Anatta

The claim

The doctrine denies atman — a permanent, unchanging, independent self of the kind Upanishadic thought identifies as the true subject and equates with ultimate reality.

The canonical argument proceeds by examination. A person is analysed into five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness. Each is examined and found impermanent; what is impermanent is unsatisfactory; and what is impermanent and unsatisfactory cannot properly be regarded as "mine, I am this, this is my self". No sixth thing is found behind them.

What it does not claim

The doctrine is not that persons do not exist. Buddhist texts speak freely of persons acting, remembering and being reborn, and moral responsibility is not abandoned. What is denied is a permanent unchanging essence underlying the changing process.

Nor is it a straightforward metaphysical assertion that there is no self. The Buddha is reported as declining to answer directly when asked whether a self exists, on the grounds that both a flat yes and a flat no would mislead. The teaching is presented as an instruction for investigation — look for it, and see that it is not found — rather than as a thesis to be believed.

The difficulty it creates

If there is no permanent self, what is reborn, and what bears the consequences of action? Buddhist schools answered at length: through dependent origination, in which a process continues without an enduring bearer; through the analogy of a flame passing from one lamp to another; and in the Abhidharma, through detailed accounts of momentary mental events succeeding one another.

The question drove much of Buddhist philosophy, and produced the Pudgalavada school, which posited a person neither identical to nor different from the aggregates and was regarded by the others as having conceded the point.

Position

Anatta is one of the three marks of existence, with impermanence and unsatisfactoriness, and is accepted by every Buddhist school. It is the doctrine on which Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophy divided most sharply, and the debate between them over the self ran for more than a thousand years.