This chart outlines at a glance the first discourse of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Long Discourses of the Buddha, which lays out a number of different ways in which people can hold mistaken views about the nature of the self and of the world.
The first eighteen views are based upon speculations about the past, while the final forty-four all have their root in speculation about the future. In both cases we see the drawbacks of “hammering it out with reason,” but we also see how easy it can be to draw erroneous conclusions from deep meditative experience.
Of course the one thing all the mistaken views have in common is the assumption that the self exists, and it is the core insight of the Buddha to see through this appearance to a more subtle, process-based understanding of selfhood and identity.
