There Is No Fixed I: The Self in Eastern Thought

A simple example: a woman who is a teacher and has children is "mother" at home, "teacher" at school, and "you" among friends. What others call her changes with the place.

Where English needs only "you," Japanese shifts the form of address as the place requires. A foreigner learning Japanese may feel that, in Japanese conversation, a new "I" appears from moment to moment according to the relationship with the other person, and above all the place. In Japan, self and other alike are variable beings who show themselves within the relations of a place; there is no unchanging "I" established before the encounter. Put another way, the self in Japanese is fluidity itself.

The self that surrenders to excitement at a festival, the self at rest with family, the self that does its duty at work: none of these "I"s tied to a place is a mask. Each is a form born of resonance with place (the place of absolute nothingness).

Old Buddhist scriptures also contain important teachings, shogyo mujo and shoho muga: all phenomena constantly change, and nowhere is there an unchanging self. Even the mind and body we take to be ourselves are merely aggregates of elements that change from moment to moment. This sense of impermanence, that there is no "I" that stays identical forever, is not a feeling of void or loss; today it has spread worldwide as an insight that sees the world as one great flow.

The philosopher who Japanized this Buddhist philosophy of identity and brought it to a brilliant sublimation was Kitaro Nishida. Nishida proposed a new concept, "absolutely contradictory self-identity." He saw the world as made of two absolutely contradictory elements, the "many" and the "one," and broke through to a state hard to put into words until then, reaching a deep Japanese thought.

In the predicative realm there is no subject, agent, subjectivity, ego, or self, such as the subjective realm produces. Philosophically, there is no opposition of "subject and object" or "subjective and objective," and the very concept of an object does not exist. That is, there is no ontology. To put it plainly, the subjective realm has "separation" as its code, and the predicative realm has "non-separation." Things are not separated in anything.

I have seen this especially in the identity crisis of young people who live where the subjective realm works strongly. It is by origin a problem peculiar to the subjective realm, and given that it shows most in the lands of subjective language, it looks to me like the symbol of a new current: the polishing and refining of the subject has reached its limit, and it is beginning to dissolve once more into the predicative realm.

What follows is a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. It is a rebooting of the DMN, and from there the brain begins rebuilding itself over days or weeks, and in some people over months or years. Put plainly, it dissolves and then reconstructs. Dissolution is not loss but a way of seeing things as they are, by dissolving the split between subject and object.

Only by dissolving the split between subject and object does it become possible to dive deep at all. Diving deep, then, is not a descent carried out by the will or consciousness of a subject. It is the state in which you sink of your own accord, by practicing the dissolution of subject and object, and of every other separation, in the middle of ordinary life.

This is what I value most in thought: muka (無化), bringing to nothing. This state cannot be reached unless the subject, the self as agent, subjectivity and the ego are thoroughly brought to nothing. And this state is not reached by an act of will or a sense of purpose; it becomes manifest from the other side, in the place where the subject has been brought to nothing.

Confusion, in Zen, is the subject, the self as agent, subjectivity and the ego.

The view that one "exists in the flow" is not anxiety over losing a fixed self. It is a highly active attitude that finds the true self precisely in constant change. Of course, even for a Japanese it is not easy to reach.