The Atman Always Wins: Or the Case for Protestant Buddhism
I've been reluctant to delve too deeply into modern lineages and their teachings, but it's unavoidable for a Westerner seeking clarity on questions related to dhamma, practice, and final ends. Practice has its own rewards, here and now, and big-picture goals and objectives can be skipped, but mind being mind, it will still wonder about the final end of life. Why are we here, why do we suffer, what causes suffering? – these questions make no sense if there is no reference to the unconditioned, the blessed isle, the far shore in the answer.
The Buddha taught people from the position that they were agents capable of doing the work: A little work, some work, or all of it.
Today, a Westerner is usually not part of a living community of traditional practitioners. We do not have the voice of another at our side, in earshot, to guide us along the path. Our community is YouTube, texts, and the Internet. The problem with people is that they are ever more divided by various and sundry streams of thought. The ability to hear dhamma is a blessing in this soup of information, but it's also a drag. The buffet of raw data has to be shaped by our own lights, and there are ever more dhammas to sort and rank.
Several years ago, I began a project to read the core early texts for myself. I was pleasantly surprised by how wrong my understanding of the message was, and how deeply it had been shaped in the West by talks about gods, goddesses, secret esoteric lineages, and whatnot. The Buddha I met in the translated Pali texts was someone altogether different. He spoke in a way no man had ever spoken, not in the language of mythologies, genealogies, miracles and strictures about "believing" this or that tale. He was not like the Yahwist schools which have shaped and defined the West along with my own personal psychology.
In the West, the Yahwist has to believe in the Exodus as an historical fact. It cannot be read as an allegory or a purely spiritual message, since doing so would mean that Jesus links himself to something that never happened. The punishment for doubting the whole edifice of the Exodus and the theological structure it upholds via the Christian dispensation would rest on nothing. But to doubt that the Exodus happened – in other words, to doubt that 2 million people wandered in the desert for 40 years, leaving no trace among the surrounding people – is to slide into the bowels of hell. Buddhism is not ahistorical, but it does not demand that you have faith that attendant miracles attached to a made-up event happened in order to experience the dhamma here and now.
The Buddha spoke plainly, directly, repetitively, compassionately, wisely. So for the past several years, my brain – which is a jar of acid that, when poured out on anything, dissolves it – has never dissolved the teachings of the texts. I have not, in years, had reason to doubt anything the Buddha taught. I do have doubts about my own abilities from time to time, however.
A Protestant by blood and culture – my WASP credentials go back centuries to the very epicenter of the English Reformation, with direct descent traceable to the men who overthrew the Catholic Church in England. Their posterity then set sail for the Americas to aid in the creation of humanity's most powerful empire. I had nothing to do with any of it of course, but I'm heir to an intellectual tradition that places a value on early sources and practices in religious matters. We original Americans have a suspicion of elaborate constructs in matters philosophical and theological, believing them to obscure rather than clarify. This can be viewed as anti-intellectual, or a genuine desire to see things as they are. My ancestors wanted to encounter the Jesus they read about in the Gospels because he is a genuinely fascinating figure.
So the WASP by birth and education who finds himself in the Buddhist orbit will understandably go at the early texts as the source of truth, to pluck the kernel of what was originally said and thought. The fussy, baroque ornamentation from later contributors is pushed aside.
For most Americans, the later traditions and accretions – the man-made constructs of the various schools – are what present first. Today, I read comments on various forums in which it's evident that Western Buddhists are not very scripturally-based, showing a basic ignorance of their creed, but seemingly well-versed in Tara-worship, dzogchen, tantric sex, psychedelics, and "scientific" wisdom. Western spirituality is already fragmented, and I'm not sure that adding a new set of Indian religions onto an already individualistic stack is the best way to make progress in dhamma.
One could say I'm guilty of doing the same, but in my defense, my interest has been mostly in the early texts and I've embraced this bias, called it out interiorly and here, on the Internet.
