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150/ Johannes Bronkhorst
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, dhatus and ayatanas, 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 tathagatagarbha not identical with the doctrine of the atman of the non-Buddhists? Also the non-Buddhists preach a doctrine of the atman 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 atman of the non-Buddhists. The main point is that the two were so close that even Buddhists started wondering what the difference was. Clearly, the idea of an inactive self had maintained its attraction for the Buddhists of this later period.
At this point something has to be said about the pudgala, the notion of the person or self that came to be accepted by the so-called Pudgalavadins. The pudgala is to be distinguished from the self I have talked about so far. The pudgala was not believed to be inactive knowledge of the true nature of the pudgala could not therefore guarantee or be a precondition for liberation. Quite on the contrary, the pudgala was thought of as neither identical with nor different from the skandhas, the constituents of the person. It appears to have been conceived of as the whole of those constituents. Many other Buddhists, especially those belonging to the Abhidharma schools, had such a concept of the person. They certainly rejected this concept, whereas the Pudgalavādins accepted it. It
sense: it is moreover confirmed by the Tibetan translation (Taipei edition vol. 10, folio 86a), as I have been informed by T. Tillemans.
.), as I have otomed by the Tibi
