Ohh, so
that's what the
Empty Fist is.
According to the Buddha, the beginning point of
Samsara is not evident. It is just like finding the beginning point of a circle.
In Buddhist philosophy, anatta (Pāli) or anātman (Sanskrit) refers to the "non-self" or "absence of separate self".[1] One scholar describes it as "meaning non-selfhood, the absence of limiting self-identity in people and things."[2] Its opposite is Atta (Pāli) or ātman (Sanskrit), the idea of a subjective Soul or Self which survives rebirth and which the Buddha explicitly rejects.
What is normally thought of as the "self" is in fact an agglomeration of constantly changing physical and mental constituents ("
skandhas").
Mindstream: an upāya doctrine of the nonlocal, atemporal metaphorical stream of moments or 'quanta of consciousness' proceeding endlessly in a lifetime, between lifetimes (Tibetan:
Bardo), from lifetime to lifetime, prior to engagement in the Bhavacakra of Samsara and beyond as an inclusive 'continuum' rather than an individuated, separate, or discrete perceptual, cognitive, or experiential entity, as in the conception of the Ātman.
Indian Buddhists see the 'evolution' of mind in terms of the continuity of individual mind-streams from one lifetime to the next.
..the Buddha was asked point-blank whether or not there was a self, he refused to answer. When later asked why, he said that to hold either that there is a self or that there is no self is to fall into extreme forms of wrong view that make the path of Buddhist practice impossible. This clear evocation of what later became canonized in Buddhist discourse as Madhyamika or "middle way", is key to tender a description of the ineffable Mysterium Magnum of the "Great Continuum" that is rendered in English as "Mindstream": the nondual resolution of ātman and anātman.
Madhyamaka is the rejection of two extreme philosophies, and therefore represents the "middle way" between eternalism (the view that something is eternal and unchanging) and nihilism (the assertion that all things are intrinsically already destroyed or rendered nonexistent.