Stephen Batchelor writes in Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist (2010,)

Gotama did for the self what Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear as it did before. Gotama no more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.