1. Introduction
2. The Problem of the Self in Buddhism
3. The Pudgalavādin Characterization of the Self
4. Reconstruction of the Pudgalavādin Conception of the Self
5. Pudgalavādin Arguments in Support of their Conception of the Self
6. Conclusion
7. References and Further Reading

1. Introduction

The Pudgalavāda was a group of five of the Early Schools of Buddhism,
distinguished from the other schools by their doctrine of the reality
of the self. The group consists of the Vātsīputrīya, the original
Pudgalavādin School, and four others that derived from it, the
Dharmottarīya, the Bhadrayānīya, the Sāmmitīya and the Shannagarika. Of
these, only the Vātsīputrīya and the Sāmmitīya had a large following.
The Vātsīputrīya evidently arose about two centuries after the death of
the Buddha (the Parinirvana). Since the date of the Buddha’s death was
probably in about 486 BCE or 368 BCE (according to which sources one
follows), the rise of the Vātsīputrīya school would have been in the
early third century or toward the middle of the second century BCE.
According to the Chinese monk Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang), who traveled in
India in the seventh century CE, the Sāmmitīya was at that time by far
the largest of the Shrāvakayāna schools (or Early Schools), equal in
size to all of the other schools combined; and as the monastic
populations of the Shrāvakayāna and the Mahāyāna were roughly the same,
the Sāmmitīya represented about a quarter of the entire Buddhist
monastic population of India. The Vātsīputrīya and a branch of the
Sāmmitīya survived in India at least until the tenth century, but since
the Pudgalavādin schools never spread to any great extent beyond the
subcontinent, when Buddhism died out in India, the tradition of the
Pudgalavāda came to an end.

The name Pudgalavāda came to be applied to these schools because “pudgala” was one of the words which they used for the self whose reality they affirmed. “Pudgala”
is a term that appears in the early canonical texts with the meaning of
a person or individual. The Pudgalavāda is thus a Doctrine of the
Person, or Personalism, and Pudgalavādins are accordingly Personalists.
Their use of the term “pudgala” has sometimes given the
impression that they were trying to conceal their unorthodoxy by talking
about a person rather than a self. But in fact they often used other
words for the self, such as “ātman” and “jīva,” and were evidently quite unabashed in declaring that the self is real.

It is hardly necessary to point out the importance, both
philosophically and historically, of a form of Buddhism which differs
strikingly in its interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching from what we
have come to regard as orthodox, and yet was for some time, at least,
the dominant form of Shrāvakayāna Buddhism in India. But the
difficulties facing us in investigating the Pudgalavāda are
considerable. There is no living tradition of Pudgalavāda; there are no
learned monks to whom we can turn for interpretations handed down within
that tradition. There are very few Pudgalavādin texts that have
survived, only two of them with anything to say about the self, and
those only in Chinese translations of poor quality. Apart from these, we
have extensive quotations from their texts (but none, unfortunately,
dealing with the self) in an Indian Buddhist work which has survived
only in Tibetan, some brief summaries of their doctrines in Tibetan and
Chinese translations of Indian works on the formation of the
Shrāvakayāna schools, and finally criticisms of their doctrines in works
from other schools, some of these fortunately available in Pali or
Sanskrit. The evidence we have is thus quite limited, much of it
surviving only in translation, and some of it from hostile sources. Any
interpretation of the Pudgalavādin doctrine of the self will necessarily
be to a considerable extent a reconstruction, and should accordingly be
regarded as a more or less plausible hypothesis rather than anything
like a definitive account.

2. The Problem of the Self in Buddhism

The Buddha taught that no self is to be found either in or outside of
the five skandhas or in their aggregates; the five are material form,
feeling, ideation, mental forces, and consciousness. He rejected the two
extreme positions of a permanent, unchanging self persisting in Samsara
(cycle of death and rebirth) through successive lives, and of a self
which is completely destroyed at death. He taught instead a middle
position of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda),
according to which our existence in this life has arisen as a result of
our ethically significant volitional acts (karma) in our last life, and
such volitional acts in our present life will give rise to our existence
(but will not determine our acts) in our next life. What we are now is
thus not the same as what we were, since this is a new life with a
different body, different feelings and so on, but neither is it entirely
separate from what we were, since what we are now is the result of
decisions made in our past life.

