Utkarsh Chawla, Graduate Student, Nalanda University
How does the ego or self arise? And how does it sustain throughout an individual’s life to impart a stable sense of personal identity? These are questions that, through the pages of history, different contemplative traditions and systems of thought have sought to answer differently. In this paper, I shall be examining three systems of thought: Buddhist philosophy, phenomenology and modern cognitive science. Through a textual study of the seminal works of each tradition, I seek to understand how these traditions account for the self. Such a study would also shed light on the commonalities in theme and approach which exist between the answers supplied by these three fields as to issues of self and identity. Finally, I wish to ask if it is possible to synthesize a ‘generalized’ answer from these three stands, one which responds to the criticisms and flaws each individual solution suffers from.
