It is an old and wise truism that when everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong. When one or two professors, for example, pass on to their students a wrong opinion which again gets passed on again and again, pretty soon a great error is memorialized. It becomes next to impossible to reverse it.

This is what happened to Buddhism when a few professors believed that the Buddha fought against Brahmanism’s belief in a self or âtman. Implicit in such a belief—it should be quite obvious—there is no need to know yourself since there is no self to know! But at the back of our minds we are not convinced; nor was the Buddha convinced. He realized that the psychophysical body consisting of physical shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness was not the whole package—and we are intrinsically independent of it.

The Buddha taught his followers that they are not physical shape. Physical shape is changing and suffering, it was also murderous. If you want to identify with it, do so at your own peril. The same goes with feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness. Don’t identify with them as being who you really are. They are not your self is what the Buddha taught—not that there is no self.

From this we can easily see what is at the heart of Buddhist soteriology—and it sure is not the absence of a self. Buddhist soteriology is about saving the self, preventing it from getting bound up with the psychophysical organism, so much so, that it can’t distinguish itself from the body which is always finite and changing. As a result, there is rebirth. Never once does the Buddha say anything good about the psychophysical body. It is even equated with Mara the Evil One (S. iii. 189). On the other hand, never once does the Buddha deprecate the self. He even likens it to an island and a refuge. Incidentally, both island and refuge also refer to nirvana.

Earlier when I mentioned that implicit with the belief that the Buddha denied the self there follows from this: there is no need to know our self. As a consequence of this, Buddhism becomes reduced to a doctrine of materialism. Hence, what man is, is the sum of his body parts. But the Buddha never says this or anything like this. What man truly is, is the unborn, the unoriginated, the increate, and the unformed, but because he beholds other than this he is convinced that he is born, originated, created, and formed.

Despite what I have said a false Buddhism will continue, one absent of soteriology.