When people in the West first learned about Buddhism, especially in the twentieth century, there were a lot of psychotherapists who complained, “The Buddha teaches there’s no self, but people need to have a healthy sense of self in order to survive, in order to be healthy, happy individuals.”

But they had a misunderstanding on two counts. One is that the Buddha never taught that there is no self. He just taught that there are things we tend to identify with which cause suffering, and we’d be better off if we let go of them, if we didn’t identify with them. His teaching was “not-self,” not “no self.”

Secondly, as an important first step, he taught all the basic principles that modern psychologists now say contribute to a healthy self. He had them figured out more than two thousand years ago.

There are five qualities that modern psychologists point to. The first one is anticipation. In other words, you realize that there are dangers facing you, and if you have a healthy sense of self, you’ll prepare for those dangers. You realize that you have the ability to make preparations, and you don’t want to let the opportunity to pass.

Well, the Buddha teaches this, too. In fact, he says it’s the basis for all skillful qualities. He calls it heedfulness: realizing that we do face dangers in life, some of them from inside, some of them from outside, but we can prepare, we can protect ourselves from those dangers through the power of our actions.

The second principle is altruism—when you take the well-being of other people into consideration because you realize that your well-being will have to depend, at least to some extent, on their well-being as well. Here again, the Buddha teaches this. He calls it compassion. Compassion comes from heedfulness.

There’s a story in the Canon: A king and a queen are alone in their apartment, and in a tender moment the king turns to the queen and says, “Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” You know what he’s probably thinking. He wants her to say, “Yes, your majesty, I love you more than I love myself.” And if this were a Hollywood movie, that’s probably what she’d say. But this is the Pali Canon, and the queen, Mallikā, is no fool. She says, “No, there’s nobody I love more than myself. And how about you? Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” The king has to admit that, No, there’s nobody he loves more than himself. So that’s the end of that scene.

The king goes down to see the Buddha and tells him what had happened. And the Buddha says, “You know, she’s right. You could search the whole world over, and never find anyone you love more than yourself. In the same way, other beings, other people, love themselves just as fiercely.” Then the Buddha’s conclusion is that you should never harm anyone, and never cause them to do any harm.

In other words, think of their happiness, think of what would cause them true happiness, and work for that, keep that in mind. After all, if your happiness depends on their suffering or their doing unskillful things, they’re not going to stand for it. They’re going to resent it and try to do what they can to destroy your happiness. So for a happiness that lasts, if you really are heedful, you need to have compassion for all beings. That’s the sign of a healthy self.

Then there’s the principle of suppression, realizing that you have some unskillful attitudes, some unskillful urges that come up in the mind, and if you give in to them, it’s going to cause trouble. So you learn how to say No.

In Buddhism we have this too. The Buddha teaches restraint. Anything you would do, say, or think that would cause harm, you learn how to say No. But you don’t just stop with No. And here again, both psychology and the Buddha’s teachings tell you what to do. The psychologist’s term is sublimation, where you learn how to find pleasure some other, more skillful, way, so you’re not just feeling frustrated.

In the Buddha’s teaching we don’t have a term for that, but the Buddha does talk about taking delight in being on the path. When you’re generous, think about what a good thing it is to be generous. When you observe the precepts, think about how happy you are that you’re not causing the kind of trouble that gets caused when you break the precepts. And when you meditate, the Buddha says to breathe in a way that gives rise to rapture, breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure; train yourself to do this, so that you can spread the rapture and pleasure throughout the body, so that you can find happiness inside.

Then finally, the fifth principle the psychologists talk about is having a sense of humor: You learn how to laugh at your foibles. That’s a healthy self. The people who can’t laugh at themselves, who take themselves too seriously, who are too proud: They’re headed for a fall.

Well, the Buddha doesn’t talk about humor so much, but he does show instances of humor. There was that time when he compared brahmans to dogs, and the dogs came out better than the brahmans. As he said, in the old days brahmans didn’t handle money, and dogs didn’t handle money. Nowadays, you find brahmans who do handle money, but dogs still don’t handle money. In the old days brahmans would have sex only with brahmans and not with non-brahmans. Nowadays, they have sex with all kinds of people. In the old days, dogs wouldn’t have sex with non-dogs, and today they still don’t have sex with non-dogs. So the Buddha did have a sense of humor.

And what’s most important, of course, is when you’re meditating and you’re faced with your defilements, that you learn how to laugh at them. See that your lust is pretty ridiculous; your anger is pretty stupid. It’s a lot easier to get past these things when you can laugh at them.

