In the Heart Sutra, the teaching of no-self is presented as a particular expression of the more encompassing insight into emptiness. Emptiness here does not mean sheer non-existence, but the absence of any inherent, independent essence in whatever appears. All phenomena arise dependently through causes and conditions, and for that reason they are said to be “empty” of fixed, self-existing nature. This same logic is then applied to what is ordinarily called a “person” or “self,” revealing that the self, too, is nothing other than a dependently arisen configuration.

The sutra focuses this analysis through the five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness—which are conventionally taken to constitute a person. These aggregates are explicitly declared to be empty, and the famous statement “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” is extended in meaning to all of them. Since what is called “self” cannot be found apart from these aggregates, and since they lack inherent existence, no permanent, autonomous self can be established either within or beyond them. No-self, in this light, is simply the recognition that the supposed inner core of identity is itself an empty phenomenon.

The text then radicalizes this insight by extending it beyond the person to all dharmas. Not only the aggregates, but also the sense faculties and their objects—“no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no color, sound, smell, taste, touch, phenomena”—are proclaimed to be empty. Even the structures of the path and its attainments are included in this universal emptiness, so that no phenomenon whatsoever is exempt from the lack of inherent, independent existence. No-self thus becomes a doorway into understanding that the same absence of fixed essence characterizes the entire field of experience.

This vision is not intended as a nihilistic denial of the conventional world, but as a clarification of how things actually exist. Persons and phenomena function, interact, and appear, yet they do so only in dependence upon conditions, never as isolated, self-sufficient entities. When the self is seen in this way—as merely a conventional designation for an empty, dependently arisen process—the habitual grasping at a solid “I” loses its footing. According to the Heart Sutra, this realization of no-self as an aspect of emptiness is central to the wisdom that cuts through fear and opens the way to liberation.