PeterB wrote:I am not being pedantic here ..does "Empty of self."..differ from "empty of self." ?
Well, not sure that I understand the question, but "Empty of self" are three words that would start at the beginning of a sentence, and "empty of self" would be used elsewhere with a sentence. Seriously: There are no capital letter in Sanskrit, out which Pali comes, so I would rather doubt that the that "empty" would be emphasized in such a way.
The "an" in anatta is a cognate to the "an" in a word such as "anurous" - having no tail. How would you gloss anurous? Free of a tail, without a tail, empty of a tail, tailless, but I'll defer here to a Pali-wallah such a the infrequent Ven Dhamanando, whose reading of Pali I trust greatly. English translators sort get stuck on
no, not and un for translating words with the prefix of
a/an. Asankhata is a prime example:
unconditioned being a really crappy translation of the word, which gives the horrifying locution: the unconditioned, as if it were some
thing out there.