The latest fashion is to claim that the Buddha said a human being is a jumble of karmic activities like a karmic fuzz ball. The problem is that the Buddha never talked about what you are.

"When I was up in the Bay Area [in September 2017], I came across a new word: corelessness. Apparently, the latest fashion is to claim that the Buddha said we are coreless, and that that’s the meaning of anatta. In other words, there’s a jumble of karmic activities that make up a human being. That’s what you are. The anatta teaching, in this interpretation, is not a not-self teaching; it’s a no-self teaching. It answers the question of what you are, saying that what you are has no core. You’re like a karmic fuzz ball. All the fuzz that’s picked up as the fuzz ball moves across the floor under the force of the wind is held together only by static electricity, but there’s no real core there. This is supposed to represent what the Buddha taught about what we are.

The problem is that the Buddha never talked about what we are. That was one of the questions he consistently avoided. If you say that there’s no core there, then when kamma ends in the attainment of nibbana, there’d be nothing left. Nothing would exist there. And the Buddha wouldn’t have gone to such trouble to say that an arahant after death can’t be said to exist or not exist or both or neither. It would be obvious: The arahant wouldn’t exist. End of problem. But that wasn’t his solution to the question. And it’s no solution to anything at all."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Core of Experience" (Meditations9)


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