Starting from the Beginning: The Question “Who Am I?”

Why this title for the lecture series? The question, “Who am I?” is an incredibly important one. I’m sure each of you has wondered more than once: Who am I? Finding an answer to it is very difficult because we usually don’t have a methodology or a way to go about it, so we set it aside. We forget it, turn away, and just continue living our lives as they unfold.

But since life isn’t always simple and things don’t always go the way we want, the question pops up again from time to time.

So, why is it so important? Primarily, because it turns us away from what we are usually focused on externally. It turns us inward, towards ourselves. It helps us to leave behind our preoccupations, things that surround us and that we constantly busy ourselves with, and to look deep within. That’s why this question is extraordinarily important.

Furthermore, even if it doesn’t provide a final answer in the sense of, “Yes, I know who I am, I am this or that thing,” what you will discover in the process of asking it is incredibly valuable. You will learn how things happen in our lives. Gaining such insight brings you closer to understanding why they happen the way they do. Following this logic, what naturally arises from these two insights is: What can be done to make them happen differently?

These are the three fundamental questions on which the quality of our lives depends. And that’s why they are so important. We can reach all of them by exploring one essential question: Who am I, truly?

The Guiding Quote: A Map for Our Journey

In the announcement for this lecture series, it says the series will be a commentary on a famous saying by the even more famous Zen teacher, Dōgen. The saying goes:

To know Buddhism is to know oneself.

To know oneself is to forget oneself.

To forget oneself is to be enlightened by all things.

I’ve used this quote to give structure to the series, to organize it around and in relation to these ideas. It’s so comprehensive that it gives me great freedom in approach. At the same time, as comprehensive as it is, it’s also incredibly concrete and points directly to the essence of the path it refers to. Since some of you may be encountering Buddhism for the first time, this makes it especially suitable for this series.

So, to begin, let’s say a few words about the first part of the saying: “To know Buddhism is to know oneself.”

What Does It Mean to “Know Buddhism”?

First of all, what does it mean to “know Buddhism”? To answer that, we have to ask, what is Buddhism? It’s a name that covers a lot. Buddhism is a teaching over two and a half thousand years old. But it’s not just a teaching; it’s also a culture—many cultures, in fact—because it developed not only in India but also in Tibet, China, and the Far East. When we say “Buddhism” today, we include all the different traditions: Northern, Southern, Far Eastern, and the enormous number of schools within them.

So, you could say that thoroughly “knowing Buddhism” is nearly impossible due to its sheer volume. Speaking just of the teachings, Buddhism doesn’t have one single book like Christianity or other monotheistic religions. There isn’t one book that says what Buddhism is, what life is, or how to live it. In Buddhism, there are, we can freely say, countless such books. The Buddha taught for almost fifty years, and in that time, he gave many teachings relating to almost all aspects of life. This resulted in a vast corpus of works collected in various Buddhist canons—the Southern Canon of the Theravada school, the Tibetan Canon, the Chinese Canon, the Japanese Canon—all containing an enormous number of texts. It’s a corpus impossible to read in one lifetime.

However, the situation isn’t as hopeless as I’ve described. All the different traditions and schools have something in common: the core of the Buddha’s teaching. They agree with each other more than they differ. It is possible to study Buddhism and extract from this huge corpus what represents the very essence of the Buddha’s Dharma. In that sense, we can say that Buddhism, understood this way, can be known.

The different schools exist precisely because people have different inclinations and need approaches that suit them specifically. They exist so that people with different predispositions and interests can access the teaching and benefit from it. The fact that there are different schools is not a result of internal disagreement, but of an understanding that people are different. So, when encountering Buddhism, we aren’t doomed to face the whole immense entity called “Buddhism.” We can simply approach a school that matches our inclinations.

The Universal Heart of the Teaching

It’s also important to say that the nature of the Buddha’s teaching is universal. What does that mean? It means it isn’t defined by its geographical origin or the time it arose—neither by time nor space. It’s universal because it relates to an experience common to all people, regardless of where or when they live, their culture, or skin color.

The Buddha himself defined his teaching in the shortest possible way, and it’s easy to remember. He defined it as a teaching concerned with only two things: suffering and its cessation. He said he taught only about suffering and the end of suffering. Since suffering is an experience of all people in all times, we can say this teaching is universal. This is important to know because there are often prejudices that a teaching from another culture or time can’t be relevant to our modern lives. It’s good to consider the universality of a teaching and see if we, living as we do today, can benefit from it.