One can only benefit by going back to the early sources and reading them. I'm a sola-Bodhi Protestant Buddhist, so I have my own hang-ups and limitations. I rely heavily on a tiny number of scholar-translators for my fundamentalism and hence suffer the side effects of my Protestant forebears in their dependency on translated works. Still, I remain reasonably confident that one can fathom the Buddha's message even in translation. The Buddha himself encouraged his followers to disseminate his teachings in the vernacular rather than in Sanskrit. Naturally, they went through a phase of Sanskrit sutta mania, but the point remains that the Buddha himself was comfortable with his teachings being given primarily in the vernacular. He did not want his dhamma to be enveloped in a priestly language, turned into vedas and made remote from ordinary people.
The Brahmajala Sutta was one of the early texts I read, and in it, the Buddha dispenses with the notion of an Atman/Brahman construct. This was notable because, of all the great world traditions, Buddhism is the only one to identify this as an understandable but subtle error. In fact, Atman is the hardest error to shake, the one that has a concrete manifestation across Eastern traditions via meditation. It is so powerful, in fact, that it deceives even the wise into thinking they have slipped the last link of samsaric existence. Uddaka Ramaputta and Alara Kalama come to mind here, the last two meditation teachers of the Buddha. The bodhisattva of the Pali canon does something no religious Indian of his or later times did – flatly deny a pure consciousness, a pure awareness, a ground and firmament for all being. Ever since his denunciation of this refined error, the history of the sangha has been one long story of trying to re-establish it via artifice, ignorance, or simple human limitation as the core of his doctrine.
All such language was not simply avoided in the early years, but actively refuted and denied. The later temptation of the schools is to read the apophatic way as just not speaking about certain realities, but secretly holding to them. One shuns the grundheit language since it produces ego-inflation and thus, thwarts the goal of final relinquishment. If you don't talk about it, you can sneak into Nibbana. If you do talk about it, though, well, it's a big club and you ain't in it.
"Advaita has Atman; we are Buddhists, we just don't give it a name or dwell too much on its positive qualia since we are all via negativa n' shit. It works for us!"
In fact, the Buddha did identify positively, emphatically, errors, stressing that there was a Right View as a precondition for the unconditioned.
Bhikkhus, I do not see even a single thing on account of which unarisen wholesome qualities arise and arisen unwholesome qualities decline so much as right view.
If you want to live a wholesome, ethical life and reduce your own misery and that of those around you, you can. If your aim is higher, to the ending of all suffering, then you will have to accept that there is a single correct path identified by the Buddha. This image does not necessarily square with the Westernized image we have of the Blessed One, as a tolerant fellow who was just about compassion. He was also about defilements and the bleak cycles of misery they set up.
Apophatic doesn't mean the teacher refrains from pointing out the dangers on the path with a mysterious silence. "This is a snake, beware!" is exclaimed in early Buddhism. Atman/Brahman is a danger, it's a many-colored snake, beautiful with luxurious shimmering feathers. It is the one that keeps the gates to the deathless closed because it's very, very, very pleasant to be with. Deep, still concentration in which time stops, in which the push-pull of craving and aversion temporarily suspends, is very seductive. To become deeply accomplished in this area, going further and further into it, is to encounter the Brahma realm. The kilesas fight the newcomer to the practice vociferously, injecting every kind of negative thought and scraping at every emotional sore, to keep one off the cushion. When some skill in letting them wear themselves out arises, it only means new encounters, in which they become more elegant, a little quieter, a little less energetic, but even more convincing. This state of peaceful equipoise is my true nature, my real self emerging from underneath the crud of childhood trauma...
"If only I could experience this blessed peace for myself all the time, every moment, world without end, amen!"
In Genesis, the snake was in the garden, but in Buddhism, the Atman snake guards the gate to paradise, assuming the role of the cherubim with the flaming sword. The snake in this rendering is pleasant and is, in fact, a portal to heaven, with no sword in sight. Anyone who reaches Atman, who dwells in his embrace, is far along the spiritual path and will find himself in a heavenly realm. But it's not what the Buddha wanted for his followers. Heaven is old hat. The whole mass of suffering, if it is to be broken, if the mountain of skulls is to be smashed and the oceans of tears drained, then Atman is just another fabrication that must be pierced. It was the one the proto-Hindus of the Buddha's day held as the final destination of the spiritual life.
People who genuinely aspire to a discovery, realization, or union with Atman are not being criticized here. There are venerable schools that have this as a stated goal, and the path they lay out cultivates merit and wholesome qualities. So this is not a dig at those non-Buddhist traditions, or a critique of others' beliefs, which often have great wisdom, depth, and compassion.
