When Did Buddhism Become Anti-Brahmanical? The Case of the Missing Soul

Abstract

Many textbooks for Introduction to Buddhism or World Religions courses treat Buddhism as a competitor of either “Hinduism” or “Brahmanism” by asserting that Buddhism teaches that there is no eternal self or soul and Hinduism teaches that there is. I ask whether these assumptions hold up for one of the earliest sources about Buddhism, the Pali canon. Using statistical analysis of 5,126 suttas or “discourses,” I argue that there is little evidence that the doctrine of soullessness was preached to “convert” representatives of the Brahmanical tradition to Buddhism. On the contrary, it would appear that Brahmin Buddhists had their own canon-within-a-canon that simply avoided the topic of soullessness. Rather than seeing the canon as “what the Buddha taught,” the argument here will present canonicity itself as one of the stakes in a nexus of power where different communities strove to assert their version of Buddhism to be “what the Buddha taught.”