Reborn without a soul?
On the axis: After death · what is reborn
If no substantial self travels from life to life, what is reborn, and in what sense do my present deeds concern the one who will inherit their fruit? Is the flame that lights another the same flame or another?
Justification
The argument proceeds by exhaustive review: Gautama runs through the five aggregates that make up a person (form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness) and shows that none meets the criteria for a self. Each is , hence a source of dis-ease, and above all eludes our command, "let it be thus and not otherwise"; yet what can neither last nor be mastered cannot be held as "my self". With no fifth term surviving behind these aggregates, there is no self-substance, only a bundle of conditioned processes: this is , which squarely rejects the of the Upaniṣads, the permanent Self identified with that the Brahmanical tradition held to be our true identity.
Form is not-self, feeling is not-self, perception is not-self, formations are not-self, consciousness is not-self.Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.59)
Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.59 (the discourse on the not-self characteristic) · Dhammapada, XX, 279 (all phenomena are not-self)
Justification
Classical Buddhist analysis dissolved the person into aggregates (body, sensations, perceptions, formations, consciousness), but treated those aggregates as the ultimate elements of the real. Nāgārjuna objects that the critique stopped too soon: applied to the relation of fire and fuel, his examination shows that the subject and its constituents are neither identical nor separate, and so lack . then holds of the aggregates themselves, in turn : the self is a pure bundle of dependent processes, with no ultimate term to bear it, bundle theory carried to its limit.
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), ch. XVIII (the examination of self and phenomena) · Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, ch. X (the examination of fire and fuel)
leads to: Nature of the self