The anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) doctrine lies at the center of Buddhist thought and practice. The Pali and Sanskrit words translate literally as 'no self'; but the doctrine applies not only to persons but to non-persons as well. On the 'no self' theory, nothing possesses selfhood or self-nature or 'own-being,' perhaps not even nibbana 'itself.' If a substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then perhaps we can interpret the anatta doctrine as a denial of the existence of substances. The 'no self' theory would then imply that in ultimate reality there are no substances: what we ordinarily take to be such are wrongly so taken. A pervasive ignorance (avijja) infects our ordinary view of the world. It is not an ignorance about this or that matter of fact, but one about the ontological structure of the world and of ourselves in it. This structural ignorance could be described as 'original ignorance.' For it lies at the origin of our uneasy and unsatisfactory predicament in this life in roughly the way in which original sin lies at its origin on a Christian scheme of things.
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