Another Kind of Self-Inquiry: Chandrakirti’s Sevenfold Reasoning on Selflessness

(This article is hosted by Jerry Katz’s nonduality.com wetsite.)

When I was about ten years old, my friends and I would throw rocks at each other. This led to a kind of self-inquiry, as I later found out. Smack! My friend’s rock hit my arm. “I got you,” he said with glee. “No you didn’t,” I retorted smugly, “You only got my arm.” Then he went for something closer to home. Bonk! The rock landed on my head. Now I got you!” “No, that was only my head.” Later, I thought a lot about this, for many years in fact. There was no place a rock could land that I thought was truly me. In fact, whatever “X” could name was not me, because it was “My X.” But where was the “I”? It’s not as though I didn’t have a strong sense of it. I did, especially at first. This is why I looked so hard for it for so many years. But no matter where I looked, it seemed to keep shifting around, almost as though it was always in back of me! Even as a youth, years before I had ever heard of Buddhism or nondualism or Chandrakirti, the inability to find the “I” really did begin to weaken my sense of its reality.  More …