With regards the crucial issue of the existence of the self, within canonical texts of the Buddhist Abhidharma schools we find passages that are frequently at odds with one another. Sometimes the Buddha defends or respects the belief in the self and in personal continuity; at other times he seems to deny that beyond the psycho-physical factors to which our existential experience can be reduced there is an ātman that contains, owns or controls these same factors; in further cases still, he states that the use of the metaphysical categories of “being” and “non-being” must be avoided – thus, about the self (or everything else), it is inappropriate to say that it exists or that it does not exist. Faced with these divergences (or contradictions) within contemporary Buddhist studies, we can detect two main tendencies. Some scholars start from the assumption that the Buddha’s teaching is or should be coherent and univocal, and, therefore, propose readings of his original message that are supposed to iron out or conciliate any inconsistencies. Others believe that the inconsistencies are actually irreconcilable and, therefore, maintain that the Abhidharma canons are a composite and stratified redaction in which the opposite views of different writers overlap and intersect. Against these historiographical approaches, the purpose of the present paper is to show that the three aforementioned modes of the Buddha’s teaching are, in fact, both alternative and irreconcilable. This, however, far from presenting a puzzle to be solved or explained (by resorting to suppositions of which, in the canons, we have no explicit confirmation), is nothing more than a feature of the Buddha’s Dharma, which appears to be a teaching that develops different pedagogical/soteriological modes for different purposes, and which is conceived for the spiritual growth of followers with different intellectual and psychological profiles.

中文翻译：

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佛法的三种方式

关于自我存在的关键问题，在佛教阿毗达磨宗派的经典文本中，我们发现经常相互矛盾的段落。有时佛陀会捍卫或尊重对自我和个人连续性的信仰；在其他时候，他似乎否认除了我们的存在经验可以减少到的心理物理因素之外，还有一个包含、拥有或控制这些相同因素的人；在更进一步的情况下，他指出必须避免使用“存在”和“非存在”的形而上学范畴——因此，关于自我（或其他一切），说它存在或它是不合适的不存在。面对当代佛教研究中的这些分歧（或矛盾），我们可以发现两个主要趋势。一些学者从假设佛陀的教义是或应该是连贯和单一的假设出发，因此建议阅读他的原始信息，以消除或调和任何不一致之处。其他人则认为，这种不一致实际上是不可调和的，因此，坚持认为阿毗达摩经典是一种复合和分层的编纂，其中不同作者的相反观点重叠和交叉。与这些史学方法相反，本文的目的是要表明，上述三种佛陀的教法模式实际上既是交替的，又是不可调和的。然而，这远没有提出一个需要解决或解释的难题（通过诉诸假设，在经典中，我们没有明确的确认），