In the non-Pudgalavādin schools, which we now think of as orthodox in
this regard, this teaching was interpreted (not unreasonably) as a
denial that there is any substantial self together with an affirmation
of the complex process of evanescent phenomena which at any particular
time we identify as a person. In the opinion of these schools, the
teaching understood in this way offers several advantages: first, it is
true, in the sense that it can be accepted as an accurate account of
what can actually be observed of a person (including the events and
decisions of past lives, which were supposed to be accessible to the
Buddha’s memory); secondly, it removes the basis for selfishness (the
root of both wrong-doing and suffering) by exposing the ultimate
unreality of the self as a substantial entity; and thirdly, it supports
the view that what we do makes a real difference to what we become in
both this life and future lives. It thus offers rational hope for an
eventual dismantling of the otherwise self-perpetuating mechanism of
misunderstanding, craving and suffering in which we are trapped.

But this interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching also involves
certain difficulties. In the first place, even if we can understand the
functional identity of the person as simply the continuity of a causal
process in which the evanescent phenomena of the five aggregates occur
and recur in a gradually changing pattern, it is hard to understand how
this continuity is maintained through death to the birth of the person
in a new life. If rebirth is immediate, as the Theravādins held, how can
the final moments of one life bring about the beginning of a new life
in a place necessarily at some distance from the place of death? But if
there is an intermediate state between death and rebirth, as the
Sarvāstivādins held, how can the person journey from one life to the
next when the aggregates of the old life have passed away and the
aggregates of the new life have not yet arisen? Or if there are
aggregates in the intermediate state, why does this state not constitute
a life interposed between the one that has ended and the one that is to
begin?

In the second place, the denial of the ultimate reality of the self
certainly seems to cut away the basis for selfishness, but it seems in
the same way to cut away the basis for compassion. If the effort to gain
anything for oneself is essentially deluded, how can it not be equally
deluded to try to gain anything for other persons, other selves? If to
be liberated is to realize that there was never anyone to be liberated,
why would that liberation not include the realization that there was
never anyone else to be liberated either? Yet it was out of compassion
that the Buddha, freshly enlightened, undertook to teach in the first
place, and without that compassion there would have been no Buddhism.

Schools that accepted this interpretation, such as the Theravāda and
Sarvāstivāda, were of course aware of these difficulties and dealt with
them as well as they could. But it is not surprising that the
Pudgalavādin schools, sensitive to such problems, developed a
fundamentally different interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching about
the self.

3. The Pudgalavādin Characterization of the Self

The Pudgalavādins described the person or self as “inexpressible,”
that is, as indeterminate in its relation to the five aggregates, since
it cannot be identified with the aggregates and cannot be found apart
from them: the self and the aggregates are neither the same nor
different. But whereas other schools took this indeterminacy as evidence
that the self is unreal, the Pudgalavādins understood it to
characterize a real self, a self that is “true and ultimate.” It is this
self, they maintained, that dies and is reborn through successive lives
in Samsara, continuing to exist until enlightenment is attained. Even
in Parinirvana, when the aggregates of the enlightened self have passed
away in death and no new aggregates can arise in rebirth, the self,
though no longer existent with the aggregates of an individual person,
cannot actually be said to be non-existent.

Like most other Shrāvakayāna Buddhists, the Pudgalavādins regarded
Nirvana as a real entity, differing from the realm of dependent
origination (though not absolutely distinct from it) in being uncaused (asamskrita)
and thus indestructible. Accordingly, Nirvana is not something brought
into being at the moment of enlightenment, but is rather an eternally
existing reality which at that moment is finally attained. The
Pudgalavādins held that the self is indeterminate also in its relation
to this eternal reality of Nirvana: the self and Nirvana are neither the
same nor different.

In its indeterminate relationship with the five aggregates and
Nirvana, the self is understood to constitute a fifth category of
existence, the “inexpressible.” The phenomena of the five aggregates and
of temporal existence in general form three categories: past phenomena,
present phenomena and future phenomena. Nirvana, as an eternal,
uncaused reality, is the fourth category. The self or person, not to be
described either as the same as the dependent phenomena of the temporal
world or as distinct from them, is the fifth.

