Consciousness and the soul in Buddhism
Buddhism's doctrine of anatta — no permanent self — rejects the substance-soul of Christian and Islamic theology outright, making Buddhism's view of consciousness an interesting near-ally of philosophical naturalism despite the tradition's own supernatural commitments.
Buddhism is, among major religions, the outlier on the soul. The doctrine of anatta (non-self, Sanskrit anatman) — one of the three marks of existence in classical Buddhist teaching — holds that there is no permanent, unchanging substance-self underlying the ever-changing stream of mental events. What we call 'self' is a conventional designation for five aggregates (skandhas): form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness, none of which is the 'owner' of the others. The Buddha is explicit on this in texts like the Anattalakkhana Sutta: trying to locate a persisting self among or behind the aggregates is a category error.
This rejection of substance-dualism makes Buddhism's relationship to contemporary philosophy of mind unusually interesting. Philosophers like Owen Flanagan (in The Bodhisattva's Brain) and Mark Johnston have argued that Buddhism's psychological anthropology is broadly compatible with, and even anticipatory of, naturalist views that treat the self as a construction rather than an ontological primitive. Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology has been compared to Buddhist analyses of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada). This does not make Buddhism secular — rebirth, karma, and the purifying trajectory toward nirvana all require something beyond physicalism — but the particular piece that is 'consciousness and the soul' is notably congenial to a non-dualist naturalism.
Within the tradition, the Abhidharma literature worked out in extraordinary detail how a process-based psychology without a persisting soul could nevertheless underwrite moral responsibility, rebirth, and karmic continuity. The dominant answer is the stream of dependent arising: there is no thing that is reborn, only a causally continuous series of events. Critics from both inside and outside Buddhism press the question: if no self persists from one moment to the next, in what sense is the future sufferer of karma 'the same' as the past wrongdoer? Classical answers by Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, and later Dignaga try to make this work through more refined accounts of continuity without identity. Whether these succeed is a live question in both Buddhist philosophy and in contemporary personal-identity debates where Derek Parfit and Mark Siderits have pushed closely parallel concerns.
- Gautama Buddha— Anattalakkhana Sutta; doctrine of anatta
- Nagarjuna— Madhyamaka; emptiness of self
- Vasubandhu— Abhidharma synthesis; self as conventional
- Owen Flanagan— Contemporary naturalist engagement
“Form, monks, is not self; were form self, form would not lead to affliction.”
“Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. There is no one to cast away this set of elements and no one to assume a new set of them.”