Look upon the world,” says the Buddha, “as void.+

Look upon the world,” says the Buddha, “as void, having destroyed the view of oneself as really existing, so one may overcome death; the king of death will not see him who thus regards the world.”

The doctrine of No-self means two things:

(i) The Self is an aggregate of impermanent mental and bodily processes;

(ii) The world is unsubstantial and void; it is an aggregate of impermanent qualities devoid of substances.

The Self is impermanent. It is an aggregate. It is a series of successive mental and bodily processes which are imperma­nent. There is no permanent Self. The Self is a stream of cognitions (vijanasantana). There is a continuity of constantly changing mental processes in it. Sometimes they are intermittent.

So the Self is sometimes compared to sleep and dream. The course of organic life is compared to dreamless sleep, in which consciousness is evoked by external stimuli, which is compared to dream. Conscious processes break in upon the stream of the subconscious processes.

The Self is an aggregate of the body and four kinds of mental processes, feeling, perception, dis­position, and Self-consciousness. The body is not permanent. It is an aggregate of vital organs and their functions. It is an aggregate of changing qualities.

The Buddha is emphatic on the denial of the permanent Self in the following texts.

‘The world is empty of a self, or of anything of the nature of a Self. The five seats of the five senses, and the mind, and the feeling that is related to mind: all these are void of a Self or of anything that is Self-like.’ “When one says ‘I’, he refers either to all the aggregates combined or any one of them and deludes himself that that was T. One could not say that the body was T or that the feeling was T- or any other aggregate was ‘I’.

There is nowhere to be found in the aggregates ‘I am’. ‘Since neither Self nor aught belonging to Self can really and truly exist, the view that holds that this I who am world, who am Self, shall hereafter live permanent, persisting, eternal, unchang­ing, abide eternally; is not this utterly and entirely a foolish doctrine ?’ ‘This Self of mine is the knower, the enjoyer of the fruits of my good and bad actions: it is eternal and immutable, it will continue for infinite time: this thought is very childish’, ‘The body is not-self j feeling is Self; perception is not-self; disposition is not-self; Self-conscious­ness is not-self. All dharmas are not-self’.

The five aggregates are impermanent. They are not the so-called permanent Self. Belief in the permanent Self is a wrong view of the Self (satkayadrsti). The last text does not mean that the Self is eternal and transcendental. It clearly means that the five aggregates constitute the not-self. There is no permanent Self. The self is an empirical aggregate. There is no Self beyond them. This is the unique and original teaching of the Buddha.

Once the Buddha kept silent on the existence or non­existence of the Self. The wandering monk Vacchagotta said, “Is there the ego?” Buddha was silent. Again he said, “Is there not the ego?” Still, Buddha kept silent.

When the monk departed, the Buddha said to Ananda that the affirmative answer would lead to externalism (sasvatavada), and that the negative answer would lead to annihilationist (ucchedavada) But both are wrong views.

The ego or self is not eternal nor is the Self-non-existent. If the Self is non-existent, there can be no transmigration and reaping of the fruits of actions. The truth lies in the middle of the two extreme views. The phenomenal or empirical self exists.

The doctrine of No-self means also that the world is unsubstantial and soulless. All external things are aggregates of changing qualities. There is no permanent substance apart from impermanent qualities. The permanent identical substance is a fiction of the imagination. All forms of existence, material and psychical, are impermanent and soulless. They are subject to the inexorable law of becoming