这个概念在说什么
If the Buddhist path is a long road toward liberation, then 自他 (zìtā — "self and others") is the very first pair of footprints left on that road. The definition is short — "the combined designation of oneself and other sentient beings" — but the territory it covers is vast: it stretches from the deepest analysis of how the mind constructs a "me" and a "you," through the lived ethics of generosity and harmlessness, all the way to the meditative transformation by which a practitioner learns to sit at the center of the circle of beings without clinging to the center.
To walk through this concept properly, we need to look at it on three layers, because it doesn't sit on a single plane.
第一层：作为认知范畴的自他 (Self and other as a cognitive category).
In its most basic sense, 自他 is a description of how any conscious being divides up experience. There is a "self" — the one who feels, wants, acts, suffers. And there are "others" — everyone and everything that is not that self. The Buddhist traditions do not deny that this distinction functions at the level of conventional reality (世俗谛). You do feel your own toothache; you cannot feel mine. You do have your own karma; I have mine. The 《阿含经》 (Āgama Sūtras) speak plainly of self as the owner of one's actions (我所作, 我所受) and of others as those whose actions are their own.
But the Buddhist investigation does not stop there. It asks: *how is this self-other distinction produced?* The 唯识 (Yogācāra — Consciousness-Only) tradition, in works like 《摄大乘论》 (*Mahāyānasaṃgraha*) and 《唯识三十颂》 (*Triṃśikā-vijñaptimātratā*), traces it to the 第七末那识 (seventh consciousness, *manas*) — the deep layer of mind that constantly maintains a self-other split through what are called the 四烦恼根本 (four root afflictions): 我痴 (self-ignorance), 我见 (self-view), 我慢 (self-pride), 我爱 (self-love). In other words, the seemingly obvious fact that "I am here, you are there" is itself a mental construction, maintained moment by moment by a particular function of consciousness. Other beings are "other" not because of any inherent boundary, but because this mental function ceaselessly classifies everything as "mine" or "not-mine."
The 中观 (Madhyamaka) tradition pushes the analysis further. Self and other are both 空 (śūnya, empty) of inherent existence — that is, neither has a findable, solid, independent nature. The "self" that the 末那识 grasps at cannot be located when searched for in the body, the feelings, the mind, or anywhere else. The "other" likewise is a conventional designation (假名安立) imputed on the basis of causes and conditions, not an independent substance standing apart from the self. As 《金刚经》 (*Vajracchedikā Sūtra*) famously warns, the practitioner should not hold on to the marks of self, person, sentient being, or lifespan (我相、人相、众生相、寿者相) — these four "marks" all sit inside the 自他 framework, and clinging to any of them is itself the beginning of bondage.
So at this deepest layer, 自他 is not a description of fact but of a *habit of mind* — one that the path aims to see through, not by denying that people exist, but by seeing that the *way* the mind carves experience into "self" and "other" is more constructed than we ever realized.
第二层：作为伦理范畴的自他 (Self and other as an ethical category).
On the conventional level, of course, self and other do function. We make choices; we bear their results; we cause harm or benefit to others. This is where the ethical dimension of 自他 lives.
Most of pre-Buddhist and non-Buddhist ethical thinking takes the self as the priority and asks: how should I treat others so that I flourish? Buddhism's distinctive contribution, especially in the Mahāyāna, is to *invert* and *dissolve* the priority. The 《大智度论》 (*Mahāprajñāpāramitā Upadeśa*), commenting on the 《般若经》 (*Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras*), explains the 四无量心 (four immeasurables) — 慈 (maitri, loving-kindness), 悲 (karuṇā, compassion), 喜 (muditā, sympathetic joy), 舍 (upekṣā, equanimity) — and it is the last one, 舍, that directly addresses the self-other framework. Genuine 舍 does not erase the distinction between self and other (that would collapse into indifference, which is a different failure); rather, it loosens the grip of *my* suffering being more important than *yours*, *my* people being more precious than *your* people. It is the tempering of the in-group preference that the mind constantly performs.
