Yes, I’m serious. Buddhists have no souls. Or permanent ones at
least. That’s really what Buddha taught.  Okay, end of column.
Well, no.  Let’s talk about souls first. What is this “soul”
thing we’re talking about? The ever-convenient Mac built-in
dictionary says the soul is “the spiritual or immaterial part of
a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.”  The common
conception of the soul in the West is the immortal part of us,
the thing that goes to Heaven — or doesn’t — when we die.
There’s a whole lot of Western Christian philosophy about the
soul that I’m not going to try to go into in depth, but
certainly that’s the basic idea: an eternal, undying part that
just “wears” the body, like clothes that it takes off and leaves
behind. There’s a living, breathing entity there that’s “alive,”
and then the breath stops and something is gone.  In fact, the
Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese words that correspond to
“soul” all have roots in “breath.” (I just looked up the
etymology of “soul,” which is of Ger