The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 166 of 254
Wise people fashion themselves
Batchelor points to a very famous passage in the Dhammapada (verse 80), in which the Buddha says: ‘Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves.’2 ‘In that usage,’ says Batchelor, ‘attā, which is the same word, is not seen as problematic at all. In fact what the Buddha is pointing to is the notion of self as something like a project to be realised rather than something that inheres within you in some sort of transcendent way. So like a field to be cultivated, like an arrow to be fashioned, like a block of wood to be sculpted, so the person through their actions creates themselves. The Buddha’s idea of self therefore is something that we create.