In surveying the various Buddhist lineages, however, the Atman is alive and well. In the Thai Forest tradition, it's the undying citta, the steel ball that rolls on from lifetime to lifetime. In the Tibetan school, it's the luminous, shining "true nature." The same is found in Zen.
Modern Thai Forest luminaries speak of the "luminous mind," identifying the few passages in the Pali canon that speak of pure consciousness/pure awareness. Mahayana has its Buddha-nature, an unrealized actuality that is already found in every creature, from cockroaches to angels. You are already the Buddha; you have the same nature as everything else that is living; you just haven't realized and seen it for yourself yet. The language of Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta may vary, but their truth is the same. All of these schools and lineages have a closer kinship now because of modern communications and travel.
Some Vedantins have taken recent Thai Forest postulations in this area as independent verification of their own findings. There is a kind of ecumenical breakthrough now in the various Eastern traditions; the Western Yahwist schools lag, having the concept of an eternal hell in which there is separation of wheat and chaff lasting for all eternity. The humans in hell have immortal souls, are still in the image of Yahweh (i.e., have a Buddha-nature to borrow from the Mahayana), but are always separate, never again able to exist in a position where the deathless is attainable. To say, the Atman/Brahman finds expression in the "fullness of being," the ground of being, and so on, but the Buddha-nature of the soul means it is destined – pre-ordained – to know only eternal suffering and torment out of finite choices made in time and space. This concept of anything being eternal is alien to early Buddhism. There is nothing permanent in the cosmos – including the cosmos. Universes are born, age, wither, and die.
So the Protestant Buddhist looking at all of this sees the clear discrepancy between the text, the commentaries, and the lived teachings of the schools. It is confusing to say, I can read the Brahmajala and see the Buddha say as plain as day that X is not Y, but the present-day sangha will say, "No worries, we've cracked the code!" and not even refer to the text. Worse, they will translate the texts to imply a doctrine of Atman. We have one writer who translates a passage from the text as, "consciousness with no surface." Consciousness is a khanda, and using adjectives like "pure," or analogies like this, provides no clarification and, worse, blends with the language of the consciousness-is-fundamental movement in the West.
Here I have to be careful, because I would be a hypocrite to hang my whole case on a single rendering after complaining that others do exactly that. Viññāṇaṃ anidassanaṃ is a hard phrase, and I owe the translator who gives us consciousness without surface the same charity I claim for my own, especially given his inestimable contributions to the world.
The pabhassara citta passages are contested for real reasons, not merely because meditators want a ground to stand on. So let me grant the ambiguity fully: the words permit more than one reading, and no one should be scolded for finding the luminous-mind construction available in the Pali. My point is narrower and, I think, survives this concession. Even where the text underdetermines the phrase, nothing in it licenses the upgrade — the move from "consciousness, described in an unusual way" to "consciousness as the unconditioned ground." The three marks are asserted of viññāṇa without exception and without asterisk; that is the constraint the rendering cannot dissolve. The burden therefore falls on whoever wants to exempt a stretch of consciousness from anicca, dukkha, and anatta – and that burden is not discharged by the ambiguity of an adjective. The snake is not in the translation. The snake is in the wish to keep something.
Pure consciousness then is the chromatic serpent I spoke of earlier. It appeals to everyone. To Westerners disaffected by pure materialism, but uncomfortable with the eternalism of the Yahwist traditions, it stands as a soothing, reasonable middle way. It accords with the meditative experiences of many traditions and answers a real gap in the human need for transcendence.
But what is the point of meditation in early Buddhism? The Buddha answers this in SN 22:5:
Develop concentration, monks. A concentrated monk understands things as they really are. And what does he understand as it really is? The arising and passing away of form, of feeling, of perception, of fabrications, of consciousness.
The delusional mind will then read into this, if I see the coming-to-be and falling away of phenomena, then I will see something else, the ground of being, or purified essence, shimmering before me in the field of the divine eye. Perception refined means I can, like a Zen master, see my true self! The ego fills in the spaces, but here, the text identifies the wrong turn of the Zen or Thai Forest master, or the Mahayana devotee.
