Dr Dechen Rochard - on How selflessness uproots the causes of suffering

Why are Buddhists so focused on refuting the self? How can it benefit anyone? We can all observe in our daily experience various mental states arising and ceasing. We can recognize that non-virtuous mental states are disturbing. The Buddha identified the cause of such disturbance to be a subtle type of grasping that habitually arises within the mind-stream and misconceives its object. This grasping is a specific mental factor variously known as the identity view, ignorance, or self-grasping. In the context of selflessness, what Buddhists are negating is the grasped object, or the object-as-cognized, by such a mind. To accomplish the final goal of perfect inner peace, one investigates this grasping mind’s focal object (the mere self) and eventually perceives the absence of its object-as-cognized (the inherently existent self). The mere self is not denied but used simply as a basis of investigation. Through continuously repeating this procedure and becoming familiar with the lack of inherent identity, the habitual attitude of self-grasping is gradually abandoned and the mind-stream completely purified.

Dechen Rochard is a Buddhist scholar-practitioner and disciple of HH Dalai Lama. After several solitary retreats in the UK, she completed a decade of traditional study at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala. She then continued her studies of Madhyamaka with Geshe Lhundub Sopa for a further decade, translating and editing his Steps on the Path to Enlightenment, Volume 5: Insight (Wisdom Publications, 2017). Having previously gained a degree in philosophy from the University of London, she pursued a PhD in Buddhist philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She then contributed to The Dalai Lama Foundation’s Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, translating Volume 2 (The Mind, 2020) and Volume 4 (Philosophical Topics, 2023). Dechen is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Religion and Theology, University of Bristol.

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