The Pudgalavādins distinguished three ways in which the self can be designated or conceived:

1. according to the aggregates appropriated as its basis in a
   particular life: In the this case, we have a conception of a particular
   person based on what we know of that person’s physical appearance,
   feelings, thoughts, inclinations and awareness.
2. according to its acquisition of new aggregates in its transition
   from a past life to its present one, or from the present life to a
   future one: In this case, we would have a conception of a particular
   person as one who was such-and-such a person, with that person’s body,
   feelings and so on, in a previous life, or as one who will be reborn as
   such-and-such a person, with that person’s body, feelings and so on, in a
   future life.
3. according to the final passing away of its aggregates at death after
   attaining enlightenment: In the this case, we have a conception of a
   person who has attained Parinirvana based on the body, feelings,
   thoughts, inclinations and awareness that have passed away at death
   without any possibility of recurrence.

In this way, all the statements made by the Buddha—and by others on
his authority or on the strength of their own observation, concerning
persons or selves and their past or future existences—can be shown to be
based on the five aggregates from which those persons are inseparable.

Other schools understood the self to be a merely conceptual entity in
the sense that it was simply the diverse phenomena of the five
aggregates comprehended for convenience under a single term such as
“self” or “person.” They supposed its existence to be thus purely
nominal; there is no single, substantial entity corresponding to the
term we use for it. We might expect that the Pudgalavādins, who held
that the self is real, would on the contrary insist that the self is not
merely conceptual or nominal, but substantial. But in fact they seem to
have regarded the self, at lest initially, as conceptual, though “true
and ultimate.” A later source represents them as maintaining that it is
neither conceptual nor substantial, and still later sources ascribe the
view to them that the self is indeed substantial. The difference in
these accounts may be the result of confusion in our sources, but it is
certainly possible that the Pudgalavādins gradually modified their
position under the pressure of criticism from other schools.

The Theravādins and Sarvāstivādins made a clear distinction between
what are traditionally called “two truths,” which in modern parlance is a
distinction between two types of “truth predicates”: ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) and conventional truth (samvritisatya). Ultimate truth distinguishes accurate statements about primary phenomena (dharmas)
and their relationships. Conventional truth distinguishes accurate
statements about persons and other composite entities; they were thus
statements expressed according to the conventions of ordinary usage, and
are true only in the sense that they could in principle be translated
into accurate statements about the constituent phenomena on which such
conventional notions as “person” and so on were based. The two types of
truth predicates (commonly called the “Two Truths”) are to be
distinguished from four important principles taught by the Buddha, which
are not truth predicates, but are called the “Four Noble Truths.” These
“Truths” are: (1) life is suffering (the Truth of Suffering), (2)
suffering arises from desire (the Truth of the Origination of
Suffering), (3) suffering can be stopped (the Truth of Nirvana and the
Cessation of Suffering), (4) the cessation of suffering is brought about
by adherence to the Buddhist Path, which consists of prescriptions such
as the Eight Fold Path (the Truth of the Path).

The Pudgalavādins also distinguished between two kinds of doctrine,
concerning phenomena and concerning persons, but they did not regard
these as related to higher and lower kinds of truth predicates. They
actually recognized three truth predicates: “ultimate truth,,
“characteristical truth,” and “practical truth.” They identified
ultimate truth with the Third Noble Truth, the Truth of Nirvana, and the
cessation of suffering. Characteristical truth distinguishes the First,
Second and Fourth of the Noble Truths, the Truths of Suffering, its
Origin, and the Path leading to its cessation. Because the
characteristical truth predicate was understood as characterizing the
world oriented of the Four Noble Truths, it was understood as also
distinguishing accurate claims about dependent phenomena. The practical
truth predicate distinguished forms of speech and behavior inherited
through local or family traditions or learned through monastic training.
It would seem that the self was subject to all three of these truths,
as the one who eventually attains the cessation of suffering, as the one
who suffers as a result of craving and follows a path leading to the
end of suffering, and as the one who speaks and acts in accordance with
the norms of secular or monastic life.

