The theme of our conference is “The Concept of a Person”. One of the most original attitudes of the Buddha towards this problem was to have dissuaded his followers from clinging to the concept of “person”. The word “person” in P li is puggala, which represents in early middle Indian dialect puthakala, a derivation of Sanskrit: prithak. [2] Puggala means person or man, an individual as opposed to a group. Its equivalent in Sanskrit is pudgala., which means a (...) personal entity or an individual. If there were any unique and permanent substance unifying this personal entity, it would be the self or the soul, attan in Pali and tman in Sanskrit. The self and the person are closely related to each other. I will trace the evolution of these two notions as treated in some Buddhist texts, firstly in the primitive basic Buddhist texts in verse or in short sentences, secondly in the prose part of some s tras and finally in later developed Mah y na Buddhist texts. Then I will confront these notions with the experience of their followers, by taking the example of Zen master Dōgen. (shrink)

General opinion holds that the Abhidhamma treats the Buddha’s teachings in terms of ultimate realities, i.e. dhammas, and that conventional constructs such as persons fall outside the primary concern of the Abhidhamma. The present paper re-examines this ultimate-conventional dichotomy drawn between dhammas and persons and argues that this dichotomy does not hold true for the canonical Abhidhamma in Pali. This study explores how various types of persons are interpreted and approached by the Abhidhamma material, including Abhidhamma texts such as the (...) Puggalapaññatti and a number of suttas in the Aṅguttara Nikāya that are identified in this paper as proto- Abhidhamma. (shrink)