Buddhists affirm anatta, that there is no permanent, unchanging self or soul underlying experience. What is conventionally called a person is analyzed as a flowing combination of five aggregates, body, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness, none of which, singly or together, constitutes a fixed self; all are impermanent and dependently arisen. The teaching is one of the three marks of existence, alongside impermanence (anicca) and suffering (dukkha), and clinging to the illusion of a self is held to be a root cause of suffering.
The classical illustration of the doctrine appears in the Milindapanha, a dialogue between the monk Nagasena and the Greco-Bactrian king Menander, in which Nagasena asks the king to point to the chariot he arrived in: is it the wheels, the axle, the frame, or the pole? None of these parts, alone or even all together, is the chariot itself, Nagasena argues, yet chariot remains a perfectly useful word for the assembled whole; a person, he concludes, is a name for the aggregates in the same way, real enough for everyday speech and moral responsibility, but not naming any single, separate, essential thing underneath them. The image is one of the tradition's most frequently cited teaching devices precisely because it makes the point without denying that persons, and moral responsibility, are real in the only sense the teaching says matters.