The Buddhist Self: On Tathagatagarbha and Atman by C. V. Jones
University of Hawai’i Press, 2021 316 pages: $68
“I BOW TO THE BUDDHA IN YOU”—this expression (and its variations) no doubt will be familiar to many Buddhists in America. It wasn’t always to me. I first heard it a few years after coming to the United States from India as a student when a kindly American uttered the words as she bowed to me, her palms together. I found the verbal expression as beguiling as I found the elegant hand gesture familiar. Overcome by literalism I pictured taking an X-ray and finding the silhouette of the figure of a buddha seated in meditation in the approximate area of my chest. Whatever was intended, it is nonetheless the case that there is a special variety of seeing implied by the phrase, a notable acknowledgment of the kinds of beings we are.
An important case of an amalgam of a way of seeing and thinking, as the philosopher Wittgenstein might have liked to put it, talk of acknowledging the buddhas we are, or buddhas within ourselves, is ultimately bound up with the history of a vast, revolutionary, labyrinthine, and influential world of Indian texts on buddhanature, early representatives of which may belong to the first three centuries of the common era. Inspired no doubt by the innovations made by the at the level of doctrine and literary genre, these inventive scriptures constitute nothing less than a revolution in seeing—literary experiments, if you will, in rethinking embodiment. can be a guide.
