Sartre and a Chinese Buddhist Theory of No-Self: The Mirroring of Mind

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre was assuredly not a Buddhist. Nor do his works exhibit any influence, immediate or remote, from Buddhist textual sources. Still, it is intriguing to find that, laying aside its practical, soteriological aim, much of the Buddhist phenomenology of the self (2tman) can be reclaimed in terms of the early Sartrean doctrine articulated in The Transcendence of the Ego. And it is tempting, therefore, simply to assimilate the one to the other. Certain of the skandhas (the sansk2ras), for example, appear to play the same role in Buddhist egology as the transcendencies (states, actions, and qualities) do in the Sartrean. The Buddhist conception of 2tman, like the Sartrean ego, features an illusory construct of psychic idealities. And both would accept the insight that at the base of consciousness lies the anonymous flux of absolutely momentary experience. It is said thatpratn2 is the realization of the three marks of existence: suffering, momentariness, and impersonality. Each of these notions has its counterpart in the early Sartrean phenomenological ontology. And, indeed, Sartre's pure reflection seems saliently akin to prafih. It is not my intent, however, to press Sartre into the Buddhist mold. The resulting fit, were it possible at all, would be at once artificial and superficial. No philosophy enjoys sufficient plasticity to permit such ad hoc adjustments. Serious reservations would certainly remain. The apparent congruence would be met by wisely heeded qualms, the most serious of which would be, first, that, under the popular (though, I believe, incorrect) reading, Sartre maintains a Cartesian dualism, a bifurcation of for-itself and in-itself entirely alien to the spirit of Buddhism; second, that the Sartrean conception of the universal nihilation of the in-itself at the base of the for-itself, is no more than a relative nothingness, the determinately modalized privation of being-in-itself, and not the absolute nothingness of sunyat2; and finally, that Sartre's attempted resolution of the ego into the manifold of immanent Erlebnisse represents a certain foundationalism in conflict with the profound doctrine of pratzya samutp2da. Certain of these stinging qualms might successfully be resolved. Sartre claims, in Being and Nothingness, for example, that the two transpheno-