What qualities would you expect self to possess? More fundamentally, what did the word self mean to the Buddha? Unfortunately, the Buddha didn’t spend a lot of time defining his terms. Still, if you pay close attention to his arguments against the self, you can get some sense of what he meant by self—a sense of what particular properties he’d expect something worthy of the name self to have. For starters, he links the idea of self to the idea of control. Listen to what he says about the aggregate of “form,” the physical body: “If form were self, then form would not lead to affliction, and it
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