The Buddhist Doctrine of No-Self

Initially, this teaching of anatman was a rejection of the Vedic belief that everyone has an undying, unchanging essence called the atman (“Self”).

It was one more way to distinguish the teachings of the Buddha from the teachings of the Vedas. Instead of locating identity in something akin to a soul, the Buddha taught that there is only a sense of self. There is no permanent foundation, such as a soul, to consciousness and experience.

The Five Aggregates (skandhas)
This sense of selfhood arises from the combination of all the elements that make up a person and his or her identity. The Buddha outlined five broad categories that made up this sense of self. These five categories (skandhas, lit. “heaps, collections, aggregates”) are:
Form (rupa), which refers to the physical body;
Feeling (vedana), by which one reacts to perceptions as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither;
Perception (samjna), the recognition of objects;
Mental faculties (samskara), which refer to the collection of features of the mind such as will, memory, ideas, thought, etc., and;
Consciousness (vijnana), which is the awareness of the objects of perception.
The conjunction of these five skandhas results in one’s sense of identity and selfhood. From the body one acts and experiences in the world. Consciousness is the awareness of the world, while perception refers to the process of knowing the objects of awareness. That is, one can be aware of a tree, or a car, or the sky; perception is the act of knowing the sky is the sky, or a tree a tree, etc. The process of feeling is where one develops a liking or aversion to a sensation. Then the mental faculties decide how to act on these perceptions.

"In this book we will focus on one such tradition, that which derives from the Buddhist method of examining experiences called mindfulness meditation. We believe that the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and nondualismo that grew out of this method have a significant contribuition to make in a dialogue with cognitive science: (1) The no-self doctrine contributes to understanding the fragmentation of self-portrayed in cognitivismo and connectionism. (2) Buddhist nondualism, particularly as is presented in the Madhyamika (which literally means 'middle way') philosophy of Nagarjuna, may be juxtaposed with the entre-deux of Merleau-Ponty and with the more recent ideas of cognition and enaction." (VARELA, F.; THOMPSON, E.; ROSH, E. The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1993, p.21-22)