Advayavada Study Plan – week 2

[Advayavada Study Plan – week 2 of 13] Anatta (Pali) or anatman (Sanskrit) means no-self. The Buddhist anatta or anatmata doctrine teaches that no soul, spirit or self exists in the person in the sense of a permanent, eternal, integral, and independent substance; in Mahayana Buddhism, the nissvabhava doctrine teaches further that because in fact all things without exception are produced by interdependent origination (madhyamaka-pratityasamutpada), they are all invariably empty (shunya) of self-nature (svabhava); svabhava-shunyata (lit. self-nature emptiness) is a central notion in Madhyamaka philosophy. In Advayavada Buddhism, it is the second of the four signs or marks or basic facts of being, the other three being the impermanence or changeability of everything (see week 1), the ubiquity of existential suffering, and evolution or, in human terms, progress.