Chapter 5. The Vātsīputrīyas and the problem of the pudgala¶

In the preceding chapters, each school installed a bearer to address the problem of "continuity without a self" (1.5): Sarvāstivāda used possession, unmanifest matter, and the reality of all three times; Sautrāntika used seeds; Theravāda used bhavaṅga consciousness. The Vātsīputrīyas examined in this chapter offer the most direct answer: the bearer is a "person" (pudgala). Precisely because this step came so close to the forbidden "self," they became the most fiercely denounced school of the period. Paradoxically, however, they were also among the most prosperous schools in India itself.

1. The Vātsīputrīyas and Saṃmitīyas: denounced as "heretics," yet a major tradition¶

The Vātsīputrīyas came from the Sthavira line and took their name from their lineage of teachers. They later divided into branches including the Dharmottarīyas, Bhadrayānīyas, Saṃmitīyas, and Ṣaṇṇagarikas; among these, the Saṃmitīyas grew into a very large school. As 3.2 noted, Xuanzang encountered substantial numbers of Saṃmitīya monasteries and monks during his journey west. This shows that the later impression, left by Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda polemics, that "the pudgala is heretical" does not represent the school's actual standing at the time.

Most of its writings have been lost, and once again we must piece together our understanding through its critics. The opening and longest debate in the Theravāda Kathāvatthu refutes the pudgala.¹ At the end of the Abhidharmakośa, Vasubandhu devotes a special chapter to "Refutation of the Self." It refutes the pudgala and self and is the most famous text in this controversy.^{2 3} A few treatises of the Saṃmitīya tradition, such as the Saṃmitīyanikāyaśāstra, also survive.

2. The pudgala: a "person" neither identical with nor separate from the aggregates¶

The Vātsīputrīya position can be stated in one sentence: a "pudgala," or person, really exists, but its relation to the five aggregates is "indeterminate" (avaktavya); it is neither identical with them nor separate from them.

"Not identical with the aggregates": it is not equivalent to the five aggregates. The aggregates arise and cease from moment to moment and disperse when the body of a lifetime breaks up. Equating the person with them would once again leave "who undergoes rebirth and who remembers" without a basis. "Not separate from the aggregates": neither is it something that exists apart from the five aggregates. If it were an independent, permanent entity outside them, it would become the Brahmanical "self" (ātman), violating the fundamental prohibition imposed by no-self. Neither identical with nor separate from them, it can only be "designated in dependence on the five aggregates," yet it remains a real bearer. The Vātsīputrīyas favor the analogy of fire and fuel: fire is not equivalent to fuel, but apart from fuel there is no fire to speak of. Fire and fuel are neither one nor different; so too are the pudgala and the five aggregates.³

It seeks to resolve precisely the series of questions that the other schools pass over vaguely: who is reborn in the six realms? Who remembers earlier events? Who produces karma, and who receives its results? Who finally enters nirvāṇa? The Vātsīputrīyas answer: the pudgala.

More important is the purpose of the move to "indeterminacy." Refusing to answer whether it is one with or different from the aggregates is precisely a way of passing between the two extremes. To say "different" is to fall into a permanent soul; to say "identical," or simply "nonexistent," is to fall into annihilation, leaving no one to bear anything.

Positive arguments: why the pudgala is needed

The Vātsīputrīyas do more than say "a bearer is needed, so we posit a pudgala." They also offer several positive arguments.

First, to whom memory belongs: when I remember what I did yesterday, I recognize it as "what I did yesterday." A line of recognition connects yesterday's stream of dharmas with today's. But every dharma of yesterday has now entirely ceased; no present dharma can "recognize" a dharma that has ceased. Only a pudgala spanning time can take the events of two days as "the experiences of the same person." Second, to whom karma belongs: the producer of karma and the recipient of its result may be separated by several lifetimes. If continuity is only a series of ownerless, momentary dharmas, it is unclear "who ought to receive" this result. Only a pudgala can bear responsibility across lives. Third, the subject of realization: between saying "a certain configuration of five aggregates attained arahantship" and saying "a certain person attained arahantship," there is a semantic gap. That gap is precisely the place the pudgala fills.

