Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductions to Buddhism.

Last time we discussed impermanence. This episode turns to another important and often misunderstood Buddhist idea: no-self.

Earlier episodes described the suffering consumer society and materialism bring to modern people.Commerce exploits sensory greed and the mind’s habit of reaching outward, manufactures desire, and implants consumerism’s premise: we are consumers, and commodities provide ultimate happiness and prove our value.

To prove the self’s value, we endlessly foreground what ‘I’ feel and demand: I am happy, sad, depressed, delighted, capable, entitled, and wanting.Behind all these activities stands one rarely questioned word: I.。

Across traditional Eastern and Western thought, the individual self was located within relations between Heaven and humanity, Dao and humanity, or God and humanity. People understood individual limitation and sought meaning within a larger cosmic or spiritual order. Thus,despite individual differences, every self faced a greater order and therefore showed humility, restraint, or even smallness.。

Socrates, though tried for impiety and corrupting youth, said he believed in divinity, if differently from Athenians. Confucius likewise said to sacrifice to spirits as though they were present: uncertainty did not excuse irreverence.

Zhuangzi’s Equalizing Things instead describes interaction and unity between self and things—an experience of self-forgetting. Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly and forgot himself; upon waking he asked whether Zhou dreamed the butterfly or the butterfly dreamed Zhou, lightly dissolving a rigid subject.

Daoist self-forgetting and the Indian renunciant’s union of atman and Brahman reflect genuine experiences. Traditional people did not feel like isolated modern individuals opposed to an objective world, but couldsense an inner connection with everything.。

As a classical-music lover, I attended chamber concerts at the Shanghai Symphony’s former Hunan Road venue. In April 2007, at a Bach series conducted by violinist Ding Zhinuo, the D-minor Concerto for Two Violins struck me like electricity. Warm sunlight seemed to fill the hall; I merged into an indescribable spiritual order, held in warmth and moved to tears without sadness. That accidental experience inspired me to explore unusual states of consciousness.