Åtman/Anåtman in Buddhism and Its Implication for the Wisdom Tradition

Abstract

Does Christianity believe in reincarnation? Of course it does not. Yet, students of the Wisdom Tradition may seek to find evidence that early Christians did accept reincarnation. Similarly in Buddhism. Does Buddhism believe in the atman, the permanent self? Certainly the Buddhist religion does not. Yet, there is evidence that the Buddha when teaching his basic doctrine of anatman, no-self, only denied the abiding reality of the personal or empirical atman, but not the universal or authentic atman. The Wisdom Tradition known as Theosophy teaches the existence of “An Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable PRINCIPLE,”1 often compared to the Hindu atman, the universal “self,” while Buddhism with its doctrine of anatman, “no-self,” is normally understood to deny any such universal principle. In regard to Buddhism, however, there have been several attempts to show that the Buddha did not deny the existence of the authentic atman, the self.2 Only one of these attempts seems to have been taken seriously by scholars3; namely, the work of Kamaleswar Bhattacharya. His book on this subject, written in French, L’Atman-Brahman dans le Bouddhisme ancien , was published in Paris in 1973; and an English translation of this work, The Atman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism , was published in 2015.4 It is here that he set forth his arguments for the existence of the Upanisadic atman in early Buddhism. This is the work that we will discuss. How must we understand the Sanskrit term atman, or in Pali, atta ? The word atman has been translated into English a number of different ways by writers; sometimes as soul, or self,

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