  Buddhist conceptions of mind evolved from early attempts to offer a  systematic account of human experience as described in the large body of discourses attributed to the Buddha. The Buddha offered an account of the human individual as a composite of various psychological and  physical elements that challenged the prevailing philosophical views, dominated by the Upaniṣadic idea of an enduring, substantive  self (ātman). This aggregated view of persons became  the object of early and extensive scholastic debates as Buddhists  sought to explain how we come to mistakenly apprehend an unchanging  and enduring self in a stream of causally interconnected phenomena.  The notion that the habitual patterns of behavior which condition  human existence are the direct result of an entrenched and abiding  belief that we are (or have) an enduring, unchanging, and independent core or self, sets this aggregated view of persons apart from all  other philosophical accounts of personal identity in classical India. 