4. Reconstruction of the Pudgalavādin Conception of the Self

What the Pudgalavādins said (or in some cases are said to have said)
about the self is sufficient to locate their conception of the self in
relation to various Buddhist and non-Buddhist opinions that they
rejected. But the exact nature of their conception of it remains
unclear. Just what was the self supposed to be? Was it simply the five
aggregates taken together as a totality but which was not reducible to
its parts? Or was it a persisting entity distinct from the aggregates
but bound to them so that it could be said to change as the aggregates
connected with it changed? Or was it in fact something else altogether?

If the self was supposed to be conceptual, as the Pudgalavādins seem
initially to have asserted, that would tend to support the view that
they regarded the self as the totality of its constituent aggregates.
This view differed from the Theravādins and Sarvāstivādins in not
thinking that this conceptual whole was reducible to its parts. On the
other hand, if it was supposed to be substantial, as the Pudgalavādins
seem later to have asserted, that would tend to support the view that
they regarded it as an entity in its own right, non-different from the
aggregates only in the sense that it was inseparably bound to them. But
there is a problem that affects both of these interpretations. The
person who has completely passed away in Parinirvana is supposed to be
neither existent nor non-existent. If the self were the aggregates taken
as a whole, then with the final destruction of body, feeling, and so on
the self would simply be non-existent. But if the self were an entity
distinct from the aggregates though bound to them, then in Parinirvana
the self would either come to an end together with the aggregates and
thus be non-existent, or else it would continue to exist without the
aggregates, in spite of allegedly being bound to them, and so would be
simply existent. The former interpretation in fact comes too close to
identifying the self with the aggregates, and the latter, to treating it
as a separate entity.

An analogy that the Pudgalavādins frequently made use of may give
some indication of what they actually had in mind. They say that the
person is to the aggregates as fire is to its fuel. This analogy appears
in a number of the canonical texts and so would have to be accepted by
all Buddhist who accepted these texts, though their understanding of it
would of course be different from the Pudgalavādins’. As the
Pudgalavādins explain it, fire is described in terms of its fuel, as a
wood fire or a straw fire, but the fire is not the same as the fuel, nor
can it continue to burn without the fuel. Similarly, the person is
described in terms of the aggregates, as having such-and-such a physical
appearance and so on, but it is not the same as that particular body,
those feelings and so on, and cannot exist without a body, feelings and
the other aggregates. This analogy makes it clear that although the
aggregates in some sense support the self, they are not actually its
constituents, since a fire, though supported by its fuel, is certainly
not a whole constituted by some particular arrangement of logs.

What the analogy seems not to make clear is why the person in
Parinirvana, no longer supported by the aggregates, is not simply
non-existent like a fire that has gone out when its fuel is exhausted.
But there is reason to think that the Pudgalavādins did not understand
the extinction of the fire as we would. Several of the canonical texts
that use this analogy specifically compare the Buddha after death to a
fire that has gone out and has not gone north, south, east or west, but
is simply extinct; but instead of going on to say that the Buddha is
non-existent, they say that he is “unfathomable”, that he cannot be
described in terms of arising or non-arising, existence or
non-existence. Another text, preserved and accepted as authoritative by
the Theravādins, explains that Nirvana exists eternally and can be
attained even though there is no place where it is “stored up,” just as
fire exists and can be produced by rubbing two sticks together even
though there is no place where it is stored up. The extinction of the
fire can be understood as a transition from its local existence
supported by its fuel to a non-local state which cannot be described as
either existence or non-existence. The Parinirvana of the Buddha will
then be his transition from a local existence supported by the
aggregates to a non-local state which is unfathomable. A canonical text
of the Mahāyāna explicitly describes the non-local form of the Buddha
after his death as his “eternal body,” which is said to be like the fire
that has not gone north, south, east or west, but is simply extinct.

There is no evidence that the Pudgalavādins anticipated this Mahāyāna
doctrine of an eternal body of the Buddha. However, the analogy
understood in this way certainly indicates that the person or self (in
this case, the Buddha) is a local manifestation of something. Could that
“something” have been a supreme self such as we find in the Upanishads
and the Vedānta, and, suitably qualified, in some Mahāyāna texts? There
is no evidence to suggest that it was, and in fact the Pudgalavādins may
have felt that it would be inappropriate to use the term designating a
local, dependent manifestation of that something to refer to the
something itself, which unlike any self was eternal and independent of
the aggregates.