Connecting Buddhism to Knowing Ourselves

This is a very brief overview of what Buddhism is primarily concerned with: suffering and its cessation. This leads us to the second part of the first phrase: “To know Buddhism is to know oneself.”

If knowing Buddhism means knowing suffering and its end—understanding why it arises, how it arises, how we can avoid it, how we can make it cease—then it’s perfectly clear that this knowledge isn’t some abstract knowledge. It’s knowledge about ourselves, about our experience, about “how our experience arises, why it is the way it is, and how it can be different“. Those are the three questions we mentioned at the beginning.

From this brief definition, it’s clear that Buddhism sees suffering as superfluous and unnecessary. In other words, suffering is not an inherent, unavoidable part of human life. Not only does Buddhism see suffering as unnecessary, but it also holds that the question of whether or not to suffer is entirely in our hands. In this sense, Buddhism finds the causes of suffering in ourselves, in our own experience, or better said, in our understanding or lack thereof.

To know oneself means to have a deep insight into one’s own experience. This is only possible when we turn inward, when we observe our mind, when we ask the question, “Who am I?” We said at the beginning that this question directs us toward contemplation, to look at our own mind and to recognize its nature. To recognize its nature is essentially to answer the question “Who am I?”

An Inner Path of Inquiry

“To know Buddhism is to know oneself.” has an additional meaning: following Buddhism is not about following something external. It is an inner path. The meaning of the first part of Dōgen’s saying lies precisely in this knowledge.

From this perspective, is it even possible to “be a Buddhist”? When you say, “I am a Buddhist,” does it mean you know Buddhism, and therefore you know yourself? Isn’t that somewhat contradictory? When you say, “I am a Buddhist,” have you answered the question of who you are? Is that answer based on a deep knowledge of yourself, or merely on the fact that you’ve joined a Buddhist group?

“To know Buddhism is to know oneself” suggests something quite different – a path of investigation, and not a path of ready-made solutions for life’s problems. A path you embark upon to find out, because you know you don’t know. A path of openness, of inquiry, of not settling for answers offered by someone else.

In Chan (Chinese Zen) Buddhism, the entire meditative practice is called by one Chinese word: tsan, which has a very specific meaning: to investigate, to examine, to inquire. What is something truly? In this case: Who am I, truly? This doesn’t mean that if you follow this path, you’ll have a problem saying you’re a Buddhist. Of course you can say that. But you won’t fall into the delusion of adopting a new identity to solve an identity crisis you might have had before. Tsan reminds us that to be a Buddhist means to deeply ask, “Who am I truly?” not to settle for a simple solution like “I am this” or “I am that.”

A Path of Tolerance and Community

Perhaps it is precisely from this inner inquiry that Buddhism’s great tolerance arises, its deep respect for all other teachings and religions. Buddhism is not competitive in any way.

Of course, anyone who follows a particular Buddhist school will tell you that school is the best for them—and I certainly hope they always emphasize that it’s the case for them, not in an absolute sense. Just as there are different schools in Buddhism because there are different people, so too are there different religions in the world because there are different people. Some people are more suited to following this path, others are more suited to following another path. That is perfectly fine, and no conflict should arise from this fact. Unfortunately, that’s not really how the world is today, but you all know that very well, so we won’t dwell on it.

In this, we find another meaning of the inner path: it is an individual path. In the sense that if you are walking it, others do not have to walk it. Not everyone has to go the same way. Everyone chooses their own path.

The Sangha: Support, Not Separation

But don’t let this make you think that Buddhism is a completely disorganized whole, or not a whole at all, where people following the Buddha’s teaching have no connection to each other—each just practicing for themselves, unaware of what others are doing. Of course, it’s not like that.

In Buddhism, there is Sangha, a community of practitioners, people who practice the Dharma, who follow the path and mutually support each other in their efforts. As a group, they are not  in opposition to other groups. It’s a common case that when you align with one formation, all other formations become a threat. Everything that is different from us becomes a threat. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. In fact, Buddhism, throughout its entire history, testifies that it doesn’t have to be that way at all.

Where the Journey Begins: Right Here, Right Now

So, where does this inner path of self-knowledge begin? Buddhism gives a very simple answer: It begins right where you are, exactly in the state you are in.

