The Atman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism

Book excerpt: The thesis of this book is nothing less than epoch-making. While no one doubts that the Buddha denied the atman, the self, the question is: Which atman? Buddhism, as a religion, has long taken this to be the universal atman taught in the Hindu Upanisads, equivalent to brahman. What we find in the Buddha's words as recorded in the Buddhist scriptures, however, is only a denial of any permanent self in the ever-changing aggregates that form a person. In decades of teaching, the Buddha had many opportunities to clearly deny the universal atman if that was his intention. He did not do so. Kamaleswar Bhattacharya's research is the most important study of this fundamentally important question to have appeared. Other studies of this question exist, coming to the same conclusion, but in general they have not been taken seriously. Bhattacharya's research, because of the high level of his scholarship, has to be taken seriously. One may disagree with it, but it cannot be dismissed or ignored. The late Kamaleswar Bhattacharya was Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. This book was originally published in French as L'Atman-Brahman dans le Bouddhisme ancien in 1973, as volume 90 of Publications de l'Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient, Paris. The present book makes available for the first time an English translation of this essential work, completed under the author's direction before his death in 2014.