[Buddha-l] Re: Attan.com

[L.S. Cousins]

Joel Tatelman writes:

>It's perhaps worth recalling that C.A.F. Rhys Davids, who did so 
>much valuable philological and translation work in Pali, published, 
>in her later years, a book dedicated to arguing for the reality and 
>centrality of the soul in "original" Buddhist thought. Her opinion, 
>too, was that later monk-dominated, ecclesiastical Buddhism 
>"reified" the anatman/anatta doctrine and made it into the "no-soul" 
>doctrine.

Views as to the quality of her work differ. I don't think she had 
ever visited a Buddhist country. Perhaps her later positions are more 
to do with her own early religious background.

>  I believe that a scholar by the name of Bhattacarya published a 
>rather more scholarly book on this topic; I think it was in the late 
>1960s.

He is a good scholar, committed to a type of Vedantin perspective. (A 
brahmin, I think.) His arguments essentially depend upon the notion 
that relatively sophisticated, later Vedantin ideas are present in 
the Upanisads and known to the Buddha. Both of those assumptions are 
open to question.

>So, yeah, there's a history--not to mention the Pudgalavadins, 
>whatever one may think of them--of people "within Buddhism" having 
>trouble with the anatman doctrine.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. "Within Buddhism" is rather 
ambiguous. I don't think there is any evidence of opposition to the 
teaching of no-self within Buddhism before the rise of Mahaayaana and 
probably not before the rise of Yogaacaara.

As to the Puggalavaadins, they are explicit that what they say in no 
way contradicts the teaching of no-self. And of course we only have 
relatively late materials of theirs.

Lance Cousins