A plasma display panel and a method for driving the same, wherein the problems of erroneous discharges and write discharge delays, which are caused by accidental strong discharges occurring during an initialization period, are suppressed, without using any auxiliary blanking pulses after the end of the blanking interval, thereby achieving an image display having no flicker but having a good quality. For this purpose, upper and lower potential variation waveforms (voltage variation pulses) are applied to at least one of three electrodes, that is, a scanning electrode, a sustain electrode and a data electrode, between the former half of the initialization period by an acclivity waveform voltage and the latter half of the initialization period by an declivity waveform voltage.