ABSTRACT
Describing the most dramatic transformation we can experience, embryology is about becoming as much as being. There has always been a tension in Buddhism regarding the discourse of being, and this is a topic that has long been closely tied to thinking about human development. The Buddhist aversion to a language of the self required early Buddhists to modify known Hindu accounts of human development. Indian Buddhist scriptures grounded refutations of the self in the complex task of defining “self,” although, in fact, early Buddhist definitions of self were often difficult to distinguish from those of the non-Buddhists.1 In many texts the existence of a self was not denied outright; Indian Buddhists simply rejected the existence of a permanent self. In other writings, an aggressive rhetoric outlawed the possibility of an existent self of any kind. Variations in this issue led to hermeneutic maneuvers in which later commentators labeled certain teachings as definitively the word of the Buddha, and others as only interpretively so.
