65. Vasubandhu: The Commentary on the Treasury of Abhidharma
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
Charles Goodman [+]
Binghamton University
Description
This chapter presents a debate between two schools of Buddhism about how to reconcile the central Buddhist teaching of no-self with the pan-Indian belief in reincarnation. One participant in the debate is Vasubandhu, perhaps the greatest exponent and defender of the reductionist realism of the Abhidharma tradition. He maintained that agency and subjectivity could be explained wholly through the interplay of complex, constantly changing events and processes, without any ultimately real self. His interlocutor represents the Vātsīputrīyas, an extinct non-Mahāyāna school of Buddhist thought. The Vātsīputrīyas are also known as “those who advocate the doctrine of the person.” The “person” is a sui generis entity postulated to explain personal unity and identity. Buddhists analyze the empirical personality into five “aggregates”: form, feeling, conceptions, conditioning, and consciousness. They deny that there is a soul distinct from these aggregates. But the person, for the Vātsīputrīyas, is ineffable: we cannot say that it is either identical to, or distinct from, the aggregates. The debate largely takes the form of scriptural exegesis. But the argument touches on a number of important philosophical issues, including the relations between entities and their properties, reductionism and holism, the canons of interpretation, and the nonliteral use of language.