ABSTRACT
One of the most difficult points for Western students of all forms of Buddhism to understand is the doctrine of Anātman, which is unusually translated “soullessness.” Buddhism insists that the soul is not a rigid unchanging, self-constituted entity, but a living, complex, changing, evolving organism. Non-Buddhistic philosophers have usually supposed that the soul is a simple substance which inhabits the body and which after death is rendered free from the shackles of corporeality. This is the core of the Hindu theory of the ātman.
