What the Buddha Said About Personality

What makes up the human personality? What am I?in things that endures from one moment to the next.
To understand what the Buddha said about this, weOk, we don't have a permanent identity, so, what are
must understand first a very important concept ofwe? What are we made of? The Buddha said that
Buddhist doctrine: the concept of no-self. What doesthe personality is made up of five aggregates or
this mean? It means that nothing has a permanentkhandhas. They are: matter, sensations, ideas,
identity, including personalities.decisions we make about things, and consciousness.
The easiest way to step into this concept is toThese aggregates are only momentary, but they
understand that Buddhists are claiming that things havegroup together to create the illusion of some kind of
no permanent identity that lies from one moment tocontinuity or permanence.
the next. What we mean here is not that there isBuddhists traditionally use two comparisons to express
nothing going on. We're here. We're here trying tothis idea. One is to say that the personality is like the
understand Buddhism. That's real in a sense, but it isstream of a river. The personality is nothing but a
transient and passes away.stream of aggregates flowing through the world.
We too are transient phenomena. My personality isAnother comparison that they use is to think about the
constantly changing, is evolving all the time. In big ways,personality as a flame. A flame of fire. This is actually
in subtle ways, it is constantly moving. To say thatuseful because it also suggests at the same time that
there is a self here is a certain kind of illusorythe personality is burning in a painful way. All the karma
construction that can cause us pain in certain kinds ofthat we produce is like logs fueling a great fire. And it
situations. So, Buddhists when say that there is no self,burns constantly, changing from one moment to the
what they mean is that there is no permanent identitynext.