[Buddha-l] Pudgalavada

[Dan Lusthaus]

Apologies for having to break up the translation. The 15k limit on postings keep spitting them back to me. Whoever is interested in trying to figure out what is going on in the text, it might be easier to work with if you past the various parts into a single doc (in the right order, of course) and then either read it or print it out.

These passages come up relatively late in each text. Both had already devoted considerable space to explaining that the pudgala is a prajnapti (it's virtually the first thing they get into). Again, Bhikshu Thich Thien Chau's summary and partial translations make that abundantly clear.

The issue is not the affirmation of something ineffable existing, but rather that Buddhists who talk about such things as skandhas-of-appropriation (skandha-upādāna), previous lives, and nirvāṇa as entailing the cessation of appropriation of skandhas—as all mainstream Buddhists do—are dabbling with "unsayables," but they are not aware of that. It is a clever polemic accusing other Buddhists of ignoring the "unsayables" in their own heuristic expressions – i.e., the extent to which what Buddhists claim as foundational realities turn out to only be heuristics. The gist, for the Pudgalavadins is that as long as one has to employ such heuristics, one may as well select those that are coherent, reasonable, and are useful for practice (avoiding nihilistic immobility and attachment to false literalisms).



In most other respects, the pudgalavadins are just like every other Buddhist group -- they just don't get queasy when the heuristic efficacy of the notion of a pudgala, which is neither the same nor different than the skandhas, etc., comes up.



Dan Lusthaus
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