The Ancient Understanding of Identity and Personhood: A Cautionary Reflection
By Beezone
“Dharmic-ethical framework gives the lie to the Western category of the “singularity” of an individual: Singularity as a function of death”
Sujay Sood, Dharmic-ethics, Emory University 1997
“In East Africa, among the Akamba… As soon as the umbilical cord has been hung around the child’s neck, the child becomes a real human being; before that, it is looked upon as being in more or less intimate connection with the spirit world.”
Gerhard Lindblom, The Akamba in British East Africa, An Ethnological Monograph,
***
Preface: The Chariot and the Illusion of the Self
In an ancient Buddhist dialogue known as The Questions of King Milinda, a monk named Nāgasena confronts the powerful king’s question about the nature of self. The king asks, if there is no “real” person—as Buddhism teaches—then who receives gifts, who meditates, who does good or evil, who experiences the fruits of action?
Nāgasena replies by pointing to the king’s own chariot: “Is the pole your chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame?” The king says no to each. Nāgasena continues: “Then is there anything apart from these that is the chariot?” Again, no. “Then what is this ‘chariot’ you claim to own?” Nāgasena asks.
The king sees the point: the chariot is not a separate thing—it is a convenient term for a combination of parts assembled in a certain way. So too, Nāgasena says, the “self” is merely a conventional name for the five aggregates—body, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. There is no enduring, independent ego behind them.
This ancient simile pierces through what we now take for granted: the self as an isolated, sovereign entity. And it opens the door to remembering that, across many ancient traditions—not just Buddhism but also indigenous and tribal societies—the self was never assumed to be solitary or self-originated. Identity was forged in participation, not possession. One was not a person merely by being born—but by being recognized, named, initiated, and bound in relation.
What follows is a contemporary reflection on this forgotten truth—one that echoes across traditions and now whispers through the cracks of modern psychological certainty.
The Ancient Understanding of Identity and Personhood: A Cautionary Reflection
In studying the perceptions of personhood among ancient and indigenous cultures, one cannot help but confront a deep paradox: these societies clearly understood that individuals could think, feel, act, and speak—but they did not, as we do, conceive of the person as an isolated, self-contained individual. Rather, the self was embedded in a web of social, spiritual, and cosmological relationships. This contrast is nowhere more evident than in the way such cultures treated the beginning of life, the development of personality, and the recognition of individuality through ritual and social inclusion.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
’s The Soul and the Individual in Primitive Thought offers a vivid portrayal of this worldview. The very young infant, in many ancient communities, was not yet considered fully alive or part of the human community. In British New Guinea, for example, the father did not include the baby in a family count because the child did not yet contribute to communal work. Among the Bampangu, an infant was merely a kimpiatu—a grub, a chrysalis—not yet a child until a name was bestowed, signifying the integration of the child into the community and the soul-lineage. Naming was not merely identification; it was ontological transformation. It made the child a “nuana muntu,” a human child, an individuated soul within the group’s sacred lineage.
This understanding strikes us as alien today, yet it reveals something profound: the soul, the self, the person—these were not given facts of biology but achievements of relationship, ritual, and cosmological participation. Before naming, or the falling off of the umbilical cord, or the rite of being brought outside the house for the first time, the child remained in a liminal state: semi-human, half-born, part spirit. The self had to be ritually drawn into the world, named, and anchored within the social and spiritual fabric of the tribe.
This belief extended into adulthood. Initiation rites—circumcision, seclusion, trials—marked the boy’s transformation into a man, the girl’s into a woman. Prior to these rites, even if biologically mature, one was considered a nobody. The uncircumcised were denied rights, status, and inheritance. They had no standing. Initiation was not merely social inclusion; it was ontological metamorphosis, the remolding of being itself. Only after initiation was a person considered to have a complete individuality and personality—and often, only after fathering children was that individuality perfected. To die childless was, in many cultures, to die incomplete.
What this shows is that ancient peoples—so often dismissed by modernity as ‘primitive’—had a deeply relational, spiritually infused, and communal understanding of personhood. They recognized that a person is not born whole and ready but must become through relationship: with family, tribe, ancestors, and the unseen world.
By contrast, the modern Western concept of individuality rests on radically different assumptions. Personhood today is defined biologically, psychically, and legally: one is a person because one exists as a unique being with consciousness and rights. This belief system has deep roots in post-Enlightenment rationalism and in Christian ideas of the immortal soul—but in secular form, it has lost the sacred context that once grounded the concept of identity.
This difference is most glaring when one considers the absence of any foundational ceremonial rites in modern life to recognize and celebrate the stages of growth in a child. While there are vestigial remnants—Christenings, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, confirmations—these are now largely private or symbolic, and increasingly detached from the wider society. They derive from ancient understandings but have been hollowed out to fit modern secular and scientific sensibilities. There is no communal, cosmological recognition of a child’s unfolding identity.
This absence has consequences. In place of sacred initiations into identity, we offer consumer milestones, digital profiles, and fragmented rites of passage like high school graduation or legal drinking age. These do little to confer true meaning or communal belonging. Without communal rites, our children often grow up with a fragile sense of self, clinging to individualism while starving for connection. The soul’s becoming is left to chance.
