The Overcoming of Self in Go

Azt mondod, hogy ha bármit is komolyan veszünk, az csak rólunk szólhat? Mármintha elmélyedünk valamiben, akkor nem juthatunk máshova, csak önmagunkhoz (közelebb legalábbis)? Vagy hogy az univerzum közepe önmagunk közepében van?

The Overcoming of Self in Go

by William Cobb

It is interesting to think of Go as a sort of sedentary martial art. In earlier days it was often seen that way quite self-consciously. Go was looked upon as a Way (do/tao), a practice through which one could achieve the ultimate level of existence and establish contact with the highest level of reality, that is, achieve enlightenment and enter nirvana. In the martial arts this goal is often spoken of as overcoming the self and becoming one with the tao. A common misconception thinks that this is similar to the experience of losing oneself in an activity, but in the martial arts this is not simply a matter of learning to concentrate on the activity and ceasing to be self-conscious--something any accomplished athlete masters. In the martial arts the idea is to destroy a particular way of understanding oneself and the related way of experiencing the world and relating to others. This is expected to have a profound impact on every aspect of one's life, not just on the way one practices the art. It is a thorough transformation, like waking up from a nightmare.

One can still approach Go as a tao in this sense, of course. In fact, I find it amazing how often the game seems to have some of this sort of impact on players who are surely unaware of this way of thinking about it. Just playing the game seems to bring many players closer to nirvana, or, as the ancient Chinese claimed, make them "better" (that is, enlightened) people. This is exactly the way it would be with a proper tao. "Just do it-that is being enlightened," as Dogen, the 13th century Japanese Zen master, said. He was talking about sitting meditation (zazen), but it comes to the same thing.

To understand how one enters nirvana just by playing Go, one needs some understanding of what it means to overcome the self. The Buddhist view of what a human being is contrasts radically with the common Western view. In the latter, it is assumed that each person is a unique, self-contained, self-responsible agent. Even though the individual person has parts, these parts constitute the person on the basis of their relations to each other. These internal relations are what make up the real self; external relations to other persons and the world are not constitutive of one's fundamental being on this view.

Thus, groups of individuals such as families or communities are abstractions for most Westerners; it is their individual members that are real. These individuals can leave one group and join another and still be the same persons. This is the famous Cartesian ego, the ego that says, "I think, therefore I am." It is the philosophical notion that is at the root of Western individualism, the view that all actions and all values are ultimately the actions and values of individuals. Such individuals can cooperate with each other, but they remain separate individuals.

It is just this view of the self that the Buddha said is the number one source of human suffering and is thus the most serious of all the delusions that humans are prone to. It is the self in this sense that the martial arts are designed to overcome; the point of the practice is to get rid of this delusion. This view of the self causes terrible problems because it encourages us to believe that we can make our lives better by acquiring or achieving things for ourselves as separate individuals. Buddhists argue that life is in fact a common endeavor; we are all part of each other in the most literal sense. Thus, it makes no sense to think that I could help myself at your expense. At this point, we can begin to see how Go can help us to overcome self in the common Western sense.

In most competitive games it is easy to believe that by winning, which is a personal achievement, one is doing something that is inherently good and, in at least a small way, making one's life better. The handicapping system in Go effectively counters this unfortunate assumption. The point of handicapping is to make the quality of the playing of the game, which is a joint and not a personal achievement, the thing that matters. Even if a player only thinks of the handicapping system as a nuisance and tries to focus on winning, the practice counteracts this attitude. Players just naturally begin to pay more attention to the process of the game, delighting in plays that are particularly effective-even when the effect damages their own chances of winning a game.

Another striking instance of this overcoming of self is the common practice among Go players of pointing out in a tournament when the other has failed to hit the clock after making a play. This practice obviously damages one's chance of winning, and there is no rule that requires one to draw the other's attention to this slip. Yet it is a very pervasive practice among Go players.

The extent to which playing Go just naturally leads to the overcoming of self in this sense is one of the great attractions of the game. Even if people do not realize that it amounts to getting a toe into nirvana, in Buddhist terms that is what it is. Nirvana is the place/condition of being enlightened. Being enlightened is the condition of having overcome self. So just play-and notice how often you find yourself sharing a smile.

The Empty Board #4

American Go Journal XXIX, 3 (Summer 1995), 30-31