The cultivated mind is able to break the links of becoming by seeing that any mental state, any jhanic state, no matter how refined, is but another link in the chain of becoming. Lust is abandoned. When this is abandoned, then vipassana is developed; when vipassana is developed, then discernment arises, and once discernment appears on the scene, ignorance ceases.
Ignorance is the first link in the chain of dependent origination, but also the last fetter that, when broken, ends the cycle of becoming for the arahant. The stream enterer sees ignorance and discovers the truth of self-identity, but then spends up to seven more lifetimes uprooting the habit of being a me. One sees the falsity of a self briefly, but does not thereby encounter a ground of all being. Even the language here is hackneyed because – strictly speaking – there is no one who sees at the point of stream entry.
To mistake the jhanic state or other states of deep concentration – which are attended by a superlative state of well-being, agreeable abiding, etc. – is to land squarely in the snake's lap. If it had one. There is nothing about jhana that is uniquely Buddhist, but what is unique is the founder's insistence that it too is a fabrication, not free of the three marks of existence.
Is the mind brightened by jhana, does it carry over into daily life, make one more pleasant, agreeable, compassionate, generous? Rather, the more salient question for our particular discussion is, does it end the cycle of suffering, leaving no-thing behind as a residue to crave, to objectify, to mistake for the real?
If the conclusion of practicing deep meditation is room for error because meditation absent right view is no exit, then maybe doctrine needs to marry back into living practice. This is in the text, at the very core of the Buddha's account of his own spiritual development. Ramaputta and Uddaka did not see their attainments as having the three marks; they did find bliss and contentment, and it was enough: the silken handcuffs of becoming. I've heard Theravada commentators on YouTube discuss monks who are scholars, or monks who focus more on meditation as a specialty of their vocation; but the truth is that both activities must develop and grow in tandem.
The accomplished meditator will always be at risk of falling into wrong view – adopting some Atman variant (and there are many) – if he is not fenced in by the doctrine laid out in the Pali Nikayas.
The ecumenical group hug of the various traditions celebrates their manifestations of supreme conscious awareness because they are pleasant, even sublime. They are the beautiful states which provide peace, tranquility, and even a temporary cessation of defilement. And they are not the end. On the third watch, in the early dawn in the moment leading to his awakening, the Buddha cut the roots of the kilesas and in doing so, guaranteed no future returns to samsara. In samadhi, we only temporarily suppress the defilements with effort, both in the sit and outside, in our regular lives. To cut them at the root completely is to end them in every state and in no state.
The age of ecumenism means the ascension of Atman. I'm doubtful whether there are any lineages that really care for the dhamma of the Buddha in areas that are especially recondite, hard to fathom, hard to see. Here, I don't claim any insight beyond "the text says this," yet these schools all say the exact opposite about the very point that separates the Buddha from every other religious figure on the planet. Jesus had/was the Atman – he lives in the hearts of the believer and they, by theosis, become him. Mohammad had the Atman; the Jews, the Hindus, the Sikhs, the Zoroastrians, and on it goes.
Practitioners, having taken for themselves the experiential outcomes of meditative practices and the teachings of spiritual figures as the living expression of the suttas, can find themselves reifying an invisible light, awareness, or consciousness which seems unbounded, universal. Many good-natured people find the ethical precepts, the calm communities, and positive messages of spiritual teachers to be a wholesome way to live.
Our age is racked by the sense that all problems are global problems. Local problems garner very little attention; everything is universal. War, climate change, poverty, wealth inequality. People in Michigan went with tainted water for years; it was a local problem, and when the local authorities didn't/couldn't/wouldn't fix it, it just remained a local problem. Water undrinkable for thousands of poor people? Okay. How about that climate change?
People who find a living connection with real people living with purpose, with a desire to be wholesome and compassionate, can silence the voice of the cold, dead text. Here, I'm not speaking of dry commentaries, but the Pali texts. In the hands of the scholar-monk, even these can mutate into the gospel of the Atman, robed in the unique language of via negativa. The local people – the living people you know in positive faith communities – are on the human scale, and the "everything is a global issue" loses urgency. Modern humans have an addiction to general, universal problems, even though they were designed by nature to be actively engaged with tangible ones.
