The Self Dissolved and the Self Shared: A Constructive Dialogue between Theravāda Anattā and Filipino Kapwa

Comparative philosophy of Buddhism has been dominated by engagements with Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and, more recently, Tibetan traditions, while the philosophical traditions of Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, have remained on the periphery despite their geographical and historical proximity to Theravāda Buddhist polities. This article seeks to redress that imbalance by staging a constructive dialogue between two doctrines of selfhood: the Theravāda teaching of anattā (non-self) as articulated in the Pāli suttas and developed in the Abhidhamma, and the Filipino concept of kapwa (the shared inner self or fellow-being) as theorised within Filipino psychology and Filipino philosophy. Drawing on textual analysis of canonical Theravāda sources alongside contemporary scholarship on kapwa from Filipino philosophers, the study argues that the two traditions, although arising from distinct cultural and metaphysical horizons, converge in their refusal of the autonomous, bounded subject of Western modernity while diverging instructively in their methods and emphases. Anattā proceeds analytically through a deconstruction of the person into the five khandhas; kapwa proceeds phenomenologically through a thick description of relational personhood in everyday Filipino experience. The paper proposes that, when read together, anattā furnishes a metaphysical floor for kapwa by clarifying what kind of “self” can intelligibly be shared, while kapwa extends anattā into the social-relational domain where Buddhist analyses of personhood have been criticised as thin. The study contributes to comparative Buddhist philosophy by situating Filipino philosophy as a contributing interlocutor rather than a peripheral case study, and to decolonial method in religious studies by demonstrating how Asian philosophical traditions can be read in sustained dialogue with one another without recourse to a European mediating frame. The deepest lesson of the dialogue, if it is the lesson it appears to be, is one that both traditions are well placed to teach: that the self we begin from, when we begin to philosophise, is never quite the self we are. The Theravāda tradition teaches this through the analytical dissolution of the apparent self into the streams of its conditioned arising; the Filipino tradition teaches it through the phenomenological recognition that, before any self has constituted itself as such, there is already a kapwa.