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It has some paradoxical aspects to answer to the question: "what is soul in Buddhism?" It is for the reasons that Buddhist fundamental doctrines teaches that there is no individual, transmigrating, and eternal entity at the level of "ultimate truth", nevertheless, it is never denied that there are more or less stable persons, namable and humanly recognizable at the level of "conventional truth". Buddhist literatures use many of the same terms to connote the individual persons as do the Upanisadic and Vedantic tradition in India, the most common being, atman, purusa, jiva. Abhidharma texts frequently employ the term pudgala to refer to that aspect of a living being that makes it distinct from other creatures, Such well-known works as Theravadin Milinda-panha employ such terms as vedagu to refer to a fully sentient being, and Mahayana Lankavatara Sutra speaks of tathagatagarba(the womb of suchness) and alayavijnana(the store of consciousness) when discussing the process of understanding, the nature of awareness, and the place where such awareness resides in the human being.
Buddhist texts in general, then, acknowledge the existence of a self as an entity that distinguishes one individual from another, that serves as the center of intellect, will, and moral agency, and that is understood to be the source of human perfection.
We must be careful, however, no to confuse the concepts between what exactly is being denied here and being acknowledged. Buddhist traditions as a whole tend to acknowledge the soul as what might be termed a functional self on the one hand. It is true that this tendency make permit Buddhist laymen to acknowledge the soul as an ontological, permanent substance. But such an acknowledgement is valuable at the level of conventional truth in all respects, rather than at the level of ultimate truth. Buddhist concepts of the soul are based on this twofold system of truth.