In this ethical register, the bodhisattva path is essentially a *restructuring of the self-other relationship*. Self-interest (自利) is not abandoned but relativized; other-benefit (利他) is not grafted on as a moral obligation but gradually recognized as inseparable from one's own awakening. The 《入菩萨行论》 (*Bodhicaryāvatāra*, Śāntideva) gives this restructuring a meditative form through the practice of 自他相换 (self-other exchange): placing oneself imaginatively in the place of others, and others in one's own place, until the rigid boundary that makes my happiness more vivid than yours begins to soften. The famous formulation — that all the suffering in the world comes from seeking one's own happiness, and all the bodhisattva's greatness comes from taking others' suffering upon oneself — expresses the inversion at the heart of Mahāyāna ethics.
The 《维摩诘经》 (*Vimalakīrti Sūtra*), in its chapter on viewing sentient beings, points to a further radical move: the bodhisattva who has truly worked through 自他 does not merely *help* others as a separate category of beings, but sees that the welfare of "others" is not something external to one's own path. The 观众生品 (chapter on contemplating sentient beings) describes how the bodhisattva regards each being as if they were a single child of one's own, without preference for the beautiful over the ugly, the close over the distant.
第三层：作为修行核心的自他 (Self and other as the axis of practice).
Self and other is not just a philosophical puzzle or an ethical ideal. It is the *axis* around which Buddhist practice rotates, in a way that is easy to overlook because it is so pervasive.
In 出离心 (renunciation), the practitioner sees that the self-clinging (我执) that makes everything revolve around "me and mine" is itself the source of suffering. The 苦 (dukkha) the Buddha diagnosed is fundamentally a *self-other problem*: feeling pulled between what I want and what others impose, between my well-being and theirs, between the world-as-I-see-it and the world-as-it-is.
In 菩提心 (bodhicitta), the practitioner deliberately reorients the heart toward all sentient beings. The four great vows of the bodhisattva (四弘誓愿) — 众生无边誓愿度, 烦恼无尽誓愿断, 法门无量誓愿学, 佛道无上誓愿成 — start with the infinite number of sentient beings, not with oneself. This is not an afterthought: it is the structural reversal of the default orientation of ordinary mind.
In 空性见 (view of emptiness), the practitioner sees through the *construction* of both self and other. The 《心经》 (*Heart Sūtra*) — 照见五蕴皆空, 度一切苦厄 — accomplishes this by dismantling the five aggregates that constitute the "self" and finding no fixed owner of them. When the self is empty of inherent existence, the rigid opposition to "others" loses its foundation too.
In each of these stages, 自他 is both the problem and the solution. The self-other split is the form that 迷惑 (delusion) takes; the dissolution and transformation of that split is the form that 觉悟 (awakening) takes.
A useful summary, drawing on the 华严 (Huayan) tradition's 事事无碍 (mutual non-obstruction of phenomena): in the awakened view, self and other are not erased but interpenetrate. The bodhisattva sees that one's own awakening cannot be completed apart from the awakening of all beings; and conversely, that each being's welfare is inseparable from one's own path. This is not a philosophical nicety but a structural feature of how 缘起 (pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination) actually works: nothing stands alone, including "me" and "you."
生活里的走查
Let's walk the concept through a few scenes of ordinary contemporary life, because 自他 is precisely the kind of concept that stays abstract until you notice it operating.
场景一：早高峰的地铁车厢。
Imagine yourself squeezed into a subway car during the morning rush. Your first mental move, almost certainly, is to draw a circle around your body — *my* space, *my* comfort, *my* bag, *my* stop. Everyone else is, in your immediate felt sense, an obstacle or a background element. This is 自他 in its narrowest, most contracted form: the 自 is the size of one body, and the 他 is everything that crowds in.
