The Buddhist no-self doctrine, its Mahāyāna refinement as emptiness, and the Christian doctrine of the God-imaging soul
3Scholarly views
8Primary sources
6Scripture passages
3Related debates
Is the human person a constructed, impermanent bundle of aggregates with no abiding self (Buddhist anattā), or a real and enduring soul made in the image of God (the Christian imago Dei)?
Why it matters
Nowhere do Buddhism and Christianity diverge more sharply than in their anthropology — their account of what a human being most fundamentally is. The Christian tradition builds its entire moral and eschatological vision on the claim that each person is a real, enduring soul of infinite worth, made in God's image and destined for communion with Him. The Buddhist tradition builds its entire soteriology on the opposite-seeming claim: that the intuition of a permanent, unified "self" (attā, Skt. ātman) is precisely the ignorance at the root of suffering, and that liberation comes from seeing through it. The two traditions therefore locate the human problem in opposite places. For the Christian, the danger is that a real self will be lost — to sin, to death, to alienation from God. For the Buddhist, the danger is that an unreal self will be clung to — reified and made the axis of craving.
This is not a merely academic contrast. It shapes how each tradition frames the good life, death, ethics, and hope. It also invites caricature in both directions: Christians sometimes hear "no-self" as the claim that Buddhism denies that persons exist at all (a nihilism no serious Buddhist holds), and Buddhists sometimes hear "imago Dei" as a naïve substance-metaphysics that ignores how manifestly composite and changeable human beings are. Two framing commitments govern what follows. First, the Buddhist side is presented primarily through Buddhist primary texts (the Pāli suttas in Rhys Davids' translation, the Dhammapada) and analytically careful secondary scholarship. Second, we take seriously the internal Buddhist resources — the two-truths distinction and Nāgārjuna's doctrine of emptiness — that answer the "no person at all" charge from within the tradition itself.
The debate
The dispute can be formalized as competing claims about the ontological status of the person:
Anattā (Buddhist): There is no permanent, unified, independent self. What we call "a person" is a causal series of five impermanent aggregates (khandha: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness); the "I" is a useful conventional designation, not a substance. Clinging to a self is the root of suffering.
Imago Dei (Christian): The human person is a real, enduring soul — possessed of interiority, memory, and rational agency — created in the image of God, of infinite and inviolable worth, and destined for eternal communion with its Maker.
Emptiness (Mahāyāna refinement): The Middle Way between substantial selfhood and nihilism: the person, like everything else, is empty of inherent existence (svabhāva) — but "empty" is not "nonexistent." Conventionally, persons are wholly real; ultimately, they lack the independent essence the ātman-theorist and the nihilist alike presuppose.
All three agree that the naïve notion of a self-sufficient ego is philosophically fraught; they disagree on whether the correction is to deny the abiding self (Buddhist) or to ground it in God (Christian).
The doctrine of anattā (Pāli; Skt. anātman, "non-self") is, with impermanence (anicca) and suffering (dukkha), one of the three marks of existence. It holds that none of the constituents of a person is a permanent, independent self, and — on the mainstream classical reading — that there is no such self beyond those constituents either. The self is a conventional designation, like the word "chariot" for an assembled set of parts, whose locus classicus is the monk Nagasena's chariot-simile in the Milindapañha. The doctrine is soteriological before it is metaphysical: the "conceit that there is an 'I' and a 'mine'" is the ignorance that drives craving, and seeing through it is the path to the cessation of suffering (SEP 'Buddha' §2).
Formal statement
The Buddha's best-known argument, the argument from impermanence (Saṃyutta-nikāya III.66–8), has this structure (SEP 'Buddha' §3):
If there were a self, it would be permanent.
None of the five kinds of psychophysical element (khandha) is permanent.
Therefore there is no self.
A second, the argument from control (S III.66–8): if there were a self, one could never coherently desire that it be otherwise; but of each aggregate one can desire that it be changed; therefore none is the self (SEP 'Buddha' §3). Classical Indian Buddhism (represented here by Buddhaghosa's Theravāda systematization) took these to deny the self tout court.
Key evidence / textual basis
The doctrine's charter is the Buddha's First Sermon, the Dhamma-kakka-ppavattana Sutta ("The Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness"). Setting out the first Noble Truth, it identifies the constituents of the sufferer not with a soul but with the aggregates: "In brief, the five aggregates which spring from attachment (the conditions of individuality and their cause) are painful" (Buddhist Suttas, First Sermon §5, Rhys Davids 1881). Rhys Davids' note explains that these pañc'upādāna-kkhandhā are "the material and mental aggregates which go to make up an individual," and that grasping (upādāna) is their source (Buddhist Suttas, First Sermon note, Rhys Davids 1881).
