Anattā, fanāʾ, kenosis, anatta — Buddhism, Sufism, and Christian mysticism each have a word for the dissolution of the small self. Reading them side by side reveals a convergence the traditions themselves rarely admit.
If you read enough contemplative literature across enough traditions, a strange thing starts to happen: the vocabularies stop sounding like rivals and start sounding like translations of each other. The territory each is mapping turns out to be — at least at the level the traditions consider most important — recognisably the same.
Nowhere is this more striking than around the dissolution of the small self. Four traditions, four words, one phenomenon.
Anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit) means not-self. It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, alongside anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (unsatisfactoriness). The teaching is that the self the practitioner takes herself to be — the felt sense of a continuous, separate, owner-of-experiences — is not, on close inspection, findable. There are sensations, there are thoughts, there are intentions. There is no extra someone behind them having them.
Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart* is the most accessible Western articulation of what anattā feels like in difficult life — not as a metaphysical claim but as a felt loosening of the grip the self maintains on its own coherence.
Fanāʾ is the central technical term of Sufism — the annihilation of the self in God. Through sustained dhikr — the repeated invocation of one of the divine names — the Sufi traveller is said to pass through stages in which the felt boundary between the practitioner and the practised-toward thins, then breaks. What remains is described in the literature not as nothing but as only God. The vocabulary is theistic. The phenomenology is recognisably the same as anattā.
Ibn ʿArabī, the thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi philosopher, wrote a doctrine — waḥdat al-wujūd, the unity of being — that maps almost cleanly onto the non-dual Hindu advaita. There is one being. The apparent two are an artefact of perception.
Kenosis (Greek, self-emptying) is the term Paul uses in Philippians 2 to describe what Christ did in becoming human — he emptied himself. The contemplative Christian tradition extended the term: kenosis is what the practitioner is asked to do in turn. Empty oneself. Make room. Meister Eckhart preached on this directly in the fourteenth century — his famous formula, the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me, is a non-dual statement in medieval German.
Jonathan Pageau's work on Eastern Orthodox iconography sits inside this lineage — the contemplative current of Christianity that the Desert Fathers established and that runs, unbroken, through Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Thomas Merton into the present day.
Two things are easy to get wrong about a comparison like this.
The first is to flatten the traditions into a single ahistorical perennial philosophy, as if they were all saying the same thing in slightly different words. They are not. The metaphysics differ. The ethics differ. The cosmologies differ. A Buddhist anattā practitioner and a Sufi fanāʾ practitioner would, if pressed, give substantively different accounts of what is happening when the small self loosens.
The second mistake is the opposite — to insist the traditions are incommensurable and that any felt convergence between them is a category error. This too is wrong. The practitioners who have moved between traditions — Thich Nhat Hanh corresponding with Trappist monks, Pema Chödrön trained in Tibetan tantra teaching American Christians, the long history of Hindu-Sufi exchange in medieval India — report something more interesting than identity and more substantial than coincidence.
The phenomenon they are pointing to seems to be real. The vocabularies are local. Read enough of them and the local vocabularies start to sound like dialects.
Or, as Nisargadatta Maharaj put it from the advaita side: the seeker is the sought. Four traditions. One sentence. The translation problem solves itself if you sit with it long enough.
— end of essay —