By the way, at the risk of draining this whole subject of some drama, in my own view these arguments over what the Buddha actually believed about the self are in one sense pointless. There’s roughly no chance that all the sayings attributed to him in Buddhist texts were uttered by him. In fact, some scholars will tell you that there is little or nothing in these texts that we can confidently attribute to him. Like the “historical Jesus,” the “historical Buddha” is hard to discern through the mists of history.
