Anatta: no permanent self

Buddhists affirm anatta, that there is no permanent, unchanging self or soul underlying experience. What is conventionally called a person is analyzed as a flowing combination of five aggregates, body, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness, none of which, singly or together, constitutes a fixed self; all are impermanent and dependently arisen. The teaching is one of the three marks of existence, alongside impermanence (anicca) and suffering (dukkha), and clinging to the illusion of a self is held to be a root cause of suffering.

The classical illustration of the doctrine appears in the Milindapanha, a dialogue between the monk Nagasena and the Greco-Bactrian king Menander, in which Nagasena asks the king to point to the chariot he arrived in: is it the wheels, the axle, the frame, or the pole? None of these parts, alone or even all together, is the chariot itself, Nagasena argues, yet chariot remains a perfectly useful word for the assembled whole; a person, he concludes, is a name for the aggregates in the same way, real enough for everyday speech and moral responsibility, but not naming any single, separate, essential thing underneath them. The image is one of the tradition's most frequently cited teaching devices precisely because it makes the point without denying that persons, and moral responsibility, are real in the only sense the teaching says matters.

Anatta is the point on which Buddhism parts most decisively from the surrounding Indian traditions: where Hinduism and Jainism affirm an enduring self or soul that transmigrates, Buddhism denies any such permanent essence and describes rebirth as a causal continuity without a self that is reborn. The doctrine is affirmed across the Buddhist schools, though Mahayana philosophy develops it further into the emptiness (shunyata) of all phenomena, extending the analysis from persons to every conditioned thing whatsoever.

Modern philosophers working on questions of personal identity, independent of any religious commitment, have noted a real structural resemblance between anatta and reductionist theories of the self in Western analytic philosophy; Derek Parfit's influential Reasons and Persons explicitly drew the comparison, arguing that once personal identity is analyzed away into psychological continuity and connectedness, the resulting picture converges with something like the Buddhist view that there is, at bottom, no further fact of a persisting self beyond the connected series of mental states. Buddhist scholars have generally welcomed the comparison while noting it remains a philosophical parallel rather than agreement on the further, specifically Buddhist, soteriological claim that seeing through the self is what ends suffering.