THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY INDIAN BUDDHISM 59The first split was over whether, aside from nirvat:J.a, all the concepts in the
Sutra Pi taka, and in particular the concept of pudgala (person or individual),
could be reduced to the five skandhas. The orthodox Sthaviras-with whom
the Mahasanghikas concurred on this point-said yes. The dissenting group,
called the Vatsiputriyas or, in terms of their main doctrine, the Pudgalavadins
(or Personalists), said no; that the Buddha used the term person in three con-
texts in such a way that it could not be understood as merely a conventional
expression for the five skandhas. However, it was also not entirely separate
from them, and so was not a separate dharma.
The three contexts the Pudgalavadins cited referred to (1) the five skand-
has in the present life, (2) transmigration, and (3) the attainment ofParinirvat:J.a.
In the first context, the Pudgalavadins cited a verse from the Sutra stating that
the person is the carrier of the burden of the five skandhas. If one did not as-
sume such a person, they said, there was no explaining the cohesion and in-
tegrity of an individual's experiences-that things such as memory can take
place and that one person's perceptions, feelings, and so forth cannot become
the perceptions and feelings of someone else. With regards to the second con-
text, if the person is not assumed to^1 be a transmigrating principle, there is no
making sense of the Buddha's teachings that a person, at death, is reborn in
only one place at a time, or that the state of stream winner, once gained, is
transferred to one's following lives. And, in the third context, if the person is
not assumed, there is no making sense of the statements maintaining that,
when the skandhas end with the Parinirval).a, one will attain the Further Shore
and the bliss ofliberation. However, once the point of Parinirval).a is passed,
the Pudgalavadins asserted, nothing further could be said about the pudgala,
for as a concept it has descriptive power only in relation to the skandhas.
In formulating this explanation of the Sutra, the Pudgalavadins thus intro-
duced a third category ofbeing-relative existence-in between the standard
Abhidharma categories of ultimate reality and conventional designation. The
concept of person had a relative existence to the skandhas, just as fire exists
only relative to its fuel, and as such it could not be described apart from them.
Thus it had to be classified as ineffable, for the terms conditioned and uncondi-
tioned, which, strictly speaking, could apply only to dharmas, could not apply
to it. This introduction of a new category sparked vehement attacks from all
other Abhidharmists, who refused to entertain the possibility that reality could
be explained outside of the binary categories of ultimate truths and conven-
tional expressions. Texts survive in which the Sthaviras and one of their
offshoots, the Sarvastivadins (see Section 3.2.3), attempt to force the
Pudgalavadins to fit their concept into one of the two categories; the
Pudgalavadins refuse to do so. This, for the Sthaviras, was proof enough that
the Pudgalavadin thesis was incoherent and incomprehensible. Furthermore,
they charged that the Pudgalavadin concept of person flew in the face of the
not-self doctrine; that it constituted a self-identity view, and as such closed off
the Path to nirval).a. The Pudgalavadins, for their part, were able to quote
Sutra passages to such an effect that the view "I have no self" is an annihila-
tionist wrong view, and that the standard Abhidharma analysis thus closed off