Ask “What am I, really?” and you’ve joined an argument more than two thousand years old. A common shortcut says the East answered “no self” and the West answered “self.” That shortcut is too neat. Some Buddhists argued for a “person,” and one of the most famous Western philosophers reported that he could never find himself at all.
Who was asking, and when?
The Buddha taught in north India. Many scholars now think he died around 405 BCE; older estimates put him a century earlier (Siderits, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Buddha,” §1) (Disputed). He was arguing with other teachers of his day, some of whom held that there is a lasting self of pure consciousness (Siderits, §1).
The Western voices on this page come much later. René Descartes (1596–1650) wrote in the 1630s and 1640s (Hatfield, SEP, “René Descartes”). John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776) followed (Gordon-Roth, SEP, “Locke on Personal Identity”; Qu, SEP, “David Hume”). So this isn’t two teams arguing at the same time. It’s two long conversations, separated by about two thousand years, that sometimes reach similar places.
The Buddhist side: five changing heaps
In the discourse “The Characteristic of Not-Self,” the Buddha takes a person apart into five aggregates: form (the body), feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness. If your body were your self, he says, you could order it: “May my form be like this! May it not be like that!” You can’t. The same goes for the other four. So of each one, you should see: “This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self” (SN 22.59, Sujato trans.) (Documented as the text’s teaching).
Later Buddhist thinkers explained it with a chariot. “Chariot” is a handy name for parts put together the right way. It’s useful, but there’s no extra chariot beyond the parts. In the same way, a “person” is conventionally real, a useful way to talk about a causal series of changing events. At the ultimate level, there are only the events (Siderits, §2) (Documented as a later Buddhist reading).
Did the Buddha deny any self at all, or only that these five things are the self? That’s Disputed. Some modern interpreters note he never flatly denies a self beyond the five. Classical Indian philosophers, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, read him as denying it outright (Siderits, §1). Buddhists argued among themselves too; one school, the Pudgalavāda, affirmed “the person” (Siderits, §5).
Later schools kept building:
- Nāgārjuna (about 150–250 CE) centered his philosophy on “emptiness” (śūnyatā). For him, nothing has “inherent existence” (Westerhoff, SEP, “Nāgārjuna”).
- Yogācāra, systematized by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu (about 4th–5th century CE), proposed a “storehouse consciousness” (ālayavijñāna). It carried some of the jobs a self would do, like continuity and rebirth. Critics accused them of bringing the self back in. Yogācāra writers answered that it’s like a river, an unbroken stream of changing water, and that it ends at liberation (Szanyi, SEP, “Yogācāra”).
- Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha) is the idea that all sentient beings contain the essence of a buddha, or the potential to become one (Szanyi) (Documented as a doctrine).
The Western side: substance, memory, bundle
Descartes. In the Meditations (1641), Descartes found one thing he couldn’t doubt, elsewhere expressed as “I think, therefore I am” (Hatfield, citing AT 7:25, 7:140). He concluded that the mind is a thinking substance, really distinct from the body. This is his well-known substance dualism (Hatfield) (Documented as his view). The Discourse on the Method came first, in French, in 1637 (Hatfield).
Locke. Locke added his chapter on personal identity (Essay, Book 2, Chapter 27) to the second edition, in 1694. The first edition of 1689 didn’t have it (Gordon-Roth). For Locke, “consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ’tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self.” You’re the same person as far back as your consciousness reaches (Essay 2.27.9, quoted in Gordon-Roth). That makes the person a matter of consciousness, not of soul-stuff.
Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature (Books 1–2 in 1739, Book 3 in 1740; Qu, SEP), Hume wrote that when he looked inward, “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.” People, he said, are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions” (Treatise 1.4.6.3–4, davidhume.org) (Documented). He later voiced doubts about this theory in the Treatise’s Appendix (Qu).
Parfit. Derek Parfit (1942–2017), born in Chengdu, China, argued in Reasons and Persons (1984) that identity isn’t what matters. What matters is psychological connection and continuity (Dancy, British Academy memoir; Olson, SEP, “Personal Identity”).
Same conclusion? Similar, not the same
Christian Coseru notes a parallel. Buddhists say our sense of an independent self is “imputed,” just as Hume says a self is never found among our perceptions. Scholars have written whole studies of the comparison (Coseru, SEP, “Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy,” §1.1) (Documented as a scholarly comparison).
Did Hume borrow it? That’s Unknown. Alison Gopnik argues it was possible. She notes that Hume wrote the Treatise at La Flèche in France, where a Jesuit named Charles François Dolu, who had seen Buddhism in Siam in 1687–88, was living. Her case is for possibility, not proof (Gopnik 2009, Hume Studies).
There’s an older Greek-Indian link too. Pyrrho, whom the later Greek skeptics called their inspiration, reportedly met unnamed Indian “naked wise men” on Alexander’s expedition. One scholar calls him a representative of early Buddhism, but Richard Bett notes “room for debate” (Bett, SEP, “Pyrrho”) (Disputed).
The goals differed. Siderits says the Buddha taught to end suffering and rebirth, and that the “person” is a useful convention within his account of liberation (§1, §2). Hume was reporting what introspection finds. Parfit was asking what should matter to us.
An analogy, not a history: two hikers reach the same ridge from different valleys. They’re carrying different packs, and they’re heading different places.
What about rebirth?
If there’s no lasting self, what is reborn? Siderits calls the evidence that the Buddha accepted rebirth “quite strong.” He also argues that rebirth and not-self aren’t inconsistent: “Rebirth without transmigration is logically possible” (§4). Transmigration here means a lasting self passing from one life to the next. The Western comparisons here concern substance, consciousness, and continuity. This page describes rebirth as a teaching; it doesn’t test it.
How we know
What survives. Buddhist discourses were transmitted orally and written down centuries later (Siderits, §1). Descartes, Locke, and Hume published their own books, and we have their words and editions.
Whose voices are missing. This selection centers named philosophers and religious texts. It cannot represent everyone’s sense of self in either region.
How later readers used it. Modern writers often pair “Buddha and Hume.” That pairing is a modern comparison, not an ancient conversation.
Then vs. now
Then: The Buddha found no lasting self in the five aggregates, and later schools argued over what carries a life forward. Descartes called the mind a thinking substance, Locke tied the person to consciousness, and Hume found only a bundle of perceptions.
Now: Philosophers still disagree about what personal identity consists in, and whether identity is even what matters. Olson’s survey sets psychological, biological, and other views side by side, with no winner declared (Olson) (Disputed). Brain science hasn’t settled a question this old, and this page doesn’t claim it has.