The Self: an overlooked Buddhist Simile

Extract

I am not referring to the simile (and its fate) of the Jetawood and the faggots. That at least I have not overlooked, nor have others. Charles Eliot once wrote to us, that it seemed to imply the existence of a self that was other and more than body and mind (as the wood was there, and other, and more than the faggots). I remarked, Was it not a curious way of teaching the existence of a something (about which there might be a doubt), merely by implication ? I was then blind to two things: the tremendous emphasis on the immanence of Deity as ‘Self’ current in the lifetime of the ‘Buddha’ (rendering any assertion of It unnecessary); the decline in that emphasis by the time the Suttas came to be finally worded and canonized. To very few was awareness of this earlier and later constantly present. ‘Was?’ It is still true of most.