Then finally there’s the quality the Buddhist’s talk about, but the psychologists don’t, and that’s having a healthy sense of shame. For the psychologists, shame means one thing: being embarrassed about something that other people look down on you for. It’s the opposite of pride. But there’s another kind of shame, which is the opposite of shamelessness. Shamelessness is when you don’t care what other people think, you’re just going to do what you want to do, and you don’t care what opinion they have of you.

The Buddha actually encourages a sense of shame in that sense. He says you want to look good in the eyes of the noble ones. That kind of shame is part of a healthy sense of self because it spurs you to do the things that you know are right. You don’t carry around that very offensive sense that “I don’t care what other people think.” That’s not healthy.

So the Buddha does teach you how to have a healthy sense of self, because as he says, the self is its own mainstay: attāhi attano nātho. But it’s going to be your mainstay only if you train it. If it’s not trained you can’t really depend on yourself, but if you do train it, then you can depend on it.

This is really an important principle throughout the teachings: You have to keep depending on yourself. The Buddha teaches, as he says, that the whole of the holy life is to have admirable friends, and to engage in admirable friendship. Which means that you look for good people to associate with, but not only that: Whatever good qualities they have, you try to emulate. So in that sense you’re dependent on them, but it’s up to you to emulate their qualities. They can’t do it for you.

Years back when I was taking the Dhamma exams in Thailand, one of the exams involves writing a little Dhamma talk. They’d give you a quote from the Canon and they wanted you to write about that topic and then, in the first year, bring in one quote from the Canon, the second year two quotes, the third year three quotes, Pali and Thai. They gave you a book full of short quotes from the Buddha’s teachings, and they expected you to memorize it.

I remember when I was studying for the exam, I’d hear the novices reciting page after page after page. And of course, Thai was not my native language, and memorization was not my forte. So I figured what I needed to do was to find two or three sure-fire quotes that would be applicable in any situation, with any topic. And this was one of them: “The self is its own mainstay.” Whatever you do, you’re going to have to depend on yourself, and you have to train yourself to be dependable.

That’s where we get back to heedfulness, with the reminder that we have to think in the long term and can’t just be satisfied with the short term. The Buddha defines that as part of the definition of discernment as well. You’re wise to the extent that you want to know what to do or say or think that would lead to long-term happiness.

This principle is so basic that many of these principles of the healthy self are the things that the Buddha taught to his son, Rāhula, when Rāhula was only seven years old. He starts out by saying that before you do something, ask yourself, “This thing that I plan to do”—whether it’s an act in the body, speech, or mind—“will it harm myself, will it harm others?” That’s heedfulness right there, plus compassion: You don’t want to harm anybody. If you see that it will harm somebody, you don’t do it. That’s restraint.

So three of the principles are right there, right at the very beginning.

If you don’t foresee any harm, then you can go ahead and do it. But even while you’re doing it, you look at what actually is coming out in the course of your action as the results. This is the principle of being responsible, which also comes from heedfulness. You don’t just depend on good intentions. You really want to make sure that your intentions are actually skillful. So building on heedfulness, you’ve got a sense of responsibility.

If you see there’s any harm, you stop. If you don’t see any harm coming up, you can continue. When the action is done, you look at the long-term consequences and if you see some unexpected harm, you go talk it over with someone else who is more advanced on the path. Then you develop a sense of shame around that action. In other words, you realize it’s beneath you. This, again, is part of that healthy sense of self, the shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness.

But if you see that there was nothing that in any way that you caused any harm, he said to take joy in the fact that you’re advancing on the training. That’s sublimation, learning how to take joy in being skillful.

Instead of just indulging in your whims, doing what you want, learn to appreciate life as a skill, and that you’re appreciating the skill you’re developing. There’s a very deep sense of happiness that comes when you realize that you’ve done something skillful—much deeper than simply enjoying nice sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations.

So from the very beginning the Buddha was teaching his son almost all of the principles of a healthy sense of self. So there’s nothing lacking in the Buddha’s teachings. We simply have to learn how to understand them and to apply the right teaching at the right time.

Eventually, you will let go of your sense of self, but only when it’s done everything you need it to do. It’s part of your strategy for finding true happiness. You’re learning how to train it, so that it finds a happiness that’s genuinely true, genuinely reliable—so reliable that you don’t have to do anything to maintain it. That’s when you don’t need the strategies anymore—either the strategies of self or the strategies of not-self.

But in the meantime, learn how to develop a healthy sense of self that will maintain you on the path. It’ll guarantee that you’re headed in the right direction, a happiness that really is solid.