Description

The thesis of this book is epoch-making. While no one doubts that the Buddha denied the ātman, the self, the question is: Which ātman? Buddhism, as understood in the modern era, has taken this to be the universal ātman taught in the Hindu Upaniṣads, equivalent to brahman. What we find in the Buddha's words as recorded in the Buddhist scriptures, however, is only a denial of any permanent self in the ever-changing aggregates that form a person. In decades of teaching, the Buddha had many opportunities to clearly deny the universal ātman if that was his intention. He did not do so.

The most serious objection to Kamaleswar Bhattacharya's thesis that the Buddha did not deny the universal ātman may be put in the form of this question: Why, then, did Buddhists down through the ages think he did? Reply: Actually, they did not think this, as far as we can tell from their writings that refute the ātman and teach the anātman or no-self doctrine. The idea of the ātman as the impersonal universal ātman did not become dominant in India until some time after the eighth century C.E. Before then, throughout the Buddhist period, the dominant idea of the ātman in India was that of a permanent personal ātman. Judging from their writings, the Indian Buddhist teachers from Nāgārjuna to Āryadeva to Asaṅga to Vasubandhu to Bhavya to Candrakīrti to Dharmakīrti to Śāntarakṣita thought that the Buddha's anātman teaching was directed against a permanent personal ātman.

The late Kamaleswar Bhattacharya was Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. This book was originally published in French as L'Atman-Brahman dans le Bouddhisme ancien in 1973, as volume 90 of Publications de l'Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient, Paris. The present book makes available for the first time an English translation of this essential work, completed under the author's direction before his death in 2014.