Self-grasping

Self-grasping (Skt. ātmagrāha; Tib. dak dzin; Wyl. bdag 'dzin) — often translated as 'ego'.

Sogyal Rinpoche writes:

[...] Ego [...] is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. This is what is known as the ‘ego’ or dak dzin in Tibetan, which means ‘grasping at a self’. Ego is defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that sustain this false construction.

Internal Links

• selflessness