Mindfulness Meditation, No-Self, and the Problem of Verification

Buddhism claims that there are three marks of existence – dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anattā (no-self). In this paper I shall focus on the no-self claim, noting that, while early Buddhism developed arguments to demonstrate this, these arguments assume premises which rely on their verification in the meditative experience, specifically on the practice of mindfulness of meditation (vipassanā). The problem lies in a further assumption that mindfulness meditation is a practice of pre-conceptual “bare” attention that enables the practitioner to see phenomena as they really are. However, I will argue that the method employed in the practice already embodies an interpretation of experience that includes the idea that all phenomena are without self. Mindfulness meditation, then, cannot strictly speaking verify the no-self doctrine, as it fails the test of what Karl Popper calls “the falsifiability principle.” Nonetheless, I will argue that it is possible to recast Buddhism as a research program, in Imre Lakatos’ sense of the term, and to judge this Buddhist research program as “progressive” or “degenerate” to the extent that it enables Buddhist practitioners to move in the direction of Buddhism’s soteriological goal – to extinguish suffering (dukkha)..