There is no special place or state you need to achieve to start the path, to begin getting to know yourself. The path starts from the ordinary human state of confusion, dissatisfaction, and suffering. This is what makes the beginning special. Buddhism doesn’t promise “bliss, peace, and happiness” to people interested in practice. It is a very realistic teaching with a practical purpose: to help us understand our situation and to change it. The best way to change it is to understand it, and to understand our situation means to face it, to meet it here and now, right where we are.

In this sense, the path starts from confusion, dissatisfaction, suffering—from the life we have, as it is. The process of spiritual practice aims to understand and remove confusion, to reach the awake state within us, to reach what is often called the Buddha-nature of mind or the enlightened state of mind.

Uncovering, Not Creating: The Goal of Practice

From the perspective of Buddhism, the state of awakeness, or enlightenment is not something we create through practice, not something that is a result of building. Quite the opposite. The dissolving of obstacles, confusion, and ignorance leads us to the mind’s original state, which is not created by practice but has been here all along.

It is our nature, which lacks nothing, which is just as it should be—complete and whole. The path isn’t about building something new, but about clearing away what has always obscured the treasure that was there from the start.

Our True Nature: Buddha-Nature in Chan Buddhism

When I say “Buddhism,” that naturally includes Chan. Chan is one school of Buddhism. In many Buddhist schools in general, and in Chan particularly, there is a view that each of us possesses Buddha-nature—the nature of an awakened mind. This mind is complete, perfect, lacking nothing, with neither excess nor deficiency.

The path to discovering our own nature, our true nature, is a path we follow by understanding our situation and removing or changing whatever prevents insight into this inherent nature. Confusion, distortion, and ignorance act like a veil, obscuring it. This is one of the fundamental premises of Chan Buddhism. From the Chan perspective, our mind is already Buddha, which we can recognize by observing it. From this viewpoint, we are not a person who, through practice, following moral precepts, studying sutras, and meditating, will become something we are not. It’s not about creating something that isn’t here at this moment. It’s about returning to what we have always been, which has been here all along, but we didn’t know it was here.

The Root of the Problem: The Ego-Self

Confusion, distortion, and ignorance have a core. That core, from which all human suffering arises, is the self, the ego, the “I.” The center of confusion and distortion is the ego—”I,” “me,” “mine.” This raises the question: what, then, is the ego? What is this “I”?

Let’s reframe the question “Who am I?” or “What am I?” into “What is the ego?” The ego is layered and complex, we can talk about it in different ways. When discussing its layered nature, we should keep in mind that the sense of self—because that’s what the ego really is, the feeling of “I”—is built and formed by upbringing, experiences, education, as well as the environment we grow up in and the culture we live in. So, the self or ego is a complex and conditioned construct, shaped by all these factors.

Whenever a thought or feeling arises, when you see or hear something, when any mental or physical event occurs, inside or outside of us, the awareness of someone who heard, saw, felt, or experienced it is the sense of self. The fact that you are aware that a feeling, thought, or emotion has arisen in you—the feeling that there is someone inside who is conscious of that event—is the sense of self.

However, this sense of self is not lasting, not permanent, and does not have an enduring, unchanging quality that we could attribute to it. On the contrary, it is very, very changeable. Yet, because it constantly arises and disappears, we attribute continuity and duration to it, giving it solidity. We reinforce the sense of self in all our experiences. The sense of self becomes the anchor point for our entire experience. It becomes the axis around which everything happens.

Once this happens, a defense mechanism appears, as welll. The goal of this mechanism is to procure pleasure for the sense of self, and to protect it from discomfort.

The Construction of a Solid “I”

We could put it another way. Each of us bears witness to our own existence. We know what we did yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, or five or ten years ago. Because there is a memory of a whole series of events in our experience, the idea of continuity arises. “Therefore, I exist.” If I am a witness, then I exist, and my existence is confirmed by the fact that I remember a whole series of past events.

Then something else happens: based on the idea of continuity, we attribute an identity to the sense of self and begin to create a certain self-image: “I am this,” or “I am that,” “I am like this or like that.” Furthermore, we invest an enormous amount of energy into maintaining this image, for ourselves but especially for others. Over time, this newly formed complex or center becomes heavier and heavier. It can become so heavy that sometimes people see no other solution but suicide. The burden can become so overwhelming that it leaves no way out of the situation someone is in. The problem becomes much bigger than the person experiencing it, so the only solution seems to be to eliminate oneself. This is not the right perspective nor a true solution, but I want to show to what an extreme this can lead.