The 末那识 is doing exactly what the 唯识 texts describe: classifying experience as "mine" vs. "not-mine," "important to me" vs. "irrelevant to me." The discomfort you feel is partly physical but mostly the friction between an inflated self-sense ("I shouldn't have to stand this close to a stranger") and a deflated sense of others ("that person is just in my way").
Where most people misread the teaching here: they think Buddhism is asking you to *not mind* the crowded train, to instantly become a saint who feels no boundary at all. That's not the practice. The practice is to notice that the boundary is *drawn*, not given. The same body that feels squeezed against a stranger in the morning might, in the evening, lean willingly against a lover. The "self" expanded or contracted according to whom it was with. There is no fixed circle of "self"; only a circle being repeatedly re-inscribed by habit.
场景二：刷手机，看到点赞数。
Open any social platform. You post a thought, a photo, a piece of work. Within seconds, your attention is drawn to a number — likes, views, comments. What is happening, internally? A constant, almost involuntary comparison between your self and an imagined audience of others. The 末那识, in the Yogācāra analysis, is not just maintaining "I am here, you are there" — it is constantly *weighing* how the self appears in the eyes of others. 我爱 (self-love) wants affirmation; 我慢 (self-pride) fears being overlooked; 我见 (self-view) interprets the data as evidence about who I am.
Notice how the self-other relationship here is *inverted* from the morning train. On the train, others are background. On social media, others become the audience against which "I" is being constantly measured. The 自 is just as much under construction — maybe more — but now the 他 has been inflated into the role of mirror, judge, jury.
This is where Buddhism's diagnostic insight becomes useful. The suffering in scrolling is not that others exist or that numbers are wrong. It is that the mind has built a self-other framework in which *my* worth is dependent on *their* response. The path is not to abandon social media or to declare numbers meaningless; it is to see the framework as a framework, contingent and constructed, and to loosen its grip. The 自他相换 practice here would look like: remembering that every person scrolling is also performing this same monitoring of self and other, that their self is just as anxious and just as constructed as yours, and that there is no fixed "self" to be affirmed or diminished by any external count.
场景三：亲密关系中的摩擦。
A couple is arguing. The argument, on the surface, is about something specific — dishes, time, money, a forgotten message. Underneath, it is almost always a self-other negotiation. "I am not being seen." "You are always prioritizing yourself." "I have given so much; you give so little." Both parties are constructing a "self" that has been wronged and an "other" that has failed. The 末那识's 我爱 (self-love) is screaming that *my* needs should be primary; the partner is registering the same scream from their own 末那识.
This is where the 大乘 ethical teaching about 自他 finds one of its most practical applications. It is not asking the couple to pretend they have no needs or no grievances. It is asking each party, in the middle of the conflict, to *actually attempt* the 自他相换: to sit for a moment in the position of the other, and to look at one's own behavior from there. The remarkable thing is that this isn't a moral imposition; it's a practical move. The same Yogācāra analysis that says "the self is constructed" also implies "the other is constructed, and their construction looks painful from the inside too." Once both parties can register this, the rigid self-other standoff begins to lose its inevitability.
Where the practice goes wrong, commonly: when one party uses "we should be equanimous" as a way to avoid accountability, or to suppress legitimate needs. Genuine 自他相换 is not flattening; it's seeing more. It makes space for the legitimate needs of *both* selves, including the legitimate request that one's own needs be acknowledged — because the other is also a self, not a thing to be sacrificed.
场景四：职场中的"我们 vs 他们" 思维。
In a company, team, or department, an almost instant tribal formation takes place: *us* versus *them*. Our team is the 自; the other team is the 他. Our manager is on *our* side; theirs is against us. This is the in-group/out-group mechanism that contemporary social psychology has documented extensively — and it is also exactly the mechanism that the Buddhist analysis of 末那识 predicts. The mind that maintains self-grasping does not stop at the body; it extends "self" to possessions, family, team, nation, ideology. The 自他 framework scales up and down; the underlying mechanism is the same.
