  Disagreement among modern interpreters of the not-self doctrine attests to the difficulty of providing a definitive account of this core aspect  of Buddhist philosophy. Thus, the early Pāli scholar Caroline  Rhys Davids (1924, 75) thought that the way Buddhists understood  and used the term consciousness was not very different that the way  Upaniṣadic philosophers talked about the self. Similarly,  Isaline Horner (1936, 145) suggested that some canonical passages  (e.g., Anguttara Nikāya I, 149–50) actually  provide support for the notion of self as an ‘unchanging  witness’ (Pāli sakkhi, Skt.  sākṣin), a view also defended in a recent  philosophical reworking of the notion of ‘witness  consciousness’ by Miri Albahari (2006). Although he  acknowledged the confusion generated by the tendency to attribute to  early Buddhism something analogous to the Upaniṣadic doctrine  of self, Edward Conze nonetheless asserted that one's true identity  is that of an Absolute, which he presumed to be none other than the  Buddhist view of consciousness (1962, pp. 43, 127). Perhaps the most  detailed attempt to support a two-tier understanding of the doctrine  of not-self comes from Kamaleswar Bhattacharya (1973, 64 and  passim), who forcibly argued that the denial of self in  Buddhism most often targets common views such as those that associate the self with the psycho-physical aggregates, and not the  metaphysical notion of self. 