The Vātsīputrīyas can find several sources of scriptural support. In the Bhārahāra Sutta (SN 22.22), the Buddha says: "What is the burden? The five aggregates subject to clinging. Who is the bearer? A person (puggala)." Read literally, "that person" is the pudgala. Early discourses also contain several positive uses of "self" (attā), such as "oneself is one's own island; oneself is one's own refuge." Such uses are not easily reduced entirely to "expedient expression." Priestley holds that they can support the pudgalavādins' reading. Whether the Vātsīputrīyas themselves cited each of these discourses, however, is not explicitly attested in the surviving material.³

The Vātsīputrīyas can even turn the argument around. When the Buddha was asked whether a self existed at all, he answered neither side (the scene with Vaccha in 1.5). They could argue that their "indeterminate" pudgala truly preserves the Buddha's middle-way silence, making them more faithful than schools that simply assert "no-self."

Viewed in modern terms, the Vātsīputrīyas touched on a theoretically valuable line of thought. "Neither identical with nor separate from the aggregates" points to something that exists in dependence on the structure of the five aggregates, yet is neither reducible to nor external to them. Today this has a name: emergence, or supervenience. The pudgala's reality rests on the structure of the five aggregates, not on an additional entity outside them. Some modern scholars read it as an anti-reductionist position approaching emergentism; others disagree.⁴ The difficulty is that the Vātsīputrīyas did not possess the conceptual tools of "emergence" and "supervenience." All they could say was "indeterminate." A potentially fruitful intuition thus stopped at an ill-defined stance. It was not merely unaccepted by the other schools; the Vātsīputrīyas themselves seem not to have thought it through. Their later division into the Dharmottarīya, Bhadrayānīya, Saṃmitīya, and Ṣaṇṇagarika branches, each holding its own view, also indicates to some degree the internal tension of this central claim. This book holds that the pudgala identified an important problem: whether a person can exist as an irreducible unity. But under the conceptual conditions of the time, the position was difficult both to articulate and to defend in debate.

3. A target for every school: is it smuggling in a "self"?¶

The other schools naturally reject the position. Chapter 9 of Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa, "Refutation of the Self," is the most complete text of this controversy. Its central argument runs roughly as follows.

Vasubandhu first presses the question: in what sense does the pudgala "really exist"? The Vātsīputrīyas have only two paths: (a) it exists ultimately and substantially, grounded in own-nature like other dharmas (dravya-sat); or (b) it exists only as a designation dependent on other things (prajñapti-sat). On path (a), it should be separately identifiable. Yet you yourself call it "indeterminate" and cannot define its relation to the five aggregates. On what grounds can something whose very identity cannot be stated clearly be called "real"? On path (b), it is merely a conceptual existence and cannot perform the function you demand of it, "really bearing karmic results." Both paths are closed; "indeterminate" merely inserts an evasion into the gap between (a) and (b).²

Judging from the surviving texts, the heart of the Vātsīputrīya reply is to posit a "third category": not everything must fall into either ultimate existence or designation. The pudgala exists in dependence on the five aggregates. It is not independently established outside them and thus is not ultimate. Nor is it a mere concept that can be arbitrarily discarded, since it performs the real functions of memory and karmic retribution. It is a third kind of existence, functionally real yet without an independent ontological entity. Vasubandhu replies: what you call "functionally real" can be explained by the appropriate configuration of dharmas. Why posit another thing?

Neither side thoroughly convinced the other, because the debate touches a deeper question: is "functionally real yet without an independent ontological entity" a coherent position at all? The Vātsīputrīyas say yes. Vasubandhu says no, because functions are merely the effects of dharmas and do not constitute a new entity. The disagreement remains unresolved in today's debates over "emergence." The Vātsīputrīyas' intuition is philosophically far from trivial; they simply could not articulate it clearly with the conceptual tools available at the time. The pudgala thus became a perennial target in sectarian debate, not only because it "resembled a self," but also because it touched the very problem that everyone else was avoiding and had likewise failed to resolve.

