It is no wonder that the founder doubted whether this doctrine of causation would be generally understood; for it is in fact an attempt to reconcile two opposite views of the nature of the human person. In the first place we find in early Buddhism the thought that there is no such thing as a self in the human being; a man is made up of various bundles of attributes and sensations called _skandhas_, but he himself is none of these. There is no persistent substratum of a self under these activities and forms, any more than there is a carriage in addition to the wheels, shafts, nails, etc., of which a carriage is composed. The Buddhist is called on to give up the belief in a permanent ego; only where the various parts come together is the man there. This is the well-known denial of the soul in this religion; the soul is nothing but the "name and form" of a chance collocation of elements. It is hard to know where this doctrine came from; Kern says it is derived from the science of dissection, others compare it with the doctrine of Heraclitus, taught about the same time in Greece, that all things are in constant flux, nothing permanent. The last words of the Master assert that decay is universal; and the doctrine of the skandhas is a corollary from that principle; if all the elements of which the human person is made up are in process of decay, then the self cannot be a substantial and persistent thing. That doctrine, however, does not go well together with the belief in the universality and inexorableness of suffering. If there is no self, must not consciousness come to an end when the elements fall asunder which chance has brought together, and must not the hour of death be also the hour of complete emancipation? This, however, it was impossible to hold in India at the time of Gautama; the belief in transmigration was too firmly fixed, he never thought of disputing it. That belief indeed is what chiefly makes the suffering of the world so lamentable. To Indian eyes the pain actually in the world was magnified a hundred-fold by the dark imagination of its connection with the past and with the future. What a man suffered was the result of acts done in many former lives, all spent in the vain misery of desire; and the sad prospect was extended before him that death would not end his pains, but that he would be born again and again to suffer ever anew so long as desire continued. But if this is the case, then the soul would seem to be a durable and persistent thing which is able to go through many lives and much suffering without being brought to an end. On the theory of transmigration the soul is not a mere shadow-name of an aggregation of qualities, but the one durable thing which survives when all that is accidental and temporary falls away from it. The doctrine of the Skandhas and that of transmigration are thus opposed, and the doctrine of the _nidanas_ or the chain of causation is the bridge