Vasubandhu · Theology
Vasubandhu’s sustained argument, in the ninth chapter of the <em>Treasury of Abhidharma</em>, against the Personalists (Pudgalavadins): there is no self standing over and above the five aggregates, and the ‘person’ is only a convenient designation for a bundle of momentary factors.
Buddhism began with a shocking claim: that there is no self. Not that the self is hidden, or divine, or hard to reach - that it simply is not there. But five centuries after the Buddha, some Buddhists had lost their nerve. A school called the Pudgalavadins, the Personalists, argued that there must be a real person (pudgala) after all - something that carries memories, reaps the fruit of its deeds, and travels from life to life. Otherwise, they asked, who remembers? Who is reborn? Who is liberated? Vasubandhu devoted the entire ninth and final chapter of his great Treasury of Abhidharma to answering them. His thesis is uncompromising: everything the Personalists want the self to do can be done by the five aggregates alone - the ever-changing stream of body, feeling, perception, dispositions, and consciousness. A self over and above that stream is not merely undiscovered; it is a fiction, and a dangerous one.
The positive half of Vasubandhu’s view is that ‘person’ and ‘self’ are conventional designations - useful shorthand, not names of real things. Take a chariot: there is no extra object, the chariot, hovering over the axle, wheels, pole, and frame. ‘Chariot’ is just the word we use when those parts are assembled and functioning. Break it down and the chariot is nowhere to be found, though not a single part has gone missing. So too with a person. There is the body, there are feelings, perceptions, habits, and moments of awareness, arising and perishing in a dependent stream - and ‘Vasubandhu,’ ‘you,’ ‘I’ are the convenient labels we lay over that stream. The label is not false, in the way a phantom is false; it is conventionally true and practically indispensable. What is false is only the extra step of taking the label to name a thing.
For Vasubandhu this is not a logic game; it is the hinge of the whole spiritual path. The belief in a self, he argues, is the deepest root of craving and hatred: because I posit a me, I divide the world into what is mine and what is not, cling to the first and recoil from the second, and so bind myself to endless suffering and rebirth. Every defilement, he says, grows from the view of self. To see through the self, then, is not to lose something precious but to loosen the grip of the very illusion that drives our misery. This is why he ends his encyclopaedic Treasury - a work of staggering technical detail about the elements of existence - with this fierce polemic against the person. The analysis was never for its own sake. It was to make possible the release that the Buddha promised: no self to defend, and therefore nothing to lose.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Vasubandhu argued against a real self (atman) or person (pudgala) over and above the five aggregates: the person is either perceived directly (then it would be a separate thing, which no one finds) or known only through the aggregates (then it is a mere designation). Explain the dilemma and why he tho…
Leads to David Hume.
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