But there is some evidence which points in another direction. One of
our Pudgalavādin sources speaks of the person in Parinirvana as having
attained the “unshakeable happiness”, and another source says that the
Pudgalavādins held that although Nirvana has the nature of
non-existence, because there is no body, faculty or thought there, it
also has the nature of existence, because the supreme, ever-lasting
happiness is there. So Nirvana is characterized by eternal happiness,
but it is a happiness unaccompanied by any body, faculty or thought.
Moreover, another source ascribes to the Pudgalavādins the view that
Nirvana is the quiescence of the person’s previous “coming and going” in
Samsara; it seems to say, then, that Nirvana is a state that the person
achieves. This “state” cannot be something that comes into being when
Nirvana is attained; otherwise Nirvana would be dependent and so in
principle impermanent. And in Parinirvana there are no aggregates, and
thus no person, in any normal sense, of which this quiescence could be a
state. But if this quiescence is Nirvana, it cannot be simply the
non-existence of the person, since we are told explicitly that the
person is not nonexistent in Parinirvana (though of course not existent,
either). Nirvana must be quiescence in the sense in which it is the
“cessation of suffering,” not as a state that arises at the moment of
enlightenment and is completed at death, but as an already existing
reality whose attainment puts an end to suffering and the coming and
going of Samsara.

But in what sense is this eternal happiness “attained” by the person
who at death ceases to exist as a self supported by body, faculties and
thought? And in what sense is a person who has attained this eternal
happiness “not non-existent” after death, even though the five
aggregates have passed away once and for all? If even without the
aggregates the person somehow survives to enjoy the eternal happiness,
why do the Pudgalavādins deny that the person is existent in
Parinirvana? But if the person does not survive and there is supposed to
be only eternal happiness without anyone who enjoys it, in what sense
does the person attain it?

The difficulty arises from the assumption that the self or person and
Nirvana are two different things, the one impermanent and the other
eternal. But the Pudgalavādins say that the self and Nirvana are neither
the same nor different. Even while suffering in Samsara the self is not
distinct from the eternal happiness of Nirvana, and when the person’s
body, feelings and so on have passed away in Parinirvana, the self is
still not entirely non-existent. That is because Nirvana, which is not
distinct from the self, continues to exist. The relationship between the
self and Nirvana, then, seems to be similar to that between the local
manifestation of fire and the fire in its non-local state. The
“something” that is locally manifested as a self on the basis of the
aggregates would thus be Nirvana.

5. Pudgalavādin Arguments in Support of their Conception of the Self

The Pudgalavādins, like other Buddhist philosophers, saw it as their
task to present what they believed to be the best interpretation of the
teaching of the Buddha and to support that interpretation through
rational argument. The correctness of the Buddha’s teaching was beyond
question; what could be debated was the adequacy of this or that
interpretation as an explanation of his meaning. Accordingly, their
arguments were broadly of two kinds: appeals to the canonical texts
(sutras) in which the Buddha’s teaching had been preserved, and
arguments on the basis of consistency with acknowledged fact. These
were not entirely distinct, since the Buddha’s teaching was supposed to
be based not on divine revelation but on the exercise of human faculties
developed to an extraordinary degree, and “acknowledged fact” was
understood to include generally accepted Buddhist doctrines concerning,
for example, karma and rebirth.

Appeals to the canonical texts were not entirely straightforward.
These texts had been transmitted orally for several centuries before
being committed to writing. Each school preserved its own versions of
these texts, and although the versions agreed to a considerable extent,
there were also differences, in some cases involving whole sutras. It
was not enough, then, for the Pudgalavādins and their opponents to quote
sutras from their own versions of the canon; they had to make sure that
the sutra they quoted was also included in their opponents’ version.
Otherwise, their opponents would feel free to dismiss it as quite
possibly a forgery.

The Pudgalavādins often quoted passages in which the Buddha spoke of
persons or the self as existing. In most cases, these could be readily
explained by their opponents on the basis of the two truths: the Buddha
spoke conventionally of persons and the self, but elsewhere made it
clear that ultimately there are only the phenomena of the five
aggregates. In the view of such non-Pudgalavādin schools as the
Theravādins and Sarvāstivādins, these passages merely serve to explain
how the Pudgalavādins have come to misunderstand the Buddha’s teaching;
they give no support at all to the misinterpretation.

