsi Sayadaw's noting practice trains attention on the arising and passing of each constituent until impermanence is seen directly rather than granted, and the sweeping attention to bodily sensation taught by U Ba Khin and S. N. Goenka does the same work through feeling. The discourse itself is chanted in Theravāda monasteries and appears in the standard chanting books, so most of its hearers have met it as liturgy first. Secular mindfulness teaching in the West, from the stress-reduction courses of the late 1970s onward, took the observation without the doctrine; it teaches that thoughts and feelings can be watched rather than identified with, which is the first movement of this text, and stops before the conclusion the text draws from it. The sentence most often heard in a modern therapy room, that you are not your thoughts, is paragraph 8 with the eleven terms and the argument removed.

The renderings above are made from the Pali of the Mahāsaṅgīti edition and are meant to be plain rather than graceful. Bhikkhu Sujato's translation is in the public domain and is the one to set beside them; Ñāṇamoli's, made in 1981, is the more formal English, and Thanissaro's carries the only substantial note any of the three provides.