The 华严 teaching of 事事无碍 (mutual non-obstruction) is, on one reading, a training in seeing through this scaling. A truly mature practitioner does not lose their ability to function as a member of a team — but they recognize the team-belonging as another layer of imputed selfhood, contingent, changeable, and not the deepest identity. This frees them to collaborate across the tribal line, not out of moral heroism but out of a more accurate perception that the "us" and "them" are both constructions maintained by the same basic habit of mind.
场景五：在网上刷到灾难新闻。
A disaster far away — a flood, an earthquake, a war. You see images of suffering. For a moment, there is a wave of 悲 (karuṇā, compassion), because the 自他 boundary briefly loosens and you register the suffering as your own. Then the wave subsides; you scroll on. The next image, of a celebrity's vacation, pulls you back into the smaller circle of "self and its concerns."
The practice of 自他 is not to maintain the wave of compassion permanently as a kind of emotional marathon; it is to investigate *why the wave is so easily interrupted*. The answer the Buddhist traditions give: because the 自 was never deeply enough deconstructed in the first place. Compassion is the symptom; the dissolution of rigid self-other boundary is the work. When the 末那识 is less entrenched, compassion is not a heroic effort but a more natural responsiveness.
当代人为什么需要它
It might be tempting to read 自他 as a quaint classical category that doesn't quite map onto modern concerns. The opposite is true: the contemporary condition is, in many ways, a crisis of self-other relationship, and this concept offers tools specifically suited to that crisis.
1. 极度的自我膨胀 (Hyper-inflation of the self).
Contemporary culture, especially under the influence of consumer capitalism and social media, has produced a self that is more inflated than at almost any previous historical moment. The self is told it is unique, it is its own brand, it is the center of its own narrative, it deserves affirmation, it is the ultimate unit of value. This is not the same as self-confidence; it is a *brittle inflation*. The inflated self is paradoxically anxious, because its self-worth is constantly dependent on external verification (likes, status, comparison) — and external verification can always be withdrawn. The Buddhist diagnosis of 我执 (self-clinging) was written about ordinary mind; the contemporary self has its own intensified version of this clinging, in which the constructions of self and other are amplified by technology. The Buddhist analysis of how the self is *constructed* — not given, not essential, but built moment by moment — speaks directly to this condition.
2. 他者的消失 (The disappearance of the other).
The paradox of an age that talks endlessly about "community" and "connection" is that the actual experience of *the other* — a real, irreducible, not-myself person with their own interiority — has become thinner. In algorithmic life, the "other" is often a profile, a target, a data point. In urban anomie, the "other" is a function (barista, customer, driver) rather than a person. In political polarization, the "other" is a category ("them") rather than individuals. The Buddhist teaching about 自他, especially the part about how the 末那识 *constantly* constructs "other," can be read as a warning: when the construction runs unexamined, the actual other — with their full presence and needs — disappears behind the category.
3. 极化的政治与社会 (Polarization).
The in-group/out-group mechanism, when scaled up by media and political economy, becomes polarization. Both sides of any polarized debate have built a rigid 自他 framework: *our* suffering is real and grievous; *their* suffering is exaggerated or invented. This is exactly the structure that Buddhist practice aims to investigate. The Huayan and Madhyamaka traditions especially offer a sophisticated critique of how the self-other opposition is itself what generates the conflict, before any particular content is added. The practice of 自他相换 — even just *imagining* the situation from the other side — has been shown, in contemporary social psychology research, to reduce intergroup hostility. Buddhism arrived at this practice from a different direction; the convergence is not surprising, because both are responding to a structure of mind that is not new.
4. 孤独与连接的悖论 (The paradox of loneliness and connection).
The contemporary epidemic of loneliness, alongside unprecedented digital connectivity, is also a self-other problem. The lonely self has built an impermeable boundary; the connected self has built a boundary so permeable that real encounter is hard. Buddhist teaching on 自他 offers a third option: a boundary that is real (because people are different, and one's own suffering is one's own) but permeable (because the boundary is constructed, not essential, and the genuine welfare of others is not external to one's own). This is not a quick fix for loneliness — but it is a more accurate framing of what the problem actually is.