The Ego’s Defense Mechanism and Its Inevitable Failure

Let’s return to the ego’s defense mechanism. Its goal, as we said, is to procure every possible pleasure and prevent any pain. However, the ego is often unsuccessful in protecting itself and securing only pleasant moments. Why isn’t it always successful? Because it operates based on a pattern that is always the same, while it encounters a changing and unpredictable world. Things change. It’s impossible to keep the same state forever, nor is it possible to prevent other states from arising. There are countless examples of this. There’s a song that says, “I’m going where everything is my way.” There is no such place. We might find it, it might be like that temporarily, but everything changes… and that place will start to change, just as we change. However good, favorable, or pleasant something seems at one moment, it may not be so in the next; it will change.

We won’t say the ego is completely unsuccessful in finding stability and relative happiness, but we cannot fully rely on this protective mechanism. This is the perspective of someone who is aware of this pattern, someone who observes what is happening, knows how and why it happens, and recognizes the problem. However, if you are unaware of this pattern, unaware of this process within yourself, and things in your life aren’t going the way you want, you are more likely to find culprits outside yourself than in this pattern within you. Once you find culprits outside yourself, you have moved completely away from the possibility of truly resolving the problem. You have entered into a conflict that will not lead to a solution but will only produce more tension, more conflict, and unforeseeable consequences.

The Three Levels of the Ego’s Game

Let’s look at how the ego and the pattern we mentioned actually function.

1. The Basic Level: Comfort, Security, and Pleasure. First and foremost, the ego’s basic task is to fight for or achieve conditions that provide comfort, security, and satisfaction. This is one level of the ego’s expression. Just look at how much energy in life you spend trying to achieve these three things! This is how the ego wants to give itself solidity, to make itself truly existent and confirm its existence. As we said at the beginning, the sense of self is not truly enduring, stable, or unchanging. The illusion that it is, is fed by constantly maintaining it as we imagine it to be, which requires investing an incredible amount of energy.

2. The Intellectual Level: Ideologies and Worldviews. The second level on which the ego expresses itself is the intellectual level. Here, the ego gains security and works on its comfort and satisfaction through concepts, by creating a picture of the world we live in. By “picture,” I mean theories about this world. This involves defining all the things around us, giving names, meanings, and purposes to things, and determining the relationships between them. The ego tries to make the world it finds itself in recognizable and familiar so it can feel safe there. Safety is based on the ability to distinguish what is a threat or danger to us. This is the level of various ideologies we adopt—nationalism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on. These are sets of ready-made answers that give us a certain identity, tell us who we are, why we are here, and what we should do, so we no longer have to think for ourselves. In return, we feel the security of belonging to something or someone much larger than ourselves.

3. The Spiritual Level: The Cunning of Spiritual Pride. There is another level of expression, which is no longer ideological but spiritual. This is perhaps the most interesting of all because it is the hardest to see through. This is the level where the ego is most cunning and hardest to recognize—the level where it identifies with experiences that should actually lead to its dissolution. When you sit in meditation and it seems the meditation is leading to something significant, and you reach a state you’ve never been in before and you know it’s important, you might say to yourself, “Wow! I did it! I succeeded!” Once again, the feeling of someone who has experienced something, who takes all the credit, who on that basis distinguishes themselves from others and sees them as less successful or less important, has been activated. This is what we usually call pride, which we could term spiritual pride. This problem arises in all religions, not just Buddhism. One needs to know how to deal with it, recognize it, and remove it in time.

Why the Ego’s Project is Doomed to Fail

Why is the defensive mechanism, the pattern by which the ego functions, ultimately unsuccessful? In none of these areas can the ego fully achieve its desired permanence. One very important reason is the changeability of the world we live in. Impermanence is the greatest threat to the ego. The awareness of impermanence is terrifying for the ego: “I who will not last, I who will pass, I who will one day cease…” This is the worst thing the ego encounters. And it encounters it constantly, on all these levels, because impermanence is all-encompassing; transience is the basic characteristic of all things.

