The History of Buddhist Thought c21.3

c21.3

Yet some of the Buddhists came to see that the totality of dispositions and processes does not express the whole matter. This totality is arranged in groups called individuals. If one of these groups is nothing more than these dispositions and processes, how is he distinguished from any other group ? Why should there be groups at all ? Hence the doctrine of pudgalavāda, the view that the individual is an entity plus the skandhas of which he is composed. This is not the ātman-doctrine, though that doctrine would be one possible solution of the problem.² The ātman-doctrine, however, as formulated by the opponents of the Buddhists, was always rejected, and the upholders of the pudgala-doctrine guarded themselves against it by maintaining that the individual is neither the same as the elements which constitute him nor different from them.³