For Indian religions, including Buddhism which is the specific subject of my paper,
experience is a sine qua non. What I would like to do in this paper is to suggest that what makes
the early Buddhist teachings different from those of other Indian religions is not that they are
saying that it is a differently structured truth about Reality that one should be aiming to experience,
but that what they are saying is that one should be aiming to know the truth about the
reality of experience itself. In my view, the doctrine of anatta (not self) in early Buddhism, can
act – and indeed has acted – as a red herring if it is taken as the central teaching of Buddhism and
interpreted in the way in which it usually is. What I would like to suggest is, first, that one should
understand it slightly differently, and accord it a different emphasis; and, second, that the truly
central point about what the Buddha taught is that one should understand experience qua
experience
