THE CONCEPT OF PUGDALA IN THE BUDDHIST SCHOOL OF PUDGALAVĀDA: THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPTION L.I. Titlin Department for Oriental Philosophy Studies Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences Volkhonka, 14/1, build. 5, Moscow, Russia, 119991 The article investigates the notion of the self in Pudgalavādа — one of the least studied schools of Buddhism. <...> The Pudgalavāda is an “unorthodox” trend of early Buddhism, which holds the doctrine of the existence of the self, or person — pudgala. <...> The author comes to the conclusion that the apparent contradictions in the interpretation of pudgala can be explained by the consistent and logical evolution in the understanding of the concept of pudgala in the school of Pudgalavāda. <...> The article will be of interest to researchers in the fields of history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and to scholars investigating the problem of the self. <...> The problem of existence of the self and the problem of its properties seems to be one of the most important for the whole Indian philosophy. <...> The largest contribution to the development of this problem was made by the controversy between the Buddhists and the Brahmanists. <...> The catalyst for these discussions was the emergence of the Buddhist doctrine of the “non- self” (anātmavāda). <...> In contrast to most of the Buddhists it advocated the teaching of the existence of the self (“pudgala”). <...> The doctrine of anātman, as presented in the Pali Canon (hereinafter — the PC), was not entirely clear because of its lack of rationalization and hence necessarily required some sort of philosophical and exegetical interpretation. <...> The main “intraBuddhist” problem in the doctrine of anātman was that the Buddha nowhere in the PC directly denied the existence of the ātman, but also nowhere did he openly claim it. <...> The followers of the Buddha, who tried to somehow rationalize Master’s words, were to solve in a philosophical way the problem deliberately excluded by him from the discourse. <...> In addition, the doctrine of anātman as such was fraught with considerable difficulties and inevitably caused heated controversy by other philosophical schools. <...> Thus the concept of the existence of pudgala, i.e. the self with a specific ontological status, was designed, on the one hand, to rationalize the philosophical teachings of the Buddha and to explain the dark places of anātmavāda for the Buddhists them105 Вестник РУДН, серия Философия, 2014, № 1 selves, and on the other — to answer to the criticism of the Brahmanists and to give a rational explanation of the phenomena of rebirth and karmic retribution given the actual <...>