“If seeing, hearing, feeling, etc. have no soul that exists prior to them, they too have no existence as such. For how could _that_ exist without _this_, and _this_ without _that_? Subject and object are mutually conditioned. The soul as it is has no independent, individual reality whatever. Therefore, the hypothesis that contends for the existence of an ego-soul prior {170} to simultaneous with, or posterior to, seeing, etc., is to be abandoned as fruitless, for the ego-soul existeth not.” _Non-âtman-ness of Things._ The word “âtman” is used by the Buddhists not only psychologically in the sense of soul, self, or ego, but also ontologically in the sense of substance or thing-in-itself or thinginess; and its existence in this capacity is also strongly denied by them. For the same reason that the existence of an individual ego-soul is untenable, they reject the hypothesis of the permanent existence of an individual object as such. As there is no transcendent agent in our soul-life, so there is no real, eternal existence of individuals as individuals, but a system of different attributes, which, when the force of karma is exhausted, ceases to subsist. Individual existences cannot be real by their inherent nature, but they are illusory, and will never remain permanent as such; for they are constantly becoming, and have no selfhood though they may so appear to our particularising senses on account of our subjective ignorance. They are in reality cûnya and anâtman, they are empty and void of âtman. _Svabhâva._ The term “svabhâva” (self-essence or noumenon) is sometimes used by the Mahâyânists in place of âtman, and they would say that all dharmas have no self-essence, {171} _sarvam dharmam niḥsvabhâvam_, which is to say, that all things in their phenomenal aspect are devoid of individual selves, that it is only due to our ignorance that we believe in the thinginess of things, whereas there is no such thing as svabhâva or âtman or noumenon which resides in them. Svabhâva and âtman are thus habitually used by Buddhists as quite synonymous.