Anātman

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Key Term	anātman
In Tibetan Script	བདག་མེད་
Wylie Tibetan Transliteration	bdag med
Devanagari Sanskrit Script	अनात्मन्
Tibetan Phonetic Rendering	dakmé
Chinese Script	无我
Chinese Pinyin	wúwǒ
Japanese Transliteration	muga
Korean Transliteration	mua
English Standard	selfless
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 main stream Indian religious-philosophical notion of an eternal self.
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.

Though it can simply be used as the expression "I" or "me", in Indian thought the notion of self refers to a permanent, unchanging entity, such as that which passes from life to life in the case of people, or the innate essence (svabhāva) of phenomena.

Though it can simply be used as the expression "I" or "me", in Indian thought the notion of self refers to a permanent, unchanging entity, such as that which passes from life to life in the case of people, or the innate essence (svabhāva) of phenomena.

Though it can simply be used as the expression "I" or "me", in Indian thought the notion of self refers to a permanent, unchanging entity, such as that which passes from life to life in the case of people, or the innate essence (svabhāva) of phenomena.

Though it can simply be used as the expression "I" or "me", in Indian thought the notion of self refers to a permanent, unchanging entity, such as that which passes from life to life in the case of people, or the innate essence (svabhāva) of phenomena.

The state of being empty of an innate nature due to a lack of independently existing characteristics.