Persons Keeping Their Karma Together

Abstract

This chapter aims to reconstruct the philosophical motivation for the pudgalavāda or “Personalist” Buddhist view that the person is ultimately real. It argues that the ultraminimalism of the Abhidharma is too minimal to account for crucial features of personhood—especially its capacity to construct unities out of pluralities (and thereby give rise to conceptual reality, and be responsible for action-generated consequences). The Buddhist Personalist insists that the individuation of person-constituting continua must be an ultimately real fact, not something we project onto or construct out of ultimate reality. That certain ultimate particulars (dharmas) really do belong together, in a way they do not belong to other dharmas with which they may stand in causal-conditional relations, is a position not readily articulated within the Abhidharma metaphysical framework—yet the Pudgalavādin will not reject this framework, for it is only the person, and not other complex wholes, that must be ultimately real.

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