Basic Meaning
The nonexistence of the self as a permanent, unchanging entity.
Has the sense of
A key feature of the Buddha's teachings that stood in direct contrast to the mainstream Indian religious-philosophical notion of an eternal self, or ātman.
The teaching that there is no personal self was a crucial precursor to the Buddhist concept of emptiness.
See page 42: In Sanskrit, “no self” or “nonself” or more broadly “insubstantiality”; the third of the “three marks” (trilakṣaṇa) of existence, along with impermanence (anitya) and suffering (duḥkha). The concept is one of the key insights of the Buddha, and it is foundational to the Buddhist analysis of the compounded quality (samskrta) of existence: since all compounded things are the fruition (phala) of a specific set of causes (hetu) and conditions (pratyaya), they are therefore absent of any perduring substratum of being.
Nonexistence of the self of the individual personality and/ or self-nature of phenomena.
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