160 No Selfarise from conceiving of persons in terms of sequences of caus-
ally connected physical and mental events rather than enduring
substances. As I have indicated, the philosophical and concep-tual elaboration of the teaching of no self in conjunction with
that of dependent arising is one of the hallmarks of Buddhist
thought. But the view that the teaching of no self annihilates the
individual and with it the basis of morality has been a feature
of the work of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century
scholars of Buddhism. Some of these accept the conclusion that
the teaching of the Buddha is thus irredeemably nihilistic. Othershave argued that the Buddhist elaboration of the teaching of no
self is the work of later scholastics who have misunderstood what
the Buddha actually taught.^45 Such scholars generally proceed by
pointing to the fact that in the earliest texts the Buddha certainly
uses the term 'self' and at the same time fails to deny categoric-ally the existence of the self. Much in the manner of certain
Upani~adic teachers, the Buddha is merely represented as stating
what is not the self. Thus, it is claimed, when the aggregates are
said not to be self, only the things that constitute our ordinary
experience are denied as self; the door is left open for a metaphys-
ical, absolute self that underlies or is beyond those experiences
-the mysterious, ungraspable iitman of the Upani~ads. The argu-
ment here is that, as a pragmatic teacher, either the Buddha wasan agnostic as far as a metaphysical self was concerned, or he
did indeed accept its existence but wished to avoid becoming in-
volved in unnecessary speculations concerning its ultimate nature.
The point that the Buddha uses the term 'self' in the earliest
texts has in effect already been dealt with above since it is to be
referred to the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth;
Moreover, it should be noted in this connection that the word
iitman is used in Sanskrit as an ordinary reflexive pronoun: thus
if one wants to say, 'he threw himself into the river' in Sanskrit,
one says that he threw his iitman into the river without any sug-
gestion that it is his eternal and immortal soul that has been thrown
into the river.