The emphasis on positivity and personal development doesn't have to be great to pull one away from the Buddha's path. For over a thousand years, the sangha has had a kind of resigned, even fatalistic view that the gates to the deathless have been closed. Going back to the original texts has given brief flashes of possibility for keeping it at least cracked open for a few more years, but the writing is on the wall. People today still discuss plan B since plan A looks less appealing: Rebirth in a better realm where the dhamma is taught and lived. There, I can really practice and make it to stream entry or better. I've wondered whether this despondency was a recognition that Atman is the natural place where the human mind goes, and that a buddha is rare because sentient thinking creatures just cannot get past the final boss.
Gods and goddesses make sense to humans, and the Atman, while significantly different from the Virgin Mary, Tara, Jesus, Yahweh, Zeus, Allah, and Indra, is still a comfy mental space to rest in because it has no hard edges. Nibbana in its language is extinction; Buddhism denies annihilationism, but then adopts a language that makes it sound like the vehicle for exactly that. Modern Westerners are not the first to levy this charge since it can also be found in the early centuries, where rival schools accused the sons of the Buddha of being crypto-believers in nothingness. Talk of extinguishment of the burning flame means there is no more energy left and a coolness arises in the place of heat. Is this permanent death? The extinguishment analogy doesn't put the mind at ease the way an hour of breath meditation does.
The enthusiastic revival, the charge that the gates to the deathless are in fact quite open, ready to accept weary travelers, no sooner launches than it staggers under the weight of a new Atman, a being who somehow sneaks into the revival tent by an unwatched flap. The Thai Forest tradition began as a positive reform movement that sought to reclaim the soteriology presented by the texts, but then found – via meditation – new Atmans, new "pure awareness," "witnesses," "observers," "consciousness[es] without surface," "undying cittas," etc. Laity were told that the body wears out and when it does, you get a new one, just like you do with your cars.
Mahayana's Pure Land Buddhism starts to make sense even if it's wrongheaded. Cast your burdens on Amitabha Buddha; go to a buddha-field when you die. Things will work out. Just keep your head down, be nice, pay your taxes, and don't stress about having to work three jobs to survive and having nothing left over for a sit. Cast your worries and fears on Amitabha, and he will take care of you in the next life.
If Yahwism offers eternal separation and unending agony for most of the human race, the degenerate forms of Buddhism offer the mirror-image consolation: an eternal kick-the-can. The poor soul is not damned, merely deferred — living, dying, and living again on a treadmill that never stops, the mountain of skulls climbing higher each turn. Atman becomes the pleasant waypoint on that road, a mirage that, pursued, at least earns the virtue that buys a better rebirth. Pure Land makes a kind of sense in this light, wrongheaded as I think it is. It is a humane response to a soteriology that has quietly decided the real goal is out of reach.
That quiet decision is the thing I keep circling back to. For over a thousand years, much of the sangha has held, with a kind of weary fatalism, that the gates to the deathless are closed, that the best a person can now do is arrange a better seat for the next show. Returning to the early texts has pried the gate open a crack, at least in flashes. But I have started to wonder whether the fatalism was never mere pessimism — whether it was a half-honest recognition that the Atman is simply where the mind goes when left to its own weight. The pull toward a ground, a witness, an awareness behind the awareness, may not be a doctrinal mistake that better scholarship corrects. It may be the default gravity of a nervous system that cannot easily stop positing the one who stands behind its own states. A buddha is rare, on this reading, not because the teaching is obscure but because the escape runs directly against the grain of what minds do naturally. That is what the title of this essay means literally, and not just ruefully: left alone, the Atman always wins. Awakening is the improbable exception, the one move out of a basin everything else falls back into.
None of this is cause to hunker down in sectarian dispute. There is still real food on the table for the YouTube-and-Internet practitioner: good talks, honest exhortation, communities of decent people trying to live wholesome lives — and yes, the Atman will wander through the frame from time to time, as it does everywhere. We should go on practicing dāna and generosity and resist the temptation to make correctness a substitute for kindness. Maybe a genuine revival comes, one that locates the Atman precisely where the early texts locate it, sees it clearly, rejects it cleanly, and then uses it to teach — the beautiful snake at the gate, named at last for what it is. And for anyone who has read this far and finds that they want the ground after all, who wants the Atman or the Brahman as the true end of the spiritual life: that is no small thing, and there are old and deep and compassionate traditions that will take you there. This one goes the other way.
