A few translation contexts for anattā as not self

[quote=“Mkoll, post:67, topic:4926”]
Personally, I don’t think I understand it, at least not on a deep level.
[/quote]If I had a penny for every idea of the Buddha’s that I don’t understand, I wouldn’t be able to pass through the eye of a needle, if you excuse my half-baked joke.

Too many people online have decided they are stream-enterers. Once you “decide” you are a stream-enterer, you cannot doubt and you cannot “not understand”, because then your claims of this specific interpretation of stream-entry are incoherent, so they just end up being trolls, arguing for their own idiosyncratic Dhamma that, for them, constitutes a coherent self-contained exhaustive philosophical system which can be "completely understood"by the “stream-enterer” in question.

Unfortunately other people always disagree with such a manner of forming a claim of stream-entry, which breeds massive amounts of pride and offence on the part of the stream-entry-claimant, who interprets authentic Dhamma as “attacks specifically against me, myself, my own and mine”, (to illustrate the relevance to anattā) since “they and the Buddha” utterly agree so much.

In my experience, generally, this leads to them accusing others who disagree with their idiosyncratic orthodoxy of “slandering the Buddha”, a common trolling meme on Buddhist forums.

4 Likes