Self

The self is what a person is: the subject of experience, the one who thinks, acts and endures through time. In ordinary use it is bound up with the body, memory, character and the story one tells about oneself. The contemplative traditions ask whether, beneath all this, there is a true self, and what it is.

Their answers divide sharply. The Upaniṣads and Advaita Vedānta teach that the true self (ātman) is pure consciousness, and is not different from Brahman, the one reality. The Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions speak of a created soul, made for God, which may be transformed in union but remains a creature. The Buddha taught non-self (anātman): no permanent self can be found among the changing elements of experience, and clinging to one is a root of suffering. Daoist and Zen texts speak of “forgetting the self”.

Modern philosophy and psychology have their own debates about the self, from Hume’s “bundle” of perceptions to contemporary theories of the narrative and the minimal self. Much depends on what is meant: the self that is denied in one tradition may not be the self that is affirmed in another.