Anatta

The classical Buddhist analysis proceeds by examining the five aggregates, physical form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness, one by one, and asking of each in turn whether it could be the permanent, independent self a person instinctively assumes exists behind their experience; in each case the analysis concludes that the aggregate in question is impermanent, subject to change and cessation, and therefore disqualified from being the fixed self that is being sought, since a genuine self, on the assumptions the argument shares with its Vedantic and Samkhya rivals, would have to be permanent and independently existing rather than conditioned and constantly changing.

What remains, on the Buddhist account, is not nothing, and the teaching is explicit that this is not a denial that persons exist conventionally, act, suffer, and can be liberated, but a denial specifically that any fixed, unchanging essence underlies that conventional, functioning person; the aggregates themselves continue to arise and pass away in a causally connected stream, dependent origination describing exactly how that stream is structured, without there being any further, separate self riding along on top of the stream and owning it. This is what allows Buddhism to affirm karma and rebirth, a causal continuity carrying moral consequence forward, while denying that any unchanging soul is what is reborn, a combination that puzzled and continues to puzzle interpreters trying to square continuity without a persisting substance.

Anatta stands in the most direct possible opposition to personal identity as substance and to any doctrine of an enduring atman or purusha, and the philosophical dispute between Buddhist no-self teaching and Vedantic or Samkhya accounts of a persisting self is one of the oldest and most carefully argued disagreements in the history of Indian philosophy, conducted across many centuries of formal debate between Buddhist and Brahmanical schools, each side developing increasingly sophisticated arguments against the other's account of what, if anything, persists through a person's life and across successive lives.

Advaita Vedanta's response is characteristically distinctive: rather than simply asserting a substantial self against Buddhist denial, Advaita argues that what anatta correctly identifies as lacking a fixed nature is precisely the empirical, individual ego, the very thing Buddhism analyzes and finds empty, while a deeper, non-individual consciousness, ultimately identical with Brahman itself, remains untouched by the analysis and is exactly what liberation reveals, a response Buddhist philosophers have in turn argued smuggles back in, at a deeper level, the same fixed essence anatta was meant to rule out entirely.

Personal identity as continuity, developed independently within Western philosophy by Locke and Parfit, arrives at a structurally similar picture to anatta, a person as a connected stream of psychological states rather than a persisting substance, without either tradition directly influencing the other, another case of the same structural claim surfacing twice.