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JOHANNES BRONKHORST
have already spoken about the reason why such a doctrine was apparently welcomed back by at least some Buddhists: because in the case of such an insight it was clear why it could constitute a solution to the problem posed by the doctrine of karma. The effects of action can only be avoided through non-action. Knowing that one's active parts are not really one's self, implies not being affected by the results of those actions.
The thesis which this last case, as well as the ones considered earlier, illustrates, is that Buddhism was vulnerable to clear and direct answers to the problem of karma. To conclude, I will give two examples from later Buddhism, which are meant to show that, many centuries after its earliest period, Buddhism remained vulnerable to such answers. The first example is about the notion of an inactive self, the second one concerns physical and mental inactivity.
The idea of an inactive self continued to exert an attraction on the Buddhists. It finds expression in the so-called tathāgatagarbha doctrine of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The similarity between the tathāgatagarbha of certain Buddhists and the self of certain non-Buddhists was so striking that one Buddhist text comments upon it. The following passage occurs in the Lankāvatāra Sūtra. The Bodhisattva Mahāmati addresses the following question to the Buddha:22
You describe the tathāgatagarbha as brilliant by nature and pure by its purity etc., possessing the thirty-two signs (of excellence), and present in the bodies of all beings; it is enveloped in a garment of skandhas, dhātus and āyatanas, like a gem of great value which is enveloped in a dirty garment; it is soiled with passion, hatred, confusion and false imagination, and described by the venerable one as eternal, stable, auspicious and without change. Why is this doctrine of the tathāgatagarbha not identical with the doctrine of the ātman of the nonBuddhists? Also the non-Buddhists preach a doctrine of the ātman which is eternal, non-active, without attributes, omnipresent and imperishable.
The Buddha's answer does not interest us at present. An attempt is made to show that there is, after all, a difference between the tathāgatagarbha of the Buddhists and the ātman of the non-Buddhists. The main point is that the two were so close that even Buddhists started wondering what the diffe
22 Lankäv(V) 2.137, p. 33 1. 10 ff. The word kartā at the end of Mahāmati's question
has been corrected into akartā "non-active'; only this reading makes sense; it is moreover confirmed by the Tibetan translation (Taipei edition vol. 10, folio 86a), as I have been informed by T. TILLEMANS.