But there is one case at least in which the Buddha’s way of
expressing himself is more difficult to account for, and the Theravādin
and Sarvastivādin explanations of it show signs of strain. Here the
Buddha speaks of the five aggregates as the burden, and identifies the
bearer of the burden as the person. Certainly it is possible to explain
this in terms, for example, of decisions made by the aggregates of a
past life whose consequences are then a burden to the aggregates of this
life. But the more natural and obvious reading is to take it as
distinguishing between the person who transmigrates from life to life,
and the aggregates which the person takes up with each life and carries
as a burden.

In another passage to which the Pudgalavādins referred, the Buddha
indicates that the idea that one has no self is a mistake. Their
opponents were quick to point out that in the same passage he also
indicates that the idea that one has a self is a mistake; the meaning,
they would suggest, is that it is a mistake to affirm the ultimate
existence of the self, but a mistake also to deny its conventional
existence. This is certainly not unreasonable; but neither is the
Pudgalavādins’ explanation: that it is a mistake to affirm the existence
of a self that is either the same as the aggregates or separate from
them (these being the two ways in which the self is usually imagined).
but a mistake also to deny that there is any self at all.

The fact that the Buddha seems to have been generally unwilling to
say outright that the self does not exist is something of an
embarrassment for the Pudgalavādins’ opponents. The Buddha
characteristically said that the self is not to be found in the
aggregates or apart from them. The Theravādins, Sarvāstivādins and
others take this to mean that there is no self at all (except nominally
or conventionally); but the Pudgalavādins take it as characterizing an
existing self which is neither the aggregates themselves nor something
apart from them. Whenever the Buddha says that the aggregates in
particular or phenomena (dharmas) in general are non-self, the
Pudgalavādins understand this only as a denial that the self can be
simply identified with them. The view of the Theravādins and
Sarvāstivādins, that what we call the self is simply the ever-changing
aggregates spoken and thought of for convenience as a persisting entity,
seems to the Pudgalavādins to be equivalent to identifying the self
with its aggregates, a view which the Buddha explicitly rejected.

Apart from appeals to the canonical texts, the Pudgalavādins also
offered arguments pointing out what they saw as the inadequacy of their
opponents’ view to account for some of the facts of personal existence
and self-cultivation which were generally accepted by Buddhists. They
argued, for example, that if there were no person distinguishable from
the aggregates, there would be no real basis for identifying oneself, as
the Buddha did, with the person that one was in a previous life, since
the aggregates in the two lives would be completely different. They
evidently felt that the causal relationship that was supposed to obtain
between the aggregates of a past life and those of the present life was
insufficient to establish a personal identity persisting through the
successive lives.

They also argued that one of the meditations recommended by the
Buddha, in which the meditator cultivates the wish that all sentient
beings may be happy, presupposes the existence of real sentient beings,
of persons, to be the objects of the meditator’s benevolence. They
rejected their opponents’ opinion that the aggregates are the real
object of benevolence, and insisted that if that were the case, the
Buddha’s recommendation to wish that all sentient beings may be happy
would not have been “well said”. In their opponents’ view, this was
simply another case in which the Pudgalavādins failed to recognize that
the Buddha spoke conventionally of sentient beings and persons when it
would have been inconvenient to speak in terms of the aggregates, which
were all that was ultimately there. But to the Pudgalavādins it seemed
clear that benevolence toward a sentient being or person is not the same
thing as benevolence (if it is possible at all) toward a series of
constantly changing aggregates.

They argued also that the operation of karma is incomprehensible if
the person is nothing more than an assemblage of phenomena. Destroying a
particular arrangement of particles of clay in the form of an ox is not
killing anything and has in itself no karmic consequences; but
destroying a particular arrangement of aggregates in the form of a
living ox is killing something and has unfortunate consequences for the
person who killed it. If the ox is really nothing but an arrangement of
aggregates, destroying that arrangement, rearranging the aggregates,
should have no more moral and karmic significance than smashing the clay
image of an ox. Their thought seems to have been something like this:
the phenomena (dharmas) which are supposed to be the ox’s
constituents cannot, strictly speaking, be destroyed, since their
existence is in any case momentary; all that can be destroyed is the
arrangement in which these phenomena have been occurring, and that, in
the view of their opponents, is nothing real. As Buddhists, their
opponents agree with the Pudgalavādins in accepting the effectiveness of
karma, but their denial of the reality of the self makes nonsense of
what they accept.