That the person is nothing but such aggregates — with no soul superadded — is stated bluntly in the tradition's own gloss: "Buddhism is not only independent of the theory of soul, but regards the consideration of that theory as worse than profitless… anattam, the absence of a soul or self as abiding principle, is one of the three parts of Buddhist wisdom" (Buddhist Suttas, Sabbāsava Sutta intro, Rhys Davids 1881). The Dhammapada supplies the affective register: "'All created things perish,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain… 'All forms are unreal,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity" (Dhammapada 277, 279, Müller 1881) — the three marks (impermanence, suffering, non-self) as the path to liberation.
The doctrine's most famous illustration is the chariot-simile of the monk Nagasena: as "chariot" is a mere name for wheels, axle, and frame assembled the right way, so "person" is a mere name for the aggregates. The Stanford Encyclopedia articulates the underlying insight: the chariot is "a conventionally real entity… a mere conceptual fiction," useful because "it is more convenient, given our interests and cognitive limitations, to have a single name for the parts when assembled in the right way" (SEP 'Buddha' §2).
Leading proponents
Nagasena (c. 150 BCE) — the monk of the Milindapañha whose chariot-simile is the locus classicus for the person as conventional designation rather than substance (represented via the suttas and SEP).
Buddhaghosa (5th c. CE) — the great Theravāda commentator and systematizer whose exposition of the aggregates and anattā fixed the classical statement of the doctrine.
The Buddha (Siddhattha Gotama) — the source of the arguments from impermanence and control, preserved in the Saṃyutta-nikāya and the First Sermon.
Strongest counter-arguments
The gravest objection — pressed by the Christian imago Dei tradition and, in a different key, by orthodox Indian ātman-theorists — is that the anattā arguments do not obviously reach their conclusion. The argument from impermanence needs the unstated premise that there is nothing to the person beyond the five aggregates; without it, the argument shows only that no aggregate is the self, leaving open a transcendent, non-empirical self. The Stanford Encyclopedia grants the point candidly: some interpreters (e.g., Albahari 2006) "correctly point out that the Buddha never categorically denies the existence of a self that transcends what is empirically given" (SEP 'Buddha' §1). The Christian presses this into a positive claim: introspection discloses exactly such a persisting subject — the "I" that remembers, that endures through the flux of experience, that Augustine finds cannot even comprehend its own depth (below).
A second objection is moral and eschatological: if there is no enduring subject, what carries moral responsibility across time, and what is the referent of the compassion the Buddha commends? The critic argues that the reforming, liberating Buddhist life presupposes precisely the continuous agent anattā seems to dissolve.
Responses
The Buddhist reply supplies the implicit premise and defends it. The Encyclopedia notes the Buddha's general hostility to positing "unobservable entities": in the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta he compares one who posits an unseen "seer" behind our cognitions to a man who longs for "the most beautiful woman in the world" merely because such a woman "must surely exist" (SEP 'Buddha' §3). A transcendent self is, on this reading, just such an unobservable posit. To the moral objection the tradition answers with the two-truths distinction: conventionally there are persons who endure "for a lifetime and possibly (if there is rebirth) longer," and it is precisely because "one part of such a series identifies with other parts of the same series" that prudence and morality get their grip; the convention is indispensable — it just should not be "taken too seriously, as more than a useful fiction" (SEP 'Buddha' §2). Moral continuity is thus preserved at the conventional level without an ultimately real soul.
Assessment
Assessment: Strong — anattā is textually anchored in the earliest stratum of Buddhist teaching, philosophically articulated across two millennia, and defensible against the charge of self-refutation via the two-truths distinction. Its force against the Christian view turns on the disputed implicit premise (that there is nothing beyond the aggregates) and on whether introspective and moral data require an enduring subject — the very questions on which the two traditions substantively differ.
The Christian tradition holds that the human person is a real, enduring soul — not merely a serviceable name for a flux of states, but a substantial subject with interiority, memory, rational agency, and inviolable worth — created in the image of God (imago Dei) and made for communion with Him. Augustine of Hippo gives the tradition its classic interior articulation: the self is so real and so deep that it cannot even fully comprehend itself, and it is restless until it rests in the God whose image it bears. On this view the human problem is not that a false self is clung to, but that a true self is estranged from its source and can be lost — or found.
Formal statement
There is one God, who creates.
God creates humanity uniquely "in his own image" (Gen 1:27 (bib)), endowing each person with an enduring soul distinct from, and not reducible to, the body (Matt 10:28 (bib)).
