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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Buddhism > Tibetan Buddhism
The assertion that there is nothing in the constitution of any
person that deserves to be considered the self (atman) - a
permanent, unchanging kernel of personal identity in this life and
those to come - has been a cornerstone of Buddhist teaching from
its inception. Whereas other Indian religious systems celebrated
the search for and potential discovery of one's "true self,"
Buddhism taught about the futility of searching for anything in our
experience that is not transient and ephemeral. But a small yet
influential set of Mahayana Buddhist texts, composed in India in
the early centuries CE, taught that all sentient beings possess at
all times, and across their successive lives, the enduring and
superlatively precious nature of a Buddha. This was taught with
reference to the enigmatic expression tathagatagarbha - the "womb"
or "chamber" for a Buddha - which some texts refer to as a person's
true self. The Buddhist Self is a methodical examination of Indian
teaching about the tathagatagarbha (otherwise the presence of one's
"Buddha-nature") and the extent to which different Buddhist texts
and authors articulated this in terms of the self. C. V. Jones
attends to each of the Indian Buddhist works responsible for
explaining what is meant by the expression tathagatagarbha, and how
far this should be understood or promoted using the language of
selfhood. With close attention to these sources, Jones argues that
the trajectory of Buddha-nature thought in India is also the
history and legacy of a Buddhist account of what deserves to be
called the self: an innovative attempt to equip Mahayana Buddhism
with an affirmative response to wider Indian interest in the
discovery of something precious or even divine in one's own
constitution. This argument is supplemented by critical
consideration of other themes that run through this distinctive
body of Mahayanist literature: the relationship between Buddhist
and non-Buddhist teachings about the self, the overlap between the
tathagatagarbha and the nature of the mind, and the originally
radical position that the only means of becoming liberated from
rebirth is to achieve the same exalted status as the Buddha.
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