Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Mind, Self and Emptiness gathers forty two doctrines addressing the same question from opposite ends: is there a self behind experience, and if so what is it.

Buddhist analysis answers no. Anatta denies any permanent self, finding on analysis only the five aggregates, each impermanent, and dependent origination explains how experience arises without a self behind it; anicca and dukkha are the companion marks, and sunyata generalises the denial to everything, empty of any self standing nature. Buddha-nature and the rangtong and shentong dispute over how strongly emptiness should be read sit closest to the tradition's harder edges, alongside Mahamudra and Dzogchen, whose defining claim is that awakening is already the ground; Dzogchen's own record states plainly that its advanced practice is esoteric and withholds its detail from general readers, a limit this entry keeps. Jhana and samadhi name the absorptions that train toward these recognitions, and satori and kensho name Zen's own breakthrough into them.

Hindu Vedanta answers the opposite way. Atman is a real self reached by neti neti, not this, stripping away everything that can be named, described at its height as turiya, the fourth state beyond waking, dreaming and sleep, and witnessed by sakshi, awareness never itself changed. Avidya names the misperception that hides this, and prakriti and purusha, matter and pure consciousness, supply Samkhya's own version of the same division. Jainism answers a third way, dividing all that exists into jiva and ajiva and insisting through anekantavada that any single account captures only one standpoint. Sufi fana, Hasidic bittul and the Dark Night of the Soul close the group as three traditions' own accounts of the self's dissolution before God.