Anatta · Pāli: anattā; Skt: anātman

Anatta (Pali; Sanskrit anātman) does not say that you do not exist. It says that no fixed, independent self can be found among the changing parts that make up a person. The Buddha’s discourse on the not-self characteristic, the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59), works through the five aggregates one at a time. “Form, monks, is not self,” it begins; if form were the self, “this form would not lend itself to dis-ease”, and it would be possible to say “Let this form be thus. Let this form not be thus.” Because it is not, every form, feeling, perception, fabrication and consciousness “is to be seen as it actually is with right discernment as: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.’” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). The discourse ends in relief rather than loss: the five monks who listened to it were “fully released”.

Not-self is rarely taught on its own. The Dhammapada sets it beside its two companions among the three marks of existence: “All conditioned things are impermanent” (277), “All conditioned things are unsatisfactory” (278) and “All things are not-self” (279), each of them, seen with wisdom, “the path to purification” (trans. Acharya Buddharakkhita).

Later Indian philosophy pressed the same analysis further. Nāgārjuna, whom the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself, built his middle way (madhyamaka) thought around emptiness, the absence of any “inherent existence” or “intrinsic nature” in things. One reading of that thought became the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism.