Anattā as Metacognitive Discovery: The Zero-Point of the Narrative Layer

This paper argues that anattā — the Buddha's teaching of not-self — is bestunderstood as a metacognitive discovery: the recognition that "self" is aculturally transmitted predictive prior, constituted entirely on the narrativelayer, with no sub-narrative referent. Drawing on the free energy principle andthe acquisition-continuation framework, the paper identifies the cognitivemechanism: the self-prior, installed at the apex of the predictive hierarchy fromculturally transmitted narrative material, is ordinarily invisible to the system itorganises. It becomes visible — available as an object of metacognitiveattention rather than functioning as transparent ground — when competingcultural frameworks force meta-representation. The paper grounds its textualanalysis in the oldest recoverable stratum of the Pāli canon, the Aṭṭhakavaggaand Pārāyanavagga of the Sutta Nipāta, identifying the "bundled operation"(view-construction = self-construction) and the verse "I am the thinker" (Sn4.14, v. 916) as the diagnostic core. It argues that the discovery was enabledby the structurally exceptional multicultural collision of fifth-century BCEIndia, where competing theories of selfhood coexisted at structural parity.Three supplementary cases — Nishida Kitarō, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein —approached the same territory at other collision points, confirming thestructural relationship between multicultural conditions and metacognitivebreakthrough. The Buddha's distinctive contribution was not only to see thezero-point from which the narrative layer becomes visible, but to develop acontemplative method for sustaining the recognition.