The analogy with fire was important in explaining the indeterminacy
of the self or person in relation to the aggregates, but they did not
offer it as an argument in its own right for the reality of the self.
Its function was rather to clarify the nature of the relationship
between the self and the aggregates, and to serve as evidence that at
least one instance of such a relationship could be recognized in the
world around us, so that there could be no justification for rejecting
their position out of hand as manifestly impossible.

6. Conclusion

The view of the Pudgalavādins, that the self is a real entity which
is neither the same as the aggregates nor different from them, is
certainly paradoxical and seems to have been regarded by their opponents
as fundamentally irrational. But they evidently felt that only such a
view did justice to our actual experience of personal existence and to
what in the Buddhist tradition were the accepted facts of karma, rebirth
and final liberation. To some extent they were able to explain the
paradox by pointing to the ways in which the self seems limited to a
particular body, particular feelings and so on and the ways in which it
also seems to transcend these, but the self in their view remains
something mysterious and only partially amenable to the principles of
rational thought.

The Theravādins, Sarvāstivādins and others naturally saw the
Pudgalavādins’ account of the self as not so much paradoxical as
incoherent. They were sure that the reason that the Pudgalavādins could
not really make sense of the self they affirmed was that no such self is
possible. But there was after all some justification for the
Pudgalavādins’ view, that their opponents, if they achieved consistency,
did so to some extent at the expense of the facts. And the insistence
of the Theravādins and Sarvāstivādins on the precise determinacy of
anything that they were prepared to regard as real brought its own
problems, as the dialectic of the Mādhyamikas would show.

The very considerable success of the Pudgalavādins in India surely
indicates that there were many who regarded their doctrine as a viable
interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching. At the very least, it was an
interpretation which, though different from what we now regard as
orthodox, had significant strengths as well as weaknesses. Perhaps
belief in a real though indeterminate self would tend, as their
opponents argued, to reinforce our inveterate selfishness; but the
Pudgalavādins held that the self once realized to be indeterminate could
not be a basis for the self-love and craving that are the source of
suffering. Their conception of a persisting self, moreover, could be
felt to give a stronger sense of our investment in the person that we
are to become, and thus a greater appreciation of the significance of
our actions in this life. Finally, belief in the reality of other selves
would seem to make it more difficult to ignore the suffering of others
than if all persons were thought to be essentially an illusion. That
there was in fact a danger that belief in the unreality of the self
might lead to an attitude of indifference to other sentient beings is
evident from the endless admonishments to cultivate compassion that we
find in the works of the Mahāyāna.

As a theory of the self, the Pudgalavāda was naturally shaped and so
in some measure limited by the concerns of Buddhism; the Pudgalavādins
were interested in the nature of selfhood only to the extent that it had
a bearing on the problem of suffering. But their interpretation of the
Buddha’s teaching offers a perspective which is also of more general
interest. Even in the fragmentary evidence that has come down to us, we
can see at least the rough outline of a view which gives full weight to
the instinctive conviction that as persons we are neither reducible to
our apparent constituents, whether these are conceived to be dharmas or
molecules, nor separable from our particular, concrete presence in the
physical world. It is a view that reminds us of the experiential
immediacy of our awareness of other selves, and that confirms our
natural resistance to regarding a person as nothing more than a
construct of the understanding. Finally, it renews in us the sense of
something mysterious and perhaps ultimately unfathomable in the mere
fact of our selfhood and of our existence in the world as conscious
beings.

