The Anattalakkhana Sutta: The Not-Self Discourse

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 7 September 2026

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The Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta — “The Characteristic of Not-Self”, SN 22.59 — is by tradition the Buddha’s second discourse, given at Isipatana to the same five mendicants who had heard his first. It works through the five aggregates one at a time, in the same words each time, and at its end all five were freed.

This page gives the discourse passage by passage in Bhikkhu Sujato’s public-domain translation, with the Pali behind the English. For the teaching, see anattā.

What is the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta?

It is a short discourse in the Saṁyutta Nikāya, the “Linked Discourses” of the Pali Canon: the seventh sutta of the sixth chapter (Upayavagga, “Involvement”) of the Khandhasaṁyutta, the book of discourses on the aggregates. Older editions cite it as S iii 66. Its Pali title is a compound: anatta + lakkhaṇa, “the mark of not-self”. Access to Insight prints it under a name taken from its audience, the Pañcavaggi Sutta, “Five Brethren”; SuttaCentral heads it Anattalakkhaṇasutta.

Sujato calls it “the famous ‘second discourse’”. In the first sermon the Buddha had mentioned the five aggregates only “in brief”; here, Sujato writes, “he draws that teaching out in more detail” — so the second discourse is in effect a commentary on one line of the first.

The setting: the same five, in the same deer park

Nobody asks for this teaching: the discourse has no questioner, no occasion. The “group of five mendicants” (pañcavaggiyā bhikkhū) are the ascetics of the first sermon, and on Sujato’s account they had already been ordained and reached stream-entry before it began — “Knowing they were ready, he taught them about not-self.” The attā about to be tested is not a vague sense of selfhood but, Sujato notes, the ātman of the Upaniṣads and the jīva of the Jains: an eternal essence austerity was meant to purify. Isipatana is modern Sarnath.

The discourse, passage by passage

The passages below run in order. What is left out is repetition: the same argument, catechism and formula put again to each remaining aggregate.

”Form is not-self” — the argument in full

The Pali opens rūpaṁ, bhikkhave, anattā — three words, no verb, a bare predicate. What follows is conditional rather than assertive: if form were self, it would not lead to ābādha (affliction), and labbhetha, “it would be obtainable”, that form match your wish. Sujato’s “you could compel” turns that passive active; Ṭhānissaro keeps it flatter with “It would be possible [to say] with regard to form”. The test is control.

The repetitions the text abbreviates

Each line stands for the whole paragraph above, with vedanā, saññā and saṅkhārā in place of rūpa. The abbreviating is uneven: the Pali writes feeling and choices out in full and shortens only perception, with the reciters’ mark …pe… (peyyāla); Sujato’s English shortens all three. It matters, because the repetition is the argument: an audience hearing this chanted took the same clause five times, against five different aggregates.

”Consciousness is not-self” — the formula’s last turn

Sujato reads the sequence as an ascent: the Buddha starts with form “to capture the most basic conceptions of self”, then moves “through successively more refined conceptions”, ending with the subtlest — the Upaniṣadic identification of self with consciousness. Viññāṇa is the last place that audience would have looked.

The catechism: impermanent, suffering, not fit to be called self

Here the discourse stops being a lecture. Everything from here on, Sujato notes, “is repeated countless times throughout the discourses”: the Buddha “engages his audience in question and answer”, and the five state the conclusion themselves. The same three questions are then put about each remaining aggregate. The chain runs anicca to dukkha to anattā — the three marks of existence in the order the Buddha argues them. And the formula rejected is three claims: etaṁ mama, esohamasmi, eso me attā — this is mine, I am this, this is my self.

”This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self”

The same sentence then repeats for feeling, perception, choices and consciousness. Its eleven-fold sweep — past, future, present; internal, external; solid, subtle; inferior, superior; far, near — is a standard canonical formula for exhaustiveness, leaving no remainder where a self might hide. Yathābhūtaṁ sammappaññāya daṭṭhabbaṁ, “seen with right understanding as it has come to be”, makes this seeing rather than believing, and the three negations reverse the catechism’s three claims one by one.

Disillusionment, fading, freedom

Three Pali verbs carry the ending — nibbindati, virajjati, vimuccati — and translators part company over the first. Sujato has “grows disillusioned”, Ṭhānissaro “grows disenchanted”, Brahmali “is repelled”. Nibbidā is not despondency but the turning-away of someone who has seen through something; virāga is literally the fading of colour, and so of passion. “Rebirth is ended…” is the canon’s set declaration of arahantship.

The ending: five arahants

“Freed from defilements by not grasping” renders anupādāya āsavehi cittāni vimucciṁsu — freed by not taking up, not by an act of will. The Vinaya adds the arithmetic the sutta omits: “Then there were six perfected ones in the world” (Kd 1:6.47.4, trans. Bhikkhu Brahmali) — the Buddha and the five. Days after the first sermon started the Sangha, the second finished the path for everyone in it.

How the translations differ

Anattā is simply na + attā, and the question is how much the English should say on the Pali’s behalf. Sujato’s hyphen keeps “not-self” a single predicate: form is a not-self thing. Ṭhānissaro’s “is not self” reads more like a denial of identity. Brahmali’s “not your essence” spells out what was at stake for that audience, at the cost of the word’s ordinary sense of “oneself”. Saṅkhārā splits the same way: “choices”, “[mental] fabrications”, “intentional activities”. None is wrong — which is why quoting one as “what the sutta says” is never quite honest.

Where else the discourse survives

SuttaCentral lists parallels in the Chinese Saṃyukta Āgama — SA 33, “The Discourse on Not-self”, and SA 34, “Five Monks” — plus T 102, the Sanskrit Mahāvastu of the Lokottaravādins (Mvu 95), and the ordination chapters of the Dharmaguptaka and Mahīśāsaka Vinayas. Schools that later disagreed about much else all transmitted this discourse.

Within the Pali tradition it appears twice: as SN 22.59, stripped to the argument, and inside the Vinaya’s account of the first ordinations (Kd 1), where the five are ordained on the page before. If SN 22.59 feels abrupt, that is because the Vinaya is holding its context.

What the discourse argues, and what it leaves open

Read closely, the sutta never states “there is no self.” It says of each aggregate that it is anattā, and that none is fit to be regarded as “mine, I, my self” — a claim about what you find when you look, not a thesis about what exists. Sujato is precise about the target: the attā examined here was “a metaphysical theory of an abiding, eternal reality that is one’s truest essence”.

He adds a caution: that metaphysical self “has only a contingent relationship with the empirical ‘self’ of psychology or popular usage”. The doctrine itself belongs elsewhere — anattā for what it does and does not deny, the five aggregates for the anatomy this argument assumes, what nirvana is for where the ending leads.

Read the whole discourse

Everything quoted above is from Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation on SuttaCentral; compare Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s on Access to Insight, and the fuller setting in Bhikkhu Brahmali’s Vinaya translation. For its collection see the Pali Canon and the Buddhist scriptures; before it came the first sermon, and third by tradition the Fire Sermon.