The 'person' doctrine

Mainstream Buddhism teaches anattā ("non-self"): there is no permanent, unchanging soul or owner sitting behind your experience. What we call a person is really a bundle of ever-changing processes—body, sensations, perceptions, mental habits, and moments of awareness—with no fixed core. This is meant to loosen the grip of self-centeredness, not to claim "you don't exist" in any practical sense.

But that teaching raised a hard puzzle. If there is truly no self of any kind, what gets reborn? What carries the consequences of past actions? Who is it that remembers, takes responsibility, or eventually wins liberation? The Pudgalavāda ("person doctrine")—held mainly by an early school called the Vātsīputrīyas, beginning around the 3rd century BCE—offered a careful answer. They affirmed a "person" (pudgala) that is real but "inexpressible": it is neither identical to the changing bundle of processes nor a separate thing apart from them.

They insisted this was not the eternal soul the Buddha rejected, only a way to make continuity and moral responsibility coherent. Most other Buddhist schools disagreed sharply, accusing them of sneaking the forbidden self back in through a side door. The Pudgalavādins remained a real and once-sizable minority, but their view never became dominant, and the debate shows how genuinely difficult "no-self" is to hold consistently.