7. References and Further Reading

• Aung, Shwe Zan and C.A.F. Rhys Davids. Points of Controversy. (English translation of the Kathāvatthu. ) London: Pali Text Society, 1915. Reprinted 1960.
• Bareau, André. “Trois traités sur les sectes bouddhiques attribués à Vasumitra, Bhavya et Vinītadeva.” Journal Asiatique, 242 (1954), 229–66; 244 (1956), 167–200.
• Bareau, André. Les sectes bouddhiques du petit véhicule. Paris: École Française d’ Extrême-Orient, 1955.
• Conze, Edward. Buddhist Thought in India. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. Reprinted 1967, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Demiéville, Paul. “L’origine des sectes bouddhiques d’après Paramartha.” Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques, 1 (1932),15–64. Reprinted 1973 in Choix d’études bouddhiques (1928–1970), Leiden: E.J. Brill, 80–130.
• Dube, S.N. Cross Currents in Early Buddhism. New Delhi: Manohar, 1980.
• Duerlinger, James. Indian Buddhist Theories of Persons: Vasubandhu’s “Refutation of the Theory of a Self”. London, New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003.
• Dutt, Nalinaksha. Buddhist Sects in India. Calcutta: K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1970.
• Hurvitz, Leon. “The Road to Buddhist Salvation as Described by Vasubhadra.” (Includes a translation of part of the Siehanmu chaojie, Kumarabuddhi’s Chinese translation of the Tridharmakhandaka.) Journal of the American Oriental Society, 87.4 (1967), 434–86.
• Jha, Ganganatha. The Tattvasamgraha of Sāntaraksita with the Commentary of Kamalasīla. (English translation of Shāntarakshita’sTattvasamgraha..) Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1937.
• La Vallée Poussin, Louis de. L’Abhidharmakosa de Vasubandhu. (French translation from Xuanzang’s Chinese version of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakoshabhāshya.) Mélanges chinoises et bouddhiques, 16 (1923–31). Reprinted 1971.
• La Vallée Poussin, Louis de. “La controverse du temps et du pudgala
  dans le Vijnānakāya.” (French translation of the first chapter of
  Xuanzang’s Chinese version of Devasharman’s Vijnānakāya.) Études Asiatiques, 20 (1923), 343–76.
• Law, B.C. The Debates Commentary. (English translation of the Kathāvatthuppakarana-atthakathā.) London: Pali Text Society, 1940. Reprinted 1969.
• Masuda, Jiryo. “Origin and Doctrines of Early Indian Buddhist
  Schools: a translation of the Hsüan-chwang version of Vasumitra’s
  treatise.” Asia Major, 2 (1925), 1–78.
• Priestley, Leonard C.D.C. Pudgalavāda Buddhism: The Reality of the Indeterminate Self. Toronto: Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto, 1999.
• Sastri, N. Aiyaswami. Satyasiddhi of Harivarman, Vol. II. (English translation of Kumārajīva’s Chinese version of Harivarman’s Tattvasiddhi or Satyasiddhi.) Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1978.
• Schayer, S. “Kamalasīlas Kritik des Pudgalavāda.” Rocnik Orientalistyczny, 10 (1934), 68–93.
• Skilling, Peter. “History and Tenets of the Sāmmatīya School.” Linh-Son— Publications d’études bouddhiques, 19 (1982), 38–52.
• Skilling, Peter. “The Samskrtāsamskrta-Viniscaya of Dasabalasrīmitra.” Buddhist Studies Review, 4.1 (1987), 3–23.
• Stcherbatsky, T. Soul Theory of the Buddhists. (Includes an English translation from the Tibetan of the ninth chapter of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakoshabhāshya, the “Pudgalavinishcaya”.) Bulletin de l’Academie des Sciences de Russie, 1919: 823–54, 937–58. Reprinted 1970, Varanasi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakasan.
• Thich Thien Chau, Bhikshu. The Literature of the Personalists of Early Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999. English translation by Sara Boin-Webb of Les Sectes personnalistes (Pudgalavâdin) du bouddhisme ancien, Thèse pour le Doctorat d’ État ès-Lettres et Sciences humaines, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), 1977.
• Venkataramanan, K. “Sāmmitīyanikāya Sāstra.” (English translation of the Sāmmitīyanikāyashāstra..) Visva-Bharati Annals, 5 (1953), 155–243.
• Walleser, Max. Die Sekten des alten Buddhismus. (Die buddhistische Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Part 4.) Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1927.

Author Information

Leonard Priestley
Email: leonard.priestley@utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Canada