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There is no entity that can be called soul and strictly speaking no entity that can be called body, only a variable aggregation of skandhas, constantly changing. At death this collocation disperses but a new one reassembles under the influence of taṇhâ, the desire of life, and by the law of karma which prescribes that every act must have its result.
They proceed to show that all manner of things, such as the five skandhas, the elements, contact, attachment, fire and fuel, origination, continuation and extinction have no real existence. Similar reasoning is then applied to religious topics: the world of transmigration as well as bondage and liberation are declared non-existent. In reality no soul is in bondage and none is released.
Early Buddhist literature asserts uncompromisingly that every state of consciousness has a cause and in one of his earliest discourses the Buddha argues that the Skandhas, including mental states, cannot be the Self because we have not free will to make them exactly what we choose . But throughout his ethical teaching it is I think assumed that, subject to the law of karma, conscious action is equivalent to spontaneous action.
Yet it would seem that according to the psychology of the Pitakas an ordinary human being is an aggregate of the skandhas and nothing more. When such a being dies and in popular language is born again, the skandhas reconstitute themselves but it is expressly stated that when the saint dies this does not happen. The Chain of Causation says that consciousness and the sankhâras are interdependent.
If a man were to take away, or burn, or use for his needs, all the grass, and boughs, and branches and leaves in this Jeta wood, would it ever occur to you to say, the man is taking us away, burning us, or using us for his needs? Certainly not, Lord. And why not? Because, Lord, it is not our self or anything belonging to our self. Just in the same way, replies the Buddha, get rid of the skandhas.
In the first place we find in early Buddhism the thought that there is no such thing as a self in the human being; a man is made up of various bundles of attributes and sensations called skandhas, but he himself is none of these.
If we take the passages at present collected as a whole, and admit that they are somewhat inconsistent or imperfectly understood, the net result is hardly that the name of self can be given to some part of human nature which remains when the skandhas are set on one side.
These five groups—body, feeling, perception, the sankhâras, thought—are generally known as the Skandhas signifying in Sanskrit collections or aggregates. The classification adopted is not completely logical, for feeling and perception are both included in the Sankhâras and also counted separately.
With reference to the special question of the existence of the saint after death, the story of Yamaka is important. This was considered a grave heresy and refuted by Sâriputta who argues that even in this life the nature of a saint passes understanding because he is neither all the skandhas taken together nor yet one or more of them.
With the death of an arhat comes the state known as an-upâdi-sesa-nibbânam in which no skandhas remain. It is also called Parinibbânam and this word and the participle parinibbuto are frequently used with special reference to the death of the Buddha . The difference between the two forms of nirvana is important though the second is only the continuation of the first.
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