 The most central and most original intellectual discovery of the early Buddhist tradition was that we do not need to posit a substantial self in order to explain the world of our ordinary experience. Instead, Buddhist philosophers hold that we can arrive at much more defensible and much more fruitful accounts by exploring ways to understand the world of our experience as a product of impersonal and subpersonal causal processes. Śāntideva’s writings are full of passages, including many quotations from earlier sources, that shed light on the nature and implications of this insight, as well as the still more profound teaching of emptiness. Indeed, according to Śāntideva and his sources, a direct, intuitive understanding of the absence of any self has the power to set us free from cyclic existence. At ŚS 242, he offers this quotation from the Mysteries of the Tathāgata Sūtra: