The Great Buddhist Divergence

Anatta is the point on which Buddhism parts most decisively from the surrounding Indian traditions: where Hinduism and Jainism affirm an enduring self or soul that transmigrates, Buddhism denies any such permanent essence and describes rebirth as a causal continuity without a self that is reborn. The doctrine is affirmed across the Buddhist schools, though Mahayana philosophy develops it further into the emptiness (shunyata) of all phenomena, extending the analysis from persons to every conditioned thing whatsoever.

Modern philosophers working on questions of personal identity, independent of any religious commitment, have noted a real structural resemblance between anatta and reductionist theories of the self in Western analytic philosophy; Derek Parfit's influential Reasons and Persons explicitly drew the comparison, arguing that once personal identity is analyzed away into psychological continuity and connectedness, the resulting picture converges with something like the Buddhist view that there is, at bottom, no further fact of a persisting self beyond the connected series of mental states. Buddhist scholars have generally welcomed the comparison while noting it remains a philosophical parallel rather than agreement on the further, specifically Buddhist, soteriological claim that seeing through the self is what ends suffering.