 Different schools in the Indian Buddhist tradition have different strategies for making sense of the Buddha’s thought and talk of persons. The Pudgalavādins are alone in holding that persons are ultimately or substantially real. The dispute between the Pudgalavādins and their opponents is not just an attempt to lay claim to ‘what the Buddha taught’, but it is also motivated by philosophical considerations about consistency with the no-self doctrine and other important Buddhist theses, for example impermanence, dependent origination, and the karma theory. The Pudgalavādin position on persons is best placed in the Emergentist camp, they try to steer a middle path between Hindu Non-Reductionism (eternalism) and Abhidharma Buddhist Reductionism (annihilationism) (Ganeri, 2012; Carpenter, 2015). They regard persons as emergent entities not reducible to mental and psychological and mental atoms (dharmas), although they depend on those atoms. The Abhidharma and Madhyamaka traditions hold very different views about persons.