Non-self (anātman)

Non-self (Sanskrit anātman, Pali anattā) is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhist teaching, with impermanence and suffering. It denies that a person contains, or is, a permanent, independent self (ātman) of the kind the Upaniṣads affirm. In the early discourses, the Buddha examines the five aggregates that make up a person, body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness, and finds that none of them is permanent, none is under our full control, and so none can be called “mine”, “I” or “my self”.

The teaching is not the claim that persons do not exist at all. A person is a stream of interdependent processes, real in the way a river or a flame is real, and responsible for actions and their results. The Questions of King Milinda illustrate this with the image of a chariot, which is nothing apart from its pole, axle, wheels and frame, yet is rightly called a chariot.

Buddhist schools disagree about how far the teaching extends. The Pudgalavāda accepted a “person” neither the same as nor different from the aggregates, which other schools condemned. Mahāyāna extends non-self to all phenomena, as emptiness. And teachings on buddha-nature raised the question, still debated, whether they reintroduce a self under another name.