Beyond Self and No-Self: Reconstructing the Buddha’s Middle-Way Account of Selfhood in the Early Buddhist Nikāyas

Abstract

Asked by the wanderer Vacchagotta whether there is a self and whether there is no self, the Buddha was silent; he later gave Ānanda not two reasons but four, in two pairs, as to why. Scholarship divided between no-self and affirmative readings of anattā has claimed the episode for one side or the other without accounting for its fourfold form. This article locates the anattā teaching in the register of first-person experience, distinguishing two horizons: the phenomenal horizon as given, and the unconditioned (asaṅkhata) as itself. The contemplative procedure of the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta shows how the second is disclosed against the first, with Husserl’s account of eidetic intuition supplying the vocabulary for the structural point. Each horizon admits exactly two mishandlings, absolutization and erasure, yielding four extremes through which the four reasons are best read. The four extremes share the assumption that a horizon can be taken on its own; the Buddha’s silence in response to Vacchagotta’s questioning is accordingly structural rather than suspensive or merely pedagogical, refusing the framework the question presupposes rather than withholding an answer. What the Buddha’s silence preserves is mutual co-presence: conditioned experience inhabited without appropriation and the unconditioned disclosed without being seized. This mode of mutual co-presence I call middle-way selfhood; on this view, it is real yet non-substantial, and nibbāna is the horizon of its first-personal manifestation.

In the evidence

This study is part of the evidence base for a synthesis in the library. Here is how each one recorded it.

• State of the evidence: Buddhism ?Unclear

  Argues that the Buddha's silence before Vacchagotta is structural rather than suspensive, and proposes a middle-way selfhood that is real yet non-substantial, with nibbāna as the horizon of its first-personal manifestation.

  Synthesized October 19, 2026

Comparable studies

Other theoretical and historical papers on buddhism, most cited first.