And so we arrive at a caution: the modern belief that we are superior to the ancients in our understanding of identity may be not only premature but profoundly misguided. To believe that individuality begins at the cellular level—as many in the abortion debate now argue—is to equate biology with personhood. But in so many of the cultures Lévy-Bruhl studied, a fetus, even a newborn, was not yet a person. Personhood emerged slowly, through ritual and relationship, through social and spiritual embedding. It was not guaranteed by biology; it was bestowed.
Modern psychology, particularly developmental and attachment theory, ironically confirms aspects of this view. The infant does not emerge from the womb with a formed ego or self-concept. It is through attunement, touch, language, and mirroring that the sense of self is constructed. Yet even psychology often stops short of recognizing what the ancients knew: that selfhood is not merely psychological, but also spiritual, communal, and ceremonial.
Despite this alignment, modern psychology is often treated—consciously or unconsciously—as a kind of secular religion, wielding a cultural authority that borders on dogma. It is not simply a field of study, but a belief system rooted in modern assumptions about the self, truth, and objectivity. Its rise over the past 150 years has paralleled the decline of communal rituals and spiritual narratives. In its place, psychology has inserted technical language, diagnostics, and therapeutic frameworks, often serving as both the church and the scripture of modern identity.
This deeply ingrained authority leaves little room for meaningful dialogue with older worldviews. A striking example of this resistance can be seen in the widespread dismissal of indigenous and Buddhist conceptions of self in academic psychology departments. For instance, efforts to include non-Western perspectives in curricula are often marginalized or tokenized. Scholars who suggest that the self might be relational or non-individuated are frequently met with skepticism or are pressured to reframe their arguments in the language of empirical science. These instances reveal not only a disciplinary bias but a broader cultural refusal to imagine the self outside of Western individualist parameters. Emotional attachments to individual rights, political polarization over topics like abortion, and the decline of religious traditions have created a cultural landscape in which the modern sense of self is defended not with curiosity, but with fervor. To even suggest that identity is not a given, but a relational unfolding, is to risk being accused of denying personhood altogether. This reaction makes it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss alternative models of personhood without triggering defensive ideological responses.
And yet, this is precisely what we must do—if we are to understand what it means to be human beyond the confines of our current paradigms.
This ancient insight, however, has not vanished entirely from the world. In Buddhism, we find a parallel continuity of this understanding. For example, in the Theravāda tradition, the concept of anatta (no-self) is taught not merely as a metaphysical idea but as a lived insight into the impermanence and interdependence of all experiences. A well-known teaching illustrates this: just as a chariot is made up of axle, wheels, and yoke—but is itself no more than the sum of these parts—so too the person is nothing beyond the aggregate of body, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness. Similarly, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Bodhisattva ideal expresses a selfhood that is inherently relational and compassionate, dissolving the boundaries between self and other. In this way, Buddhist traditions maintain an ontological view of personhood that aligns with the ancient communal model described by Lévy-Bruhl, where identity is forged in interrelation rather than isolation. Buddhism has preserved a fundamentally non-individualistic conception of the self, in which identity is not fixed but ever-changing, contingent, and interdependent. The doctrine of anatta—no-self—challenges the very basis of the Western egoic view. From early Pali texts to Mahayana elaborations, Buddhism has held fast to the idea that the separate, enduring self is a fiction. What we call “I” is a stream of experiences, sensations, thoughts, and karmic conditions, arising in dependence on causes and relations.
In this way, Buddhism remains a living testament to the wisdom that ancient cultures held in various forms: that personhood is not an isolated property, but a flux, a process, a participation. Buddhism never needed to modernize its core understanding to accommodate psychology; instead, psychology is only just beginning to confirm what Buddhism and many indigenous cultures never forgot.
Our failure to recognize this may be contributing to the psychological fragmentation and social isolation of modern life. We elevate the individual without nurturing the soul. We assert the self without the ceremonies that root the self in meaning.
In re-examining the past, we are not urged to return to its exact forms—but to reconsider its wisdom. The ancients may have lacked our technologies and sciences, but they did not lack insight into the nature of being. They knew that identity is not a possession but a process. They knew that to become a person is to enter a world of obligations, symbols, and sacred ties. And perhaps most importantly, they knew that no one becomes anything alone.
In remembering what they knew, we may rediscover what we have forgotten—and in doing so, begin to reclaim the soul of the individual, not as an isolated unit, but as a thread in the sacred fabric of life.
A Call to Study and Self-Reflection
Let this not remain merely a reflection, but a call to study—and more than that, to self-reflection. To examine, deeply and personally, the assumptions we carry about identity, selfhood, and personhood. To question not only what we believe, but how we came to believe it. Let us investigate the systems—psychological, cultural, religious, political—that have shaped our inner lives without our even noticing.
This is not an academic pursuit alone; it is an existential one. To study is to look again. To reflect is to be mirrored by what we discover. And it is through this earnest inquiry—humble, open, and sustained—that we might begin to loosen the hold of unconscious belief systems, and reawaken a more spacious, relational, and sacred understanding of what it means to be human.
Let us begin.
Bibliography
-
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Soul and the Individual in Primitive Thought
-
Marcel Mauss, A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self
-
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
-
Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective
-
Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth
-
Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language
-
D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment
-
Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life
-
Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
-
Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism
-
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art