There are no fixed entities in the Chain. Each link depends upon another and leads directly to something else. It is a perfect expression of the “becoming” which the Buddha saw as an inescapable fact of human life. We are always trying to become something different, striving for a new mode of being, and indeed cannot remain in one state for long. Each sankhara gives place to the next; each state is simply the prelude to another. Nothing in life can, therefore, be regarded as stable. A person should be regarded as a process, not an unchangeable entity. When a bhikkhu meditated on the Chain and saw it yogically, becoming mindful of the way each thought and sensation rose and fell away, he acquired a “direct knowledge” of the Truth that nothing could be relied upon, that everything was impermanent (anicca), and would be inspired to redouble his efforts to extricate himself from this endless Chain of cause and effect.

This constant self-appraisal and attention to the fluctuations of everyday life induced a state of calm control. When the daily practice of mindfulness was continued in his meditations, it brought the bhikkhu an insight into the nature of personality that was more deeply rooted and immediate than any that could be produced by rational deduction. It also led to greater self-discipline. The Buddha had no time for the ecstatic trances of the brahmins. He insisted that his monks should always conduct themselves with sobriety, and forbade emotional display. But mindfulness also made the bhikkhu more aware of the morality of his behavior. He noticed how his own “unskillful” actions could harm other people and that even his motivation could be injurious. So, the Buddha concluded, our intentions were kamma and had consequences. The intentions, conscious or unconscious, that inspired our actions were mental acts that were just as important as any external deeds. This redefinition of kamma as cetana (intention; choice) was revolutionary; it deepened the entire question of morality, which was now located in the mind and heart and could not merely be a matter of outward behavior.

But mindfulness (sati) led the Buddha to a still more radical conclusion. Three days after the five bhikkhus had become “stream-enterers,” the Buddha delivered a second sermon in the Deer Park, in which he expounded his unique doctrine of anatta (no-self). He divided the human personality into five “heaps” or “constituents” (khandhas): the body, feelings, perceptions, volitions (conscious and unconscious) and consciousness, and asked the bhikkhus to consider each khandha in turn. The body or our feelings, for example, constantly changed from one moment to the next. They caused us pain, let us down and frustrated us. The same had to be said of our perceptions and volitions. Thus each khandha, subject as it was to dukkha, flawed and transitory, could not constitute or include the Self sought by so many of the ascetics and yogins. Was it not true, the Buddha asked his disciples, that after examining each khandha, an honest person found that he could not wholly identify with it, because it was so unsatisfactory? He was bound to say, “This is not mine; this is not what I really am; this is not my self.” But the Buddha did not simply deny the existence of the eternal, absolute Self. He now claimed that there was no stable, lower-case self either. The terms “self” and “myself” were simply conventions. The personality had no fixed or changeless core. As the Chain showed, every sentient being was in a state of constant flux; he or she was merely a succession of temporary, mutable states of existence.

The Buddha pressed this message home throughout his life. Where the seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes would declare “I think, therefore I am,” the Buddha came to the opposite conclusion. The more he thought, in the mindful, yogic way he had developed, the clearer it seemed that what we call the “self” is a delusion. In his view, the more closely we examine ourselves, the harder it becomes to find anything that we can pinpoint as a fixed entity. The human personality was not a static being to which things happened. Put under the microscope of yogic analysis, each person was a process. The Buddha liked to use such metaphors as a blazing fire or a rushing stream to describe the personality; it had some kind of identity, but was never the same from one moment to another. At each second, a fire was different; it had consumed and recreated itself, just as people did. In a particularly vivid simile, the Buddha compared the human mind to a monkey ranging through the forest: “it grabs one branch, and then, letting that go, seizes another.” What we experience as the “self” is really just a convenience-term, because we are constantly changing. In the same way, milk can become, successively, curds, butter, ghee, and fine extract of ghee. There is no point in calling any one of these transformations “milk,” even though there is a sense in which it is correct to do so.

The eighteenth-century Scottish empiricist David Hume came to a similar conclusion, but with an important difference: he did not expect his insight to affect the moral conduct of his readers. But in Axial Age India, knowledge had no significance unless it was found to be transformative. A dhamma was an imperative to action, and the doctrine of anatta was not an abstract philosophical proposition but required Buddhists to behave as though the ego did not exist. The ethical effects of this are far-reaching. Not only does the idea of “self” lead to unskillful thoughts about “me and mine” and inspire our selfish cravings; egotism can arguably be described as the source of all evil: an excessive attachment to the self can lead to envy or hatred of rivals, conceit, megalomania, pride, cruelty, and, when the self feels threatened, to violence and the destruction of others. Western people often regard the Buddha’s doctrine of anatta as nihilistic and depressing, but at their best all the great world religions formed during the Axial Age seek to curb the voracious, frightened ego that does so much harm. The Buddha, however, was more radical. His teaching of anatta did not seek to annihilate the self. He simply denied that the self had ever existed. It was a mistake to think of it as a constant reality. Any such misconception was a symptom of that ignorance which kept us bound to the cycle of suffering.

Anatta, like any Buddhist teaching, was not a philosophical doctrine but was primarily pragmatic. Once a disciple had acquired, through yoga and mindfulness, a “direct” knowledge of anatta, he would be delivered from the pains and perils of egotism, which would become a logical impossibility. In the Axial countries, we have seen that people felt suddenly alone and lost in the world, in exile from Eden and the sacred dimension that gives life meaning and value. Much of their pain sprang from insecurity in a world of heightened individualism in the new market economy. The Buddha tried to make his bhikkhus see that they did not have a “self” that needed to be defended, inflated, flattered, cajoled and enhanced at the expense of others. Once a monk had become practiced in the discipline of mindfulness, he would see how ephemeral what we call the “self” really was. He would no longer introject his ego into these passing mental states and identify with them. He would learn to regard his desires, fears and cravings as remote phenomena that had little to do with him. Once he had attained this dispassion and equanimity, the Buddha explained to the five bhikkhus at the end of his Second Sermon, he would find that he was ripe for enlightenment. “His greed fades away, and once his cravings disappear, he experiences the release of his heart.” He had achieved his goal and could utter the same triumphant cry as the Buddha himself, when he had attained enlightenment. “The holy life has been lived out to its conclusion! What had to be done has been accomplished; there is nothing else to do!”