This soul is known and willed by God from before birth (Ps 139:16 (bib)) and is destined for communion with Him.
Therefore the person is a real, enduring subject of infinite worth, not a merely conventional designation.
Key evidence / textual basis
The foundational text is the creation of humanity in God's image: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen 1:26-27 (bib)). The Psalmist grounds the self's worth in God's intimate knowledge of it: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made… Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written" (Ps 139:14 (bib), 139:16 (bib)). And the soul is distinguished from — and outlasts — the body: "fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul" (Matt 10:28 (bib)).
The interior depth of this self receives its most searching expression in Augustine's Confessions. Its opening names the self's constitutive orientation to God: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" (Augustine, Confessions I.1). Book X's exploration of memory then discloses a self of astonishing, near-unfathomable interiority: coming to "the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images," Augustine confesses, "Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber!… yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself" (Augustine, Confessions X.8). This is the antithesis of the aggregate-analysis: not a bundle to be dissolved but a depth that exceeds itself and points beyond itself to God.
Philosophically, the imago Dei anthropology stands in the long "substantial soul" tradition traced from Plato and Aristotle — in Plato's Phaedo and Republic the soul is "immortal and never destroyed" and contemplates truths after separation from the body (SEP 'Ancient Theories of Soul' §3), a conception the Christian tradition inherits and transforms (grounding the soul's endurance in God's creative will rather than in intrinsic indestructibility).
Leading proponents
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) — the interior, God-oriented self of the Confessions; memory and restlessness as marks of a soul made for God (primary source in corpus).
Thomas Aquinas (via Thomas Aquinas) — the soul as the substantial form of the body, the enduring subject of rational operations (developed in the Summa; the anthropological questions are not ingested at this compile).
The Genesis and Psalter traditions — the canonical charter of humanity as image-bearer and known-by-God.
Strongest counter-arguments
The strongest objection is the Buddhist one, and it has real teeth: the "substantial soul" is not obviously given in experience. What introspection discloses, the Buddhist argues, is exactly the flux the aggregate-analysis describes — sensations, feelings, perceptions, volitions, moments of awareness — never a bare, persisting substance over and above them. To posit such a substance is, on the Buddhist reading, to make the very error the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta warns against: inferring an unseen "seer" from the mere fact of seeing (SEP 'Buddha' §3). A second objection is that the imago Dei self, precisely by being made the axis of infinite worth, becomes the axis of craving and self-defense — the Buddhist diagnosis of dukkha. Where Christianity sees a self to be saved, Buddhism sees a self-concept to be released.
Responses
The Christian replies, first, that the persisting self is not an idle posit but the presupposition of the very introspection that is supposed to undermine it: the subject that observes the flux, that unifies a remembered past with an anticipated future, that Augustine finds cannot exhaust itself, is not one more item in the flux but its condition. Second, that the worth of the self, rightly understood, is received rather than grasped — its ground is God's image and God's knowing, not the ego's self-assertion; so the imago Dei is not the reified ego the Buddhist rightly criticizes but its cure, since a self secure in God need not clutch at itself. The disagreement thus narrows to a genuine crux: is the enduring subject a datum (Christian) or a construction (Buddhist)?
Assessment
Assessment: Strong — the imago Dei anthropology is the historically continuous reading of the biblical canon across all major Christian communions, philosophically embedded in a substantial-soul tradition of great sophistication, and answers the flux-objection by distinguishing the unifying subject from the states it unifies. Whether that unifying subject is a real substance or a useful fiction remains the live point of contact with Buddhism.
Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE), founder of the Madhyamaka ("Middle Way") school, radicalizes anattā into the universal doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā): not only the self but all things are empty of inherent existence (svabhāva). This view is included here not as an outlier but because it is Buddhism's own answer to the caricature that "Buddhism denies the person." Emptiness is explicitly a middle path between substantial essentialism and nihilism: to say the person is empty is not to say the person is nothing, but to say the person lacks the independent, self-grounded essence that both the ātman-theorist and the nihilist mistakenly assume must be there for anything to be real.
Formal statement
To exist "with svabhāva" is to exist independently, as part of "the basic furniture of the world," providing an ontological rock-bottom (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2).
But there is no such rock-bottom: every putative foundation is itself dependently originated; there is no end-point to the chain of dependence.
Therefore all things — persons included — are empty of svabhāva.
Yet emptiness is not nonexistence: it is "a corrective to a mistaken view of how the world exists," and the position "avoids both of the extreme views" — substantial essence and nihilism alike (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2).
