ourselves as individual persons, possessing something we all call “the self.” For the Buddhist, whether this self is a living soul or simply a being who has some sort of individualized existence does not really matter, because God does not exist, and the soul or any form of self or personal identity is an illusion. One could also say that for most Buddhists there is no such thing as “the person,” although in the first period of Buddhist history an important school of Indian Buddhism was known as