Anātman
From Tsadra Commons
| Key Term | anātman |
|---|---|
| Hover Popup Choices | selflessness |
| In Tibetan Script | བདག་མེད་པ་ |
| Wylie Tibetan Transliteration | bdag med pa |
| Devanagari Sanskrit Script | अनात्मन् |
| Tibetan Phonetic Rendering | dakmépa |
| Chinese Script | 无我 |
| Chinese Pinyin | wúwǒ |
| Japanese Transliteration | muga |
| Korean Transliteration | mua |
| English Standard | selflessness |
| Karl Brunnhölzl's English Term | identitylessness |
| Richard Barron's English Term | nonexistence of identity; lack/absence of identity |
| Jeffrey Hopkin's English Term | selflessness |
| Ives Waldo's English Term | egoless[ness] |
| Alternate Spellings | nairātmya |
| Term Type | Noun |
| Source Language | Sanskrit |
| Basic Meaning | The nonexistence of the self as a permanent, unchanging entity. |
| Has the Sense of | A key feature of the Buddha's teachings that stood in direct contrast to the mainstream Indian religious-philosophical notion of an eternal self, or ātman. |
| NEW: Glossary-PopUpBeginnerDefinition | The Buddhist teaching of "non-self" or "selflessness"—the understanding that there is no permanent, unchanging self or soul within living beings. Along with impermanence (anitya) and suffering (duḥkha), it is one of the three marks of existence that characterize all conditioned phenomena. |
| NEW: Glossary-PopUpScholarDefinition | Anātman (P. anattā; T. bdag med) is a central Buddhist doctrine asserting the absence of a permanent, unchanging, independent self or soul (ātman) in persons and phenomena. It is one of the three marks of existence (trilakṣaṇa), along with impermanence (anitya) and suffering (duḥkha). The teaching is not primarily an ontological denial but a soteriological strategy: by recognizing the selfless nature of the pañcaskandha (five aggregates)—form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness—practitioners overcome attachment and attain liberation. In Mahāyāna, anātman is analyzed as twofold: the selflessness of persons (pudgalanairātmya) and the selflessness of phenomena (dharmanairātmya), with the latter extending the analysis to all dharmas. |
| Did you know? | The teaching that there is no personal self was a crucial precursor to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. |
| Related Terms | Ātman; Svabhāva; Śūnyatā |
| Definitions | |
| Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism | See page 42: In Sanskrit, “no self” or “nonself” or more broadly “insubstantiality”; the third of the “three marks” (trilakṣaṇa) of existence, along with impermanence (anitya) and suffering (duḥkha). The concept is one of the key insights of the Buddha, and it is foundational to the Buddhist analysis of the compounded quality (samskrta) of existence: since all compounded things are the fruition (phala) of a specific set of causes (hetu) and conditions (pratyaya), they are therefore absent of any perduring substratum of being. |
| Rangjung Yeshe's English Term | Nonexistence of the self of the individual personality and/ or self-nature of phenomena. |
