These would be his taking Form as the fundamental spatial moment of the Buddhist vedana-propelled meteorological model of ahaṃkāra. The self qua unity has only a nominal existence; the unity lies in the designator (and in the intentionality of the epistemic subject that it guides), not in the existent. The existent is a bundle of five parallel processes. What binds them is an instinctive repulsion against pain. Taking pain seriously was the chief pathology identified by the Buddha. His remedy was to point out that the victim of the pain is in concept both a unity and static, but in empirical presentation “it” is a plurality, unified only by name, and changing all the way down, so that prospective substances dissolves as well. The mystical unity demanded by the grammatical subject is both (1) a condition for taking pain seriously and (2) empirically absent. Merely combining these two facts was the Buddha’s contribution to the august tradition of analytic or axiomatically economical theory-making. The less the theorist presumes, and the more empirical data he accounts for, the better the theory. This is also exactly our attitude today towards theories we recognize as properly scientific. Ernst Mach formulated a stronger version of Occam's Principle of Economy as follows:

• Mach’s Principle of Economy: Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.