The History of Buddhist Thought c16.45

c16.45

But if we translate na m’eso attā (this is not my self) as “ this is not my soul ”, there is the possibility of supposing that Buddha implied that there was a permanent soul somewhere else, even if not in the five khandhas. Such a translation is perfectly arbitrary, and that sense would only have plausibility if we could suppose that the later community had suppressed the ātman doctrine so effectually from the rest of his forty-five years of teaching that no one remembered anything of it. Yet although at his death his teaching was preserved in the minds of thousands of disciples (and indeed nowhere else) we find no trace of it even as a heresy among the Buddhists. If a trace had survived, we should have expected the Vātsīputrīyas to have appealed to it when they started their doctrine of an individual plus the five khandhas. But in fact they started from a quite independent point of view, and there is nothing to show that they thought they were contradicting the teaching about the self.¹