5. AI 与 自他的新前沿 (AI and the new frontier of self and other).
A new wrinkle, in our time, is the rise of artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems that *behave* like others — they respond, they appear to understand, they have a "personality" — but are not sentient beings in the Buddhist sense. They have no 苦 (dukkha); they cannot be harmed or benefited in the moral sense. This is sharpening the self-other question in a new way: how do we calibrate compassion, attention, and respect for a kind of "other" that doesn't fit the traditional categories? The Buddhist answer would not be anthropomorphizing AI (which would be a misapplication of 慈悲); it would be remembering that the very capacity to extend compassion comes from having first *seen through* the rigid self-other distinction — which means the foundation of compassion is not the apparent qualities of the "other" but the *deconstruction of the grasping self*. This is a place where the classical teaching has resources the contemporary world hasn't fully drawn on.
A note of caution on the comparison with brain science and AI: neuroscience has documented how the brain constructs a sense of self through predictive processing, default mode networks, and interoception. This is fascinating and partly convergent with the Buddhist analysis of how the 末那识 maintains self-other distinctions — but neuroscience is still a young field, the Buddhist analysis operates on different premises and with different aims, and claims that "science has proven Buddhism" should be treated with the same suspicion we would give to claims that "Buddhism has proven science." The two can illuminate each other; they cannot substitute for each other.
常见误读与澄清
误读一：「自他」就是简单的「我和你」。
If you walk away from this concept thinking "自他 just means me and other people," you've missed it. In Buddhist usage, 自他 is a *constructed pair*, not a given fact. The "self" in 自 is not the natural person; it is the *grasped-at* self, the self-as-essence that the 末那识 ceaselessly maintains and the path aims to dismantle. The "other" in 他 is similarly constructed — not just the empirical other person, but the other-as-opposed-to-self. When Buddhism analyzes 自他, it is analyzing a *mental framework*, not a description of social reality. The 《金刚经》's warning against 我相、人相、众生相、寿者相 is precisely aimed at this constructed nature.
误读二：利他就是压抑自己，讨好别人。
This is one of the most damaging misreadings. It imagines that Buddhist 利他 (benefiting others) requires the practitioner to deny their own needs, suppress their own legitimate boundaries, and serve others at their own expense. In fact, the Mahāyāna teaching is the opposite. Self-other exchange (自他相换) begins with a *healthy* self — a self that knows its own suffering, its own needs, its own dignity — and only then learns to extend the same regard to others. A bodhisattva who has not yet worked through their own self-clinging cannot genuinely help others; they will either burn out, become resentful, or impose their own unresolved issues on those they try to help. The 《入菩萨行论》 is explicit that the practice of exchanging self and other is built on a foundation of understanding one's own desire for happiness and aversion to suffering — and then extending that understanding outward. To skip the first half is to produce not a bodhisattva but a martyr, and the Buddhist tradition is not in the martyr business.
误读三：自他平等 = 所有人都一样。
Equality of self and other is sometimes heard as "everyone is identical" or "no roles matter." This is a flattening that misses what the teaching actually says. 平等 (equality) in the Buddhist context means that no being is fundamentally more or less deserving of compassion, that the same basic structure of suffering applies to all, and that the practitioner's job is to refuse the mind's constant ranking of beings (myself first, my family second, my group third, distant others a distant fourth, enemies last). It does not mean that a parent has no special responsibility for their child, or that a teacher has no special role with their students, or that all social functions are interchangeable. Within 自他平等, conventional roles continue to function — but they no longer *override* the deeper recognition that each being is a locus of the same irreducible 苦.
