Anattā (No-Self)

Anattā (Pāli; Sanskrit anātman), “not-self” or “no-self”, is the Buddhist teaching that there is no permanent, unchanging, independent self or soul in any being. What we call a person is a constantly changing process of physical and mental events — the five aggregates (skandhas) of form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness — none of which is a self, and which together do not make a self either. With impermanence and suffering, not-self is one of the three marks of all conditioned existence. It is the most distinctive and most contested doctrine of Buddhism, and the dividing line between Buddhism and the Hindu and Jain traditions, which affirm an eternal self (ātman, jīva). See Buddhism.

The argument

The second sermon

The classic argument is in the Buddha’s second discourse, the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (“Discourse on the Characteristic of Not-Self”), given to his first five disciples at Sārnāth. It has two parts.

First, the argument from control: “Form, monks, is not-self. If form were self, it would not lead to affliction, and one could say of it: ‘Let my form be thus; let my form not be thus.’ But because form is not-self, it leads to affliction, and one cannot say of it: ‘Let my form be thus.’” The same is said of feeling, perception, formations and consciousness. A self, by definition, would be under one’s control; none of the aggregates is.

Second, the argument from impermanence: “Is form permanent or impermanent?” “Impermanent, Lord.” “Is what is impermanent suffering or happiness?” “Suffering, Lord.” “Is what is impermanent, suffering and subject to change fit to be regarded thus: ‘This is mine, this I am, this is my self’?” “No, Lord.” And so for each aggregate. Therefore: “Any kind of form whatever, past, future or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near — all form should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’”

The chariot

The most famous illustration is in the The Questions of King Milinda (“The Questions of King Milinda”), a dialogue between the Greek king Menander (Milinda) of north-western India and the monk Nāgasena (c. 1st century BCE). When the king asks the monk his name, Nāgasena says he is called Nāgasena, but that this is only a name — “there is no person found here”. The king, astonished, asks: who, then, keeps the precepts, meditates and attains nirvāṇa? Is Nāgasena the hair? The nails? The body? Feeling? Consciousness? Something besides all these? No, says Nāgasena, to each. Then Nāgasena asks how the king came — on foot or by chariot? By chariot. “Then what is the chariot? Is the pole the chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame? Is it something besides these?” No. “Then there is no chariot!” The king concedes: “chariot” is a designation for the pole, axle, wheels and frame in dependence on each other. “Just so, your majesty, ‘Nāgasena’ is a designation for the hair, the body, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness. But in the ultimate sense, no person is found here.”

What the doctrine does not say

The Buddha did not teach that persons do not exist in any sense; he spoke of himself and others, and taught that each person is responsible for their actions and their future. Nor did he directly assert “there is no self” as a metaphysical thesis: when the wanderer Vacchagotta asked him point-blank whether there is a self, he remained silent, later explaining that to say “there is a self” would side with the eternalists and to say “there is no self” with the annihilationists. Many scholars therefore distinguish a not-self strategy — a practical method of disidentifying from every aspect of experience — from a full no-self metaphysics, which later Buddhist philosophers developed.

The problem of rebirth

If there is no self, what is reborn, and who reaps the fruits of karma? The Buddhist answer is continuity without identity. The person in the next life is related to this one as one flame is to another lit from it — neither the same nor different (na ca so na ca añño, the Milindapañha says). Causal connection, not a persisting substance, carries karma. Later schools explained the mechanism differently: the Pudgalavādins posited an indefinable “person” (pudgala), which other Buddhists condemned as a self by another name; the Yogācāras posited a “storehouse consciousness” carrying karmic seeds.

The great debate

For over a thousand years, the no-self doctrine was the central issue between Buddhists and Hindu philosophers. The Nyāya philosophers argued that memory, recognition and desire require an enduring self: one person cannot remember what another experienced; when I recognise a thing I saw yesterday, the same subject must have seen both. The Buddhists answered that memory requires only causal continuity of mental events. Vedāntins held that the Self is not one of the aggregates but the witness of them all — the “unseen seer” of Yājñavalkya — which the Buddhist analysis, looking only at objects, could never find. See Ātman is Brahman.

Western parallels

David Hume, in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739), wrote: “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other… I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” The self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 1984) argued that personal identity is not what matters, and explicitly compared his view to the Buddha’s. Contemporary philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists (Thomas Metzinger, Evan Thompson) have taken up the comparison.

In conversation

The chariot is the image: take away the wheels, axle and frame and there is no chariot left over — and yet you still ride to work in one.