Perhaps earlier than the Buddha’s teaching the individual person (P., purisapuggalo) was believed to be composed of five selves or atma. In the Taittiriya Upanisad the selves were as follows: 1) the mass self as derived from food; 2) the organic self or pranic self; 3) the determining or attending self; 4) consciousness as the self; 5) the bliss self. This scheme was probably believed to be exhaustive of all that the self or atman could be.
According to the Buddha’s Five Aggregate scheme, which is very similar with the scheme found in the Taittiriya Upanisad, the self cannot be fixed as anyone of the aggregates because such an aggregated self was deemed by the Buddha to be impermanent and disturbed (duhkha). Nevertheless, according to the Buddha certain mendicants believed the self or atman to be the following: 1) the self is of physical qualities; 2) the self is sensate; 3) the self is imagic 4) the self is experiential; 5) the self is consciousness, or the same, sensory awareness.
We might conclude from this that the Buddha's self was completely transcendent instead of being something for us that is determinate. In other words, the Buddha's self was beyond the ken of human apperception. It would not be wrong to say that the Buddha's understanding of self was more thorough than views held by the sages of his era.
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