Key evidence / textual basis
Nāgārjuna's central texts, the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā and Vigraha-vyāvartanī (not in corpus), turn on the notion of emptiness — "always the emptiness of something," and that something is svabhāva, rendered "inherent existence" or "intrinsic nature" (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2). Where the earlier Abhidharma schools distinguished primary existents (dravyasat — irreducible dharmas) from secondary existents (prajñaptisat — conventional wholes like persons), Nāgārjuna "denies the existence of an ontological foundation," so that there is no privileged tier of really-real dharmas beneath the conventional world (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2).
The charge of nihilism is met head-on. The Encyclopedia notes that this denial of a foundation "is sometimes used as support of the accusation that Madhyamaka is really a nihilistic doctrine," but "there are powerful systematic and historical reasons against it": ontological nihilism may not even be a consistent position, and "the Mādhyamikas themselves are very clear that their position avoids both of the extreme views" (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2). The whole apparatus rests on the two-truths doctrine: a "transactional" conventional truth in which persons are wholly real, and an ultimate truth in which they are empty of inherent nature — the Madhyamaka thus being the middle path between "eternalism… and annihilationism" (SEP 'Madhyamaka' §1).
Leading proponents
Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) — founder of Madhyamaka; the MMK and VV are the school's root texts.
Candrakīrti (7th c.) and Śāntideva (8th c.) — the great Prāsaṅgika expositors who develop the emptiness-and-two-truths framework (SEP 'Madhyamaka' §§5–6).
Buddhapālita and Bhāvaviveka — early commentators who divide over how emptiness may be argued (SEP 'Madhyamaka' §§3–4).
Strongest counter-arguments
The Christian objection is that emptiness, pressed to universality, proves too much or too little. If everything is empty of inherent existence — including God, if Buddhism admitted one — then there is nothing that grounds the contingent order, no self-existent reality of the kind classical theism identifies as the terminus of explanation; the doctrine seems to deny precisely the aseity (self-existence) the Christian ascribes to God and, derivatively, the created-but-real substantiality it ascribes to the soul. A second objection: if the person is ultimately empty and only conventionally real, then the infinite, God-grounded worth Christianity ascribes to each person cannot be ultimate either — it too is a "useful fiction." The Christian worry is that emptiness relocates rather than resolves the problem of what, finally, is worth loving and saving.
Responses
The Mādhyamika answers that the demand for a self-existent foundation is itself the error emptiness diagnoses: to insist that something must have svabhāva to ground the rest is to project substance where there is only dependent origination — and the doctrine's coherence does not require a foundational exception, since "emptiness is not some kind of primordial reality ante rem but a corrective" (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2). On worth: conventional reality is not mere illusion; the compassion and moral seriousness of the bodhisattva path operate fully at the conventional level, which is "indispensable" even though not ultimately foundational (SEP 'Buddha' §2). The disagreement here is maximal and clean: the Christian holds that reality bottoms out in a self-existent God who confers real, enduring selfhood; the Mādhyamika holds that reality bottoms out in nothing at all — dependent origination "all the way down."
Assessment
Assessment: Strong — Madhyamaka is the most philosophically developed form of the no-self doctrine, internally guarded against the nihilism-charge by the two-truths distinction, and represents Buddhism's own sophisticated answer to the "Buddhism denies the person" caricature. It also sharpens, rather than softens, the contrast with the imago Dei: where Christianity grounds the person in a self-existent God, Madhyamaka denies self-existence altogether.
The Buddhist and the Christian look at the same restless human heart and read it oppositely. For the Christian, the restlessness is Augustine's — a real self aching for the God whose image it bears, and quieted only in Him. For the Buddhist, the restlessness is the clinging: the ache of a fiction defended too hard, stilled only by seeing through it. It would be a mistake — and this article has tried to avoid it — to hear anattā as "you do not exist." Both the two-truths distinction and Nāgārjuna's emptiness insist that persons are conventionally, wholly real; the denial is of an independent, self-grounding self, not of the person who loves and suffers and walks the path. The genuine disagreement lies deeper: is the enduring "I" a datum to be redeemed or a construction to be released? Is worth conferred by a self-existent God, or is self-existence itself the illusion to be dissolved? For the seeker, the honest report is that our corpus gives the Buddhist side largely through nineteenth-century translations (Rhys Davids, Müller) and modern encyclopedia scholarship rather than through the Visuddhimagga or the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā in full; those who wish to test the no-self doctrine at first hand should consult those primary works directly. What is not in doubt is that the contrast is real, deep, and worth the seeker's full attention — for it is finally a disagreement about what a human being is.
Last compiled: 2026-07-06 by pass-anatta-imago
Last compiled: 2026-07-06 · 8 primary sources · 3 views · archetype B