In various accounts of Vātsīputrīya-Sāṃmitīya doctrines, I often read the phrase “true and ultimate” to describe the puḍgalavāda schools’ view of the puḍgala (along with all the qualifiers, caveats, etc.). However, these terms are always encased in quote marks, but there is never given a source. If the authors of these various summaries only meant to characterize these schools’ beliefs, and there is no actual corresponding source in an English language article or book or Sanskrit equivalent, why is the phrase always encased in quote marks? Why don’t they just say some thing like, “Although they did not claim that the puḍgala was “real” in the sense of an actual substance, they still claimed that it was true and ultimate.” Why the quote marks? Can anyone out there help me to trace the origin of the use of this phrase as encased in quotes? This is important, because there seem to be conflicting accounts as to whether the schools explicitly claimed the puḍgala to be a conceptual designation (prajñapti) but with a “real” referent, or whether they believed it to be “true and ultimate” in some other way.
I’m not really interested in discussing what they believed here, I’m only trying to find the source of the encased phrase.
Thanks to all!
k.
I could try looking it up in the source text if I knew the passage that you are referring to. Is there a book you are reading like The Literature of the Personalists of Early Buddhism?
Hello–thank you for replying. Your quesiton is part of the problem–. I am working on a book chapter on issues related to the self, and I have been reading everything I could find (including the book b y Ven. Châu ), so the appearance of the phrase “true and ultimate” seems to have appeared in many places, including summary articles such as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. So I’ve seen it repeatedly. However, in none of these sources is the origin of the phrase cited. So I really don’t know who started using it as encased in quotes or where it came from.
I think I found the possible original source, because I just checked and found that Leonard Priestly, in his influential book “Pudgalvada Buddhism: the Reality of the Indeterminate Self” does not encase the phrase in quote marks! So given the influence of the book, this may be where someone got the phrase, encased it in quotes, but did not cite Priestley. After that, the phrase was “laundered” so to speak, and repeated in quotes without citation.
On page 213 of Priestley: “For the Pudgalavadins, the person is true and ultimate, and necessarily so if the meaningfulness of the Buddha’s teaching depends on it.”
That is in Pali, the Sanskrit form is satyakārthaparamārthena (or satyārthaparamārthena) i.e. satya+artha+parama+artha +ina (masc. inst. sing. declension suffix)
In the Pali canon, this phrase/compound occurs in the Kathāvatthu exclusively.
That looks like a spelling mistake to me, for I can understand if it were with one ṭ/t (sacchikaṭa/sacchikata) which would be sākṣātkṛta (sa-akṣāt-kṛta = witnessed with one’s own eyes, or experienced by oneself) but sacchikaṭṭha (ṭh following ṭ) does not appear to make phonetic or etymological sense.
But to tell the truth, to me, saccika is also weird phonetically. Satyaka should be saccaka in Pali, not saccika.
Welcome to Buddhist Prakrit. The words don’t follow the expected derivations are a regular occurrence from my experience researching Chinese transliterations. The alternate pronunciations makes identifying words impossible sometimes.
