Is There a Burden-bearer? The Sanskrit Bhārahārasūtra and Its Scholastic Interpretations

Abstract

A controversy over the pudgala or “person” raged among Indian Buddhists for more than a millennium. Their polemics were at least as much a matter of canonical exegesis as of reasoning and argument, for the “mainstream” Buddhist doctors had to account for—and explain away—the numerous places in scripture where the Buddha speaks of the “person.” The Bhārahārasūtra or “sūtra on the bearer of the burden” was one of the scriptures most frequently quoted and discussed in this connection. The present paper is aimed at presenting a reconstructed Sanskrit version of this sūtra and providing an overview of the doctrinal and argumentative uses that were made of it in the context of the debates about the status of the “person.”