Atta or Atman in Buddhism


Brahmajāla Sutta  provides a coherent explanation for the early Buddhist teachings on personal identity as well as  the apophatic strand in early Buddhist thought, and so underpins a  religio-philosophical understanding found consistently and extensively throughout the early Buddhist texts.
 Indeed idealism is, basically, an hypostasisation of a person’s subjective awareness into a mind-independent,
ultimate reality, an idea which the Mahānidāna Sutta rejects of  this system of thought is rather that the way things really are is unspeakable and unthinkable. In other words, the Brahmajāla Sutta’s  philosophy of epistemological conditioning implies that reality is  ultimately ineffable, as is the state of the person who realises it by  escaping his cognitive conditioning..

This conceptual clarification allows us to see that the metaphysical assumptions of the Brahmajāla Sutta differ considerably from  those of the first attempt to systematise the Buddha’s teachings, i.e. the reductionistic realism articulated in the various Abhidharmas.
This reductionism is based on the “No Self” doctrine: it assumes that although a person “exists” in the mind-independent reality of  the world, he is made up of impermanent “existents” or “events”
(dharmas) which lack self.The human being and the world are reduced to their constitutent parts, therefore, these being thought to  lack essence but exist transiently in the objectively real domain of
space-time.
Traces of the change towards a proto-Abhidharma reductionism can be found in the early texts. It is clear, for example, that the Vajirā Sutta is both reductionistic as well as realistic, for it speaks of the aggregates “existing” (khandhesu santesu) and of the failure to “find” an essential being in them (na yidha sattūpalabbhati).
This goes beyond the Not-Self teaching and the philosophy of the Brahmajāla Sutta by assuming that ultimate truth can be spoken of in terms of the concepts “existence” and “non-existence.” If so, it follows that the Not-Self teaching and the Vajirā Sutta are separated by an important philosophical change: whereas the former is based on the doctrine of epistemological conditioning and the relative truth of space-time, whereas the latter is based on the realistic assumption that space-time exists independent of human
consciousness

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