Anattā

Anattā is the Buddhist teaching that no permanent, independent self exists in a person or in any phenomenon. It challenges the assumption that anything can be possessed as an enduring “I” or “mine.”

Five aggregates: The five changing groups—form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness—used in Buddhist analysis of personal experience. Anattā examines each aggregate and finds none suitable as an enduring self.
Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta: A discourse in which the Buddha analyzes the five aggregates as not-self. It presents the classic argument: what is impermanent and liable to affliction cannot rightly be regarded as self.
Ātman: In several Indian traditions, the enduring inner self or ultimate identity that persists beyond changing experience. Anattā rejects an enduring self of the kind affirmed by many theories of ātman.
Anattā in the Pāli Canon: The presentation of not-self in the early Buddhist discourses preserved in the Pāli Canon. These discourses supply the earliest surviving formulations and arguments for anattā.
Anattā and karma: The Buddhist problem of explaining karmic continuity and results without an enduring self. Anattā requires continuity through causal processes rather than a permanent agent traveling between lives.
Dependent origination: The Buddhist account of how phenomena arise and cease through conditions rather than independently. Its account of conditioned arising explains why persons lack independent existence.
Not-self contemplation: A Buddhist meditation practice that observes experience without treating it as “I,” “mine,” or a self. It applies anattā directly to bodily and mental events as they arise.
Pudgalavāda: A Buddhist doctrinal position that affirmed a person whose status was neither identical to nor separate from the aggregates. Its account of personhood offered a distinct response to the problem anattā addresses.
Buddha: The title for an awakened teacher; in Buddhism, it most often denotes Siddhartha Gautama. The early discourses present anattā as a central teaching of the Buddha.
Rebirth in Buddhism: The continuation of conditioned existence across lives in Buddhist traditions, without requiring an unchanging soul. Rebirth makes the distinction between causal continuity and a permanent self especially consequential.

Linked from 29 pages