Self and Soul

. . . one of the foundational teachings of Zen is that there is no self. But when we say there's no self, we only mean that there is no fixed and limited entity that remains unchanging while life and time go on around it. Yet what we mistakenly call "self" still exists. We just have completely wrong ideas about what it is and make huge mistakes by acting on those wrong ideas. So sometimes Dogen just calls this unnameable something "self" or even calls it the "soul," another taboo word in Zen.

---Brad Warner, in his commentary on Master Dogen's Uji---