[Buddha-l] Pudgalavada - Vasumitra

[Dan Lusthaus]

Re: [Buddha-l] Pudgalavada - VasumitraLance,

Thanks for the comparison with Paramartha cum Bareau. I am now preparing a full translation of the Paramartha version (you can compare that with Bareau's rendering, which I'm sure I have but can't locate at the moment).

Paramartha was from Ujjain, which likely had a significant pudgalavada presence, as you mention. This raises -- as I tried to suggest awhile back -- the question of pudgalavada influence on other Buddhists. One of the things Paramartha is (in-)famous for is the idea of a ninth "Pure" consciousness, above the standard eight consciousnesses of Yogacara. This ninth quasi-vedantic ninth consciousness may have entered his thinking through pudgalavada influence (was Ujjain breeding a sort of Yogacara-Sammitiya hybrid, using tathagatagarbha thought as a bridge?). Similarly, Huiyuan, who was associated with the translations of the long and short texts we have been discussing, and is best known for his exchange of letters with Kumarajiva when the latter arrived in China with Madhyamakan ideas and for supposingly starting the White Lotus Society which is taken by Pure Land Buddhists as the first Pure Land association in China (though some scholars have been questioning that in recent decades), is also somewhat infamous for insisting on the idea of an "immortal spirit," which, we may now speculate, was not simply an aberration in the thinking of the so-called early Prajna Schools in China, but may also have derived from pudgalavada input. The impact of pudgalavada on the development of Buddhism -- both in India and China -- remains an unwritten story.

Dan Lusthaus
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