The Pudgalavāda or "Personalist" school of Buddhism broke off from the orthodox Sthaviravāda (elders) school around 280 BCE. The Sthaviravādins interpreted the doctrine of anatta to mean that, since there is no true "self", all that we think of as a self (i.e., the subject of sentences, the being that transmigrates) is merely the aggregated skandhsas. The Pudgalavādins asserted that, while there is no ātman, there is a pudgala or "person", which is neither the same as nor different from the skandhas. They would argue that without such a person, it is impossible to account for karma, rebirth, or nirvana.
The Pudgalavada was a group of five of the Early Schools of Buddhism.
The Pudgalavada was a group of five of the Early Schools of Buddhism, distinguished from the other schools by their doctrine of the reality of the self.
As a theory of the self, the Pudgalavada was naturally shaped and so in some measure limited by the concerns of Buddhism; the Pudgalavadins were interested in the nature of selfhood only to the extent that it had a bearing on the problem of suffering.
PudgalavadaBuddhism: The Reality of the Indeterminate Self.(Reviews of Books)(Book Review) - The Journal of the American Oriental Society - HighBeam Research
In this book an attempt is made to reconstruct the PudgalavadaBuddhist theory of persons as it is represented in the Chinese translations of the Sammitiyanikaya Sastra (Sanmidibu lun) and the Tridharmakhandaka (Sanfadu lun) and in later Buddhist works in which the doctrines of the Pudgalavadins are summarized and criticized.
This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.
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