“Misery only doth exist, none miserable;
  No doer is there, naught but the deed is found;
  Nirvana is, but not the man that seeks it;
  The path exists but not the traveller on it.”

Thus the Buddha and his disciples rejected such ideas as soul, being and personality.  But their language does not always conform to this ideal of negative precision, for the vocabulary of Pali (and still more of English) is inadequate for the task of discussing what form conduct and belief should take unless such words are used.  Also the Atta (Atman), which the Buddha denies, means more than is implied by our words self and personality.  The word commonly used to signify an individual is puggalo.  Thus in one sutta[419] the Buddha preaches of the burden, the bearer of the burden, taking it up and laying it down.  The burden is the five skandhas and the bearer is the individual or puggalo.  This, if pressed, implies that there is a personality apart from the skandhas which has to bear them.  But probably it should not be pressed and we should regard the utterance as merely a popular sermon using language which is, strictly speaking, metaphorical.

2

The doctrine of Anatta—­the doctrine that there is no such thing as a soul or self—­is justly emphasized as a most important part of the Buddha’s teaching and Buddhist ethics might be summarized as the selfless life.  Yet there is a danger that Europeans may exaggerate and misunderstand the doctrine by taking it as equivalent to a denial of the soul’s immortality or of free will or to an affirmation that mind is a function of the body.  The universality of the proposition really diminishes its apparent violence and nihilism.  To say that some beings have a soul and others have not is a formidable proposition, but to say that absolutely no existing person or thing contains anything which can be called a self or soul is less revolutionary than it sounds.  It clearly does not deny that men exist for decades and mountains for millenniums:  neither does it deny that before birth or after death there may be other existences similar to human life.  It merely states that in all the world, organic and inorganic, there is nothing which is simple, self-existent, self-determined, and permanent:  everything is compound, relative and transitory.  The obvious fact that infancy, youth and age form a series is not denied:  the series may be called a personality and death need not end it.  The error to be avoided is the doctrine of the Brahmans that through this series there runs a changeless self, which assumes new phases like one who puts on new garments.

The co-ordination and apparent unity observable in our mental constitution is due to mano which is commonly translated mind but is really for Buddhism, as for the Upanishads, a sensus communis.  Whereas the five senses have different spheres or fields which are independent and do not overlap, mano has a share in all these spheres.  It receives and cognizes all sense impressions.