A Brief Word on the Self
Buddhist philosophy branched off from Hindu philosophy about 400 years before Christ and continued to develop for centuries thereafter. It begins on the doctrine that the self is an illusion produced by our will to survive, and as such is the source of suffering. The self is an individuated unit which pervades our consciousness and produces all sorts of striving. All greed, malevolence, folly, etc. are produced through this selfhood we believe we have, but in reality, we are not a self. For there are two major problems: (1) we can only know things through our consciousness, and (2) everything is impermanent.
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