Page 168 note 1 The Buddhist understanding of the matter is that the commonsense view which affirms the existence of a real individual empirical self in the ‘five khandhas’ (or constituents of bodily empirical existence) is a false view. T. R. V. Murti summarises the matter as follows: ‘When the self is posited (i.e. empirical self or ego), then another confronts it; with the division of the self and the not-self attachment and aversion result’ (The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, p. 270). Thus, as he goes on to point out, samsāra (continued empirical existence) is present so long as there is attachment to the ‘I’. The doctrine of anatta is obviously very closely connected with that of suññatā (Skt. śūnyatā), often rendered ‘the void’. Murti says: ‘correctly understood śūnyatā is not annihilation, but the negation of negation; it is the conscious correction of an initial unconscious falsification of the real’ (op. cit. p. 271).
In Buddhist thought, therefore, the state of the man who is nibbuta, i.e. the state of nibbāna, is alone the real. Nibbāna, seen through the thought-forms of the empirical world, however, is samsāra. From this Murti concludes that the distinction between nibbāna and samsāra is, as he says, ‘epistemic (subjective) not ontological (objective)’ (op. cit. p. 273 f.).
This distinction seems rather dangerous, not only, as E. Conze points out, because Buddhism, like Marxism and Roman Catholicism, is prepared to make ontological assertions (a fact which might be overlooked if the distinction were pressed too far), but also because it might lead one to assume that the Buddhist aim is to bring about a change of epistemology, or, to substitute one epistemology for another. This is true in a limited sense, but since the Buddhist way is a religion as well as a philosophy, the Buddhist method of making the change is not simply a kind of gnosis, but involves a radical moral renewal.
