The illusion of self and things
　　 Daoism and Buddhism are unique among the great religions in denying the ontological self. Anatma non-self is one of the three basic "facts" taught by Sakyamuni Buddha, along with anitya impermanence and duhkha dissatisfaction. Two of his basic teachings deconstruct the self synchronically into skandha "heaps" and diachronically into pratitya-samutpada "dependent-origination". These doctrines explain how the illusion of self is constituted and maintained. All experiences associated with the illusory sense-of-self can be analyzed into one of five impersonal skandhas (form, sensation, perception, volitional tendencies and conditioned consciousness), with no remainder: there is no transcendental soul or persisting self to be found over and above their functioning.

　　 This skandha analysis has, however, been overshadowed and even subsumed into pratitya-samutpada, the most important Buddhist doctrine. Dependent-origination explains "our" experience by locating all phenomena within an interacting set of twelve factors (ignorance, volitional tendencies, conditioned consciousness, the fetus, sense-organs, contact, sensation, craving, grasping, becoming, new birth, suffering and death), each conditioning and conditioned by all the others. In response to the question of how rebirth can occur without a self that is reborn, rebirth is explained as one in a series of impersonal processes which occur without there being any self that is doing them or experiencing them. When asked to whom belong, and for whom occur, the phenomena described in pratitya-samutpada, the Buddha explained that each factor arises from the preconditions created by the other factors; that's all. The karmic results of action are experienced without there being anyone who created the karma or who receives its fruit, although there is a causal connection between the act and its result.

　　 As one would expect from its very different literary style, the Zhuangzi is less systematic in its critique of the self, yet the rejection is no less clear. Chapter one declares that "the utmost man is selfless" and chapter seventeen that "the great man has no self" (pp. 45, 150). Chapter two, the most philosophical, begins with Ziqi in a trance, to reveal afterwards that "this time I had lost my self, didn't you know?" Like other anecdotes about mind-fasting, which explain how to lose one's self, these passages are not concerned to philosophically deconstruct the self into its elements, but they emphasize or presuppose the need to get beyond self.

　　 Why is that so important? One problem with the self is its supposed identity: it provides the continuity that persists through change. Insofar as we value the self-identical, the world as the locus of transformation -- which threatens the self -- tends to be devalued. Yet Daoism and Buddhism agree that there is no such personal identity or continuity, which means that we are, in effect, depreciating everything that exists in order to cherish something illusory. Daoist emphasis on the ceaseless transformation of things does not reserve a corner for the self to watch from or hide away in, for it is the transformation of that "self" the Zhuangzi celebrates the most. On his deathbed master Lai looks upon heaven and earth as a vast foundry and looks forward to being refashioned by the Master Smith. Will he be made into a rat's liver, or a fly's egg? (ch. 6, pp. 88-89) To resist this is to be preoccupied with the welfare of the self: with satisfying its desires and defending what are believed to be its interests.

　　 Since self does not provide the desired identity, perhaps the most important of those interests is finding or constructing some such identity. That is, insofar as we have a sense-of-self we also feel a need to fixate it or stabilize it -- a need, however, which can never be fulfilled if the self is indeed illusory. To have a sense of self without being able to know what this self is, to be preoccupied with something that cannot be secured because it does not exist -- these are formulas for dis-ease (the Buddhist duhkha). The implications of this for our understanding of truth will become important later when we consider the intellectual ways our minds seek a stable dwelling-place.

　　 The other way to express the problem with self is that it is separate from other things. The subject that observes and manipulates objects becomes alienated from its world. And to experience oneself as separate from the world -- as one of many things in it -- is to experience the world as a collection of separate things, which according to both Daoism and Buddhism is a serious error.

　　 Nagarjuna emphasized that the Buddhist deconstruction of self is just as much a critique of thingness, of the self-existence of things. The first verse of the MMK asserts its thorough-going deconstruction of the being of all things: "No things whatsoever exist, at anytime or place, having risen by themselves, from another, from both or without cause." Paralleling the contemporary poststructural radicalization of structuralist claims about language, Nagarjuna's argument merely brings out more fully the implications of pratitya-samutpada. Dependent-origination is not a doctrine about causal relations among things, because the mutual interdependence of phenomena means they are not really things.