Here's the book blurb:
The book was reviewed in Lion's Roar recently: https://www.lionsroar.com/what-is-the-buddha-in-you/The assertion that there is nothing in the constitution of any person that deserves to be considered the self (ātman)―a permanent, unchanging kernel of personal identity in this life and those to come―has been a cornerstone of Buddhist teaching from its inception. Whereas other Indian religious systems celebrated the search for and potential discovery of one’s “true self,” Buddhism taught about the futility of searching for anything in our experience that is not transient and ephemeral. But a small yet influential set of Mahāyāna Buddhist texts, composed in India in the early centuries CE, taught that all sentient beings possess at all times, and across their successive lives, the enduring and superlatively precious nature of a Buddha. This was taught with reference to the enigmatic expression tathāgatagarbha―the “womb” or “chamber” for a Buddha―which some texts refer to as a person’s true self.
The Buddhist Self is a methodical examination of Indian teaching about the tathāgatagarbha (otherwise the presence of one’s “Buddha-nature”) and the extent to which different Buddhist texts and authors articulated this in terms of the self. C. V. Jones attends to each of the Indian Buddhist works responsible for explaining what is meant by the expression tathāgatagarbha, and how far this should be understood or promoted using the language of selfhood. With close attention to these sources, Jones argues that the trajectory of Buddha-nature thought in India is also the history and legacy of a Buddhist account of what deserves to be called the self: an innovative attempt to equip Mahāyāna Buddhism with an affirmative response to wider Indian interest in the discovery of something precious or even divine in one’s own constitution. This argument is supplemented by critical consideration of other themes that run through this distinctive body of Mahāyānist literature: the relationship between Buddhist and non-Buddhist teachings about the self, the overlap between the tathāgatagarbha and the nature of the mind, and the originally radical position that the only means of becoming liberated from rebirth is to achieve the same exalted status as the Buddha.
According to this review, Jones seems to support the idea that the early Buddha nature literature did indeed posit an essential self of some sort (and he compares this to similar trends in Brahamnical literature that was popular at around the same time the Buddha nature texts were written). The review states:
Jones writes in the introduction to the bookHe [Jones] argues that the earliest articulations of buddhanature in this corpus advanced their visionary proposals as a version of an acknowledgment of self rather than a denial: notwithstanding what the Buddha appears to have taught, there can be such a thing as a true or real essence of beings, even as there can be value bodied forth in the stuff of this world, an extrusion of the highest reality within the compass of our very bodies. This self is buddhanature, or the presence of the tathagatagarbha within us. As Jones puts it, “Buddhist dharma has its own account of the self.”
Hold on. This is not the self of untutored opinion; nor does it exactly conform to the self as taught by rival Indian traditions. But it is in the same ballpark, so to speak. Iterations of buddhanature (as self) satisfy the conceptual as well as therapeutic criteria employed in the search for (a hidden) self in Indian religions, something permanent, unchanging, pure, precious, and valuable, and above all, sovereign, free from time and contingency—and thus something one ought to learn to see, to identify with, as bodying-forth reality within us. Or so, Jones argues, the earliest buddhanature texts would have us understand the Buddha to have taught as his considered view.
I haven't read the book yet, but it seems interesting. I myself think that his thesis is certainly possible for some of the Buddha nature texts, but not all of them. They are just too heterogenous to make a single sweeping claim for all of them and several of these texts are pretty clear that when they say "self" they don't mean it literally. Jones knows this and his claim is that the earliest Buddha nature texts (for him these are the Nirvana and Angulimaliya) do teach a real essential Self (atman), while later texts were working to diffuse this idea and tame it (as a skillful means, etc). Perhaps this is what happened, but I just don't know if our chronology of these texts is good enough that it allows us to make this claim.A central claim of this study, with the benefit of renewed attention to Indian sources that teach about Buddha-nature, is that we should indeed understand the tathāgatagarbha tradition to have begun its life as a Buddhist account of something that deserved to be called ātman, and that the early history of tathāgatagarbha teaching in India entailed an attempt by Buddhist authors to present, and then explain, a Mahāyānist account of what was an enduring concern for Indian religious teachers and adepts in general: the pursuit and liberation of that which could be called the self.
Still, this book seems like probably the best overview of the modern scholarship on Tathagathabarbha at the moment. Seems to be very detailed.