No matter how aware we are of the sense of self and how much we want to make it firm, concrete, and unchanging, there is always within us an awareness that this is actually impossible. That the self is fundamentally impermanent, transient, not what it pretends to be. This makes the effort even more painful, heavier, more complicated. We invest tremendous energy, while somewhere deep inside we know it’s all in vain and doesn’t make much sense.

The existence of the ego, as described in Buddhism, represents the fundamental cause of suffering and all human misery. The self, the ego, is based on the idea of separate existence, disconnected from everything that surrounds us. Being separated in this way, we are constantly opposed to everything around us. 

We can say the ego is composed of three things: mind, body, and environment. It identifies with all three—”I am this body; I am this mind; and this is my environment, this is mine.” On all three levels, there is an incredibly strong conflict—within the mind itself, between the mind and body, and between the mind and the environment. Keeping the ego alive in the way we’ve described means constantly fueling this conflict on all levels. This is why human life is difficult and painful, why there is so much misery and unhappiness.

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. The ego isn’t always unsuccessful. There are moments of happiness, joy, and a certain balance in our lives. If there weren’t, we could hardly live at all. So, some balance exists, but a thread of insecurity runs through all experiences, both happy and unhappy. In happy ones, it’s hidden; in unhappy ones, it’s obvious. This is why people set out on a quest, on an investigation, asking themselves: Who am I? Why am I here? Why do things happen the way they do? What is my true nature? What is the essence? Is there an essence? What is the meaning of life at all? These are all very important questions that urge us to discover, and that discovery can change our lives.

The Buddha’s Discovery and Our Path

Finally, let’s return to the experience of the Buddha himself. As many of you probably know, in the early part of his life, he lived as a prince surrounded by all the wealth a person could imagine at that time. However, encountering the painful aspects of life prompted him to reflect. He realized he had been lulled into a false sense of security, that things do change. “Will wealth last? Will youth last? Will happiness last?” He understood that everything that exists depends on a great number of factors that are changeable and that nothing will last.

With this realization, he could no longer live with his eyes closed. He set out on a path, beginning to seriously inquire into these things. He concluded that the persistent and incessant need of people to make themselves permanent, solid, and enduring is the fundamental cause of all misery. He began to teach what is called in Sanskrit anātman (Pali: anatta), the teaching of non-self—the teaching that there is nothing permanent, eternal, and unchanging. The need for something permanent and eternal, something unchanging that we can always rely on, is a natural human need. It arose as a defense mechanism, a way to manage better in this world, but it is a consequence of ignorance about the nature of life and therefore cannot fulfill our expectations.

The Buddha went the completely opposite way. He sought permanence, but when he saw there was none, he turned to observing impermanence. It was precisely by observing transience and impermanence that he reached liberation. It’s like a situation where a fire breaks out, and everyone runs away from the fire and perishes. Those who remember that where there is fire, there is also an opening and thus air, turn towards the fire, pass through it, and save themselves. Perhaps the example is drastic (don’t always try to solve fire this way!), but I know of a case of a man who saved himself from a burning airplane precisely by not running away from the fire but by heading into it and managing to jump out of the plane just moments before it exploded. In such a situation, one must be sufficiently composed and present, not carried away by the usual impulses that typically drive us in life. Then we can find the right solution and see things as they truly are.

To be present, to be un-carried-away, is something that can be developed, something we can achieve primarily through the practice of meditation. This is the fundamental method and means that the Buddha taught and with which he showed others how to come to the same discovery he himself had made.

A Glimpse of What’s to Come

Here, I’ll conclude. In the next lecture, we’ll delve into the anatomy of the self or ego. We’ve talked quite generally now, but we’ll speak more precisely about the ego in Buddhism—what it is, what it’s made of, and why its nature isn’t what it seems.

The next lecture will be dedicated to the part of the saying: “To know Buddhism is to know oneself.”

The third lecture will be: “To know oneself is to forget oneself.”

The fourth will be: “To forget oneself is to be enlightened by all things.”

In the first two, and even the third lecture, we’ll talk a lot about the ego and self from the perspective of Buddhism in general. The last lecture will be dedicated to Chan methods of liberation from the illusion of self and other practice methods in Chan.

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First lecture of the four-part series “Who Am I?” by teacher Žarko Andričević, held at the Buddhist Center in Zagreb on February 17, 2007.