Self and No-self

Abstract

These remarks might initially strike one as hopelessly obscure. How, one might ask, can there be an action without there being someone who performs it? Similarly, the suggestion that the person just is the ‘successive perceptions’ — the denial that the person is something that has the perceptions and so is quite distinct from them — is not easy to grasp. The image of a pain which is not had by anything, is one which, I think, baffles most of us even if we are not sure how to say just what is wrong with it.

The mental and the material are really here, But here there is no human being to be found. For it is void and merely fashioned like a doll, Just suffering piled up like grass and sticks.¹

Buddha has spoken thus: ‘O Brethren, actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. There is no one to cast away this set of elements and no one to assume a new set of them. There exists no Individual, it is only a conven­tional name, given to a set of elements.

But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. … They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind.²