ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Buddhism by explaining how it is not a religion in the traditional sense, and highlights those strands of Buddhism that see it as physically and intellectually rigorous way of answering philosophical questions. It is to understand the Buddhist considerations against the view that there is any diachronic or synchronic personal identity. The Buddhist tradition also contains lines of thought purporting to show that there is also no personal identity in the synchronic sense. One central facet of Buddhist views of how best to avoid suffering is the suggestion that we should forego our belief in selves, or persons. That suggestion poses a challenge to the entire project of understanding self-knowledge: if there's no self, then there is apparently no self to know. This is why when it teaches courses on self-knowledge, when we encounter this Buddhist doctrine like to point out that the course has changed its name to "No Thyself".
