The Blade Does Not Stop: Buddhist Reductionism, Parfit, and the Madhyamaka Refusal of an Ultimate Terminus

Abstract

A growing literature reads the Buddhist doctrine of no-self as a reductionism continuous with Derek Parfit’s, and Javier Hidalgo has recently argued that Parfitians should adopt Buddhist reductionism, since the mereological nihilism at its base escapes Mark Johnston’s objections. I argue that this defence is less stable than it appears. The familiar Madhyamaka argument that whatever arises dependently lacks svabhāva begs the question against Abhidharma: as Guerrero shows, the Abhidharma criterion of intrinsic nature excludes only reductive dependence. I concede that argument, and concede with Siderits and Katsura that the consistent Ābhidharmika identifies each dharma with its nature, treating dharmas as tropes, as Hidalgo does. The critique then falls on the relations between them. Following Siderits’s reconstruction of Nāgārjuna’s causal arguments, cause and effect never co-exist; real causation among momentary tropes then demands the Sarvāstivāda three-times ontology, which Hidalgo’s own authorities reject as eternalism, or an unexplained necessary connexion, or the concession that the causal relation is conceptually constructed. On that horn, the causal series that Buddhist reductionism substitutes for the person is a construction of the same order as the person it replaced. The convergence with Parfit holds for the natures of the base and fails for their connexion.

1. Introduction

When Parfit found in the Buddha an anticipation of his own Reductionist View, he took the agreement of two traditions that knew nothing of one another as evidence that the view is simply true: the Reductionist View, he wrote, “is not merely part of one cultural tradition” and “may be, as I have claimed, true” [1] (p. 273; cf. p. 502). The comparative literature that followed has largely accepted the pairing and asked how close it runs. Mark Siderits’s “fusion philosophy” treats Abhidharma and Parfit as jointly reducing the person to impersonal constituents [2]; see also [3] (pp. 9–10); Roy Perrett aligns the Mādhyamika conventionalist with Johnston’s minimalism, claiming the Prāsaṅgika position as “a Buddhist analogue of the Western Minimalist position” [4] (p. 379); and most recently Javier Hidalgo [3] has argued that a Parfitian who wishes to survive Johnston’s objections ought to migrate to a more thoroughgoing, Buddhist version of reductionism.

This paper is a critique of that last, strongest claim, and through it of the convergence reading more generally. My thesis is a narrow one, and I advance it in the mitigated spirit such comparisons deserve: Hidalgo’s defence is less stable than it first appears, and the instability is instructive. But the instability is not where a Mādhyamika might first look for it. The familiar Madhyamaka argument, that whatever arises in dependence on causes and conditions thereby lacks svabhāva, begs the question against Abhidharma, whose criterion of intrinsic nature excludes only reductive dependence [5] (pp. 7–8). I concede that argument at the outset, and with it the direct route from dependent origination to the emptiness of the base. The route I take instead runs through the relations rather than the natures. Granting the Ābhidharmika everything he asks for his dharmas, momentary tropes each identical with its own nature [6] (p. 157), the question becomes what, at the ultimate level, connects them; and here the reductionist’s own materials, above all Siderits’s reconstruction of Nāgārjuna’s causal arguments [7], generate a trilemma with no comfortable horn. What replaced the person was a causