There is too much confusion with this term due, as usual, to the terrible translations that we can not get used to.Translating it as «no-self» is an exercise in shameless theosophism. His tendency to put the babbling of psychology into his abstruse system and inject it into Buddhism through his universal translations, gives rise to confusions like this.
Anatta simply indicates that something is not by itself, nor depends only on itself.
It is a simple corollary of conditionality. Therefore, everything conditioned is anatta. Only that. Let’s analyze it. Any phenomenon has subject and predicate. So, without more, we would say that an observer observes an object.Seen in this way we would assume that the observer is by himself and the observed as well. You look at a tree and you take for granted that before looking or not looking at the tree you exist and the tree is there for you or anybody to look at it. That seems obvious. Well, it is not. Both you and the tree are objects of namā, that is, they are only mental concepts that only exist while you think about them. Where are you with an advanced Alzheimer ?. And the tree is just a label, a meme, learned by imitation. You use the label to match the qualia with the observed. Even if we went to the sensory level, at the level of the rùpa, we would see that there can be no observer without observation, and what is observed is created at the moment of observation and only there. Therefore, there is no observer by himself or observed by himself. That is anatta. The self, not-me and similar absurdities are budistoid lucubrations. The most interesting is ANATTA regarding Nibbana.Nibbana, not depending on anything, does not even depend on himself. So it is Anatta too. And what happens with the infrastructure? Every condition was conditioned at its origin, but once it is produced, nothing depends on anything other than itself.And it does not depend on observers or objects or anything.It is there and it remains there. Therefore, it is not anatta in a strict sense. Therefore, only the illusion, the film is anatta.Reality, in its infrastructure, is not. Things are obvious when you see them and they are any fashionable translation when you are blind from all blindness.
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