 According to many of the world’s intellectual traditions, each person is a real, individual substance with a true essence or self. According to Buddhism, this widely held view is false; you are not a substance. Instead, all there is to a person is a complex, rapidly changing stream of mental and physical phenomena, connected by causal links and inextricably interrelated with the rest of the universe. This view is known as the doctrine of no self (Pāli anattā; Skt. anātman.) Śāntideva draws on this teaching to argue that egoism is irrational, and that we should work for the benefit of all sentient beings. As he writes, “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They are to be warded off simply because they are suffering. Why is any limitation put on this?” (Crosby and Skilton trans. 1995, 97) If you are not a real thing, there is no reason to place any greater intrinsic importance on preventing your own future suffering than on preventing the future suffering of others. As writers such as Mark Siderits (2003, ch. 9) have often noted, this strategy for justifying altruism, which many scholars now call the Ownerless Suffering Argument, closely resembles the arguments for consequentialism in Parfit 1984 (ch. 15). In fact, it’s hard to see how the Ownerless Suffering Argument could support any moral view that is not some form of universalist consequentialism.