误读四：自他不二 = 冷漠或没有立场。
The Chan (Zen) and Madhyamaka teachings on 自他不二 (non-duality of self and other) are sometimes read as a kind of cosmic indifference: "since self and other are not ultimately different, it doesn't matter what I do." This is the exact opposite of what the teachings intend. The reason the bodhisattva can act with boundless energy is precisely *because* the self-other distinction has been seen through. When the rigid boundary falls away, compassion is no longer effortful — it flows naturally, because there is no longer an internal wall to maintain. The historical Chan and Madhyamaka masters who taught 自他不二 were almost always the most engaged and ethically active of teachers. The non-duality is the foundation of unlimited compassion, not its alternative.
误读五：自他只是伦理概念，不是修行的核心。
Some readers, especially in academic contexts, treat 自他 as a moral category separate from meditation and wisdom. In fact, it sits at the intersection of all three. It belongs to 戒 (śīla, ethical conduct) in the form of not harming others and cultivating generosity; it belongs to 定 (samādhi, meditative concentration) in the form of practices like 自他相换 and the four immeasurables; and it belongs to 慧 (prajñā, wisdom) in the form of seeing through the constructed nature of self and other. A Buddhist path that develops wisdom without 自他 remains cold and abstract; a Buddhist path that develops ethical conduct without 自他 remains social but shallow; a Buddhist path that develops meditative concentration without 自他 can become self-absorbed. The three training pillars require 自他 to be properly integrated.
误读六：当代心理学讲「自我关怀」(self-compassion)，跟佛教讲的利他差不多。
The contemporary self-compassion movement, associated with researchers like Kristin Neff, has genuine points of contact with Buddhist teaching — but it is not the same as 利他, and the difference is illuminating. Self-compassion, in this literature, is largely about treating oneself with the same kindness one would offer a friend. It is a corrective to the cultural tendency toward self-criticism. This is valuable — and Buddhism would, in many cases, support it — but it is not the Mahāyāna restructuring of 自他. The Buddhist move is not just "be kind to yourself as you would to others" but "investigate why 'self' and 'other' were ever constructed as opposing categories in the first place, and let the boundary soften at the root." The self-compassion literature is operating within the self-other framework, trying to make the self side kinder to itself; the Buddhist path is operating *on* the framework itself, transforming it. Both have their place; they are not the same teaching.
误读七：「无我」就是否定自他的存在。
The Buddhist teaching of 无我 (anātman — no fixed self) sometimes gets read as "self and other don't really exist, so ethics is meaningless." This is a profound misreading. 无我 does not deny the *functioning* of self and other at the conventional level; it denies their *inherent, independent* existence. In the 《阿含经》 and throughout the tradition, the Buddha affirms that the self functions (it acts, it experiences, it bears karma) while denying that there is a permanent, unchanging, independent essence behind it. Similarly, others function — they have their own karma, their own suffering, their own path — without being independently existing "others" set in opposition to "self." To see this is not nihilism; it is the foundation for an ethics and a compassion that no longer depends on the rigid essence-fiction. As the 《大般涅槃经》 affirms, the Buddha does not deny that there is a functioning self — only that the functioning self has the nature of clinging-to-self (我执).
结语 (in closing)
自他 is one of those Buddhist concepts that seems transparent until you look at it carefully, and then you see that almost everything the path addresses — suffering, ethics, meditation, wisdom, community, liberation — runs through it. The reason is structural: a being who experiences the world is, by definition, a being who has drawn a boundary between self and other. To wake up is to investigate that boundary, to soften it where it is rigid, to maintain it where it is functional, and ultimately to act from a place where the welfare of "self" and the welfare of "others" are no longer in a zero-sum contest.
For contemporary practitioners, the practical question is not "do I have a self?" or "is the other real?" — those are the questions of a different philosophical era. The practical question is: *what am I, right now, making into my self? And what am I, right now, classifying as the other?* The answer is, almost always, more than I realized, less essential than I assumed, and more fluid than I had thought. To notice this — quietly, repeatedly, without drama — is the beginning of the path through 自他, which is, in the end, the path through everything.