What the Buddha Wouldn't Say About the Self

In the Anandasutta (Samyutta Nikaya 44.10), the wandering ascetic Vacchagotta comes to the Buddha and asks twice: is there a self? Is there not a self? The Buddha says nothing both times. Vacchagotta leaves.

Ananda, the Buddha's attendant, is confused. The Buddha tells him why he stayed quiet. If he had said "there is a self," he would have sided with the eternalists, who taught a permanent soul. If he had said "there is no self," Vacchagotta — "already confused" — would have decided his self had just been annihilated. Either answer would have set him further back.

This matters for one of the most-quoted lines in popular Buddhism: "there is no self." The Pali word is anatta, from an- (not) and atta (self). Nineteenth- and twentieth-century English translators rendered it as "no-self," and the metaphysical reading stuck. It is now standard in English-language books on Buddhism.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, an American Theravada monk and translator of much of the Pali canon, has spent decades pushing back. He calls "there is no self" the "granddaddy of fake Buddhist quotes." His reading: anatta is a verb-shaped instruction, not a noun-shaped doctrine. Rendered as "not-self," it tells the practitioner to look at any phenomenon — a feeling, a thought, the body — and notice that it is not a stable self worth clinging to. The point is to let go, not to prove a thesis.

Not every scholar agrees. Bhikkhu Bodhi, who translated the Samyutta Nikaya into English, accepts that not-self is a strategy but argues it also corrects a real error about how things are. The grammar allows both readings.

What survives the dispute is the Vacchagotta scene. The most direct question a person could ask the Buddha about the self produced no answer at all — a response that two and a half millennia of commentary have been trying to translate ever since.