PUDGALAVĀDA

The Pudgalavāda was a group of schools sharing the doctrine that the person (pudgala) or self (ātman) is real. The earliest Pudgalavāda school was the Vātsīputrīya; from the Vātsīputrīya came the Dharmottarīya, Bhadrayānīya, Sāṃmitīya, and Ṣaṇnagarika. Of these schools, the Vātsīputrīya and Sāṇmitīya were the most important.

Very little of their literature has survived. This circumstance, together with their apparent denial of the Buddhist doctrine of nonself, has created the impression that they were an eccentric minority on the fringe of Buddhism. But in fact they were in the mainstream; Xuanzang (ca. 600–664) tells us that roughly a quarter of the monastic population in India in the seventh century c.e. was Pudgalavāda.

They agreed with other Buddhists that the self is neither the same as the five skandha (aggregates) nor separate from them, but affirmed the self as "true and ultimate." They thought of the self as conceptual yet real, real because for the purposes of kindness and compassion the self was not reducible to the skandhas, and apparently because the self was a reflection of the timeless reality of nirvĀṆa in the flux of the skandhas. As a fire can exist locally only through its fuel, so the self can exist as a particular person only through the skandhas. As the fire vanishes when the fuel is exhausted, but cannot be said to be either existent or nonexistent, having "gone home" to its timeless source, so the self that has attained nirvāṇa, vanishing at death, cannot be said either to exist or not to exist.

See also:Anātman/Ātman (No-Self/Self); Mainstream Buddhist Schools

Bibliography

Priestley, Leonard C. D. C. Pudgalavāda Buddhism: The Reality of the Indeterminate Self. Toronto, ON: Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto, 1999.

Thien Chau, Thich. The Literature of the Personalists of Early Buddhism, tr. Sara Boin-Webb. Delhi: Motilal Barnasidass, 1999.

Leonard C. D. C. Priestley