One point should nevertheless be added: it is unfair to criticize the Vātsīputrīyas simply as heretics. Look back over the preceding chapters. Sarvāstivāda posits possession, unmanifest matter, and the reality of all three times; Sautrāntika posits seeds; Theravāda posits bhavaṅga; later Yogācāra will posit ālayavijñāna. All are installing some bearer to address the same problem. The difference is only that the others give their bearers names that sound less like "self" (a function, a seed, an underlying current), whereas the Vātsīputrīyas directly call theirs a "person."

This book's position, then, is that the pudgala is not a deviation peculiar to one school. It is better seen as a direct instance of the judgment in 3.1: under the premise of no-self, the thought of the early schools continued to seek bearers for continuity. The Vātsīputrīyas reached the boundary of a permanent self and stated the step openly. Although the other schools avoided names such as "person" or "self," they addressed the same theoretical need.

4. The same logic, two opposite conclusions¶

The logical form "neither identical with nor separate from the aggregates" deserves attention: several centuries later, Nāgārjuna would use this very form. Madhyamaka argues that "self" and the five aggregates are neither one nor different, and that "fire" and "fuel" are neither one nor different. Yet the two schools draw opposite conclusions. The Vātsīputrīyas use it to establish an indeterminate but real person; Nāgārjuna uses it to deny any own-nature and establish emptiness (Essay 5). In Vātsīputrīya hands, the same argument of "neither one nor different" establishes; in Nāgārjuna's, it refutes. This contrast between establishment and refutation reveals much about the divide between the early schools and Mahāyāna.

A comparison with modern philosophy may help understanding, without implying historical influence. The schools that reduce a person to a stream of five aggregates and deny any bearer apart from them stand close to Parfit's "reductionism": personal identity is no additional "further fact," but simply the continuity of bodily and mental events.⁵ The Vātsīputrīyas insist on precisely such a "further fact": the pudgala, a real person irreducible to the five aggregates. In this comparison, most Buddhist schools stand with Parfit, while the Vātsīputrīyas are exactly the kind of "further fact" theorists he seeks to refute.

5. It touched a real problem¶

The Vātsīputrīyas and Saṃmitīyas disappeared with the decline of Buddhism in India and have no living transmission today. But the problem they raised did not disappear with them: if there is thoroughly no self and continuity has no owner, what ultimately establishes the coherence of memory, the attribution of karmic results, and the unity of a person? The others avoided a direct answer by employing various bearers. The Vātsīputrīyas explicitly stated that "there must be a bearer," at the cost of approaching a permanent self.

To address this problem, one can step back from adding more "bearers" and question the presupposition itself: "Must a bearer be a really existing thing?" Historically, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka took this step through "emptiness" (Essay 5). It denied any own-nature, and with that the premise that "a bearer must be real" also fell away. This book nevertheless registers a reservation here: Madhyamaka was the form this path actually took in history, but it was not necessarily the only, or the best, destination for no-self.

In this book's view, a more desirable course would have been to return to a silent, phenomenological stance, to the Buddha's original intent: neither adding a bearer for continuity nor making "absence of own-nature" into another doctrine that must be argued for and defended, but stopping at faithful observation and non-grasping (1.5). No-self as an insight had no need to develop into a new edifice of philosophy. Yet, as "External opponents and pressures" in the next chapter shows, and as we shall see repeatedly afterward, that silent stance had almost no place in the arena of debate at the time. Faced with opponents continually putting forward claims to real existence, it was difficult to maintain one's position without speaking and advancing a thesis. No-self was thus repeatedly drawn into systematic expression: first the bearers of the early schools, then Madhyamaka emptiness. In this sense, Madhyamaka was an outcome formed under historical conditions, not a path that no-self itself had to take. The next chapter first concludes the treatment of the early schools, bringing together the central debates over time, causation, and mental factors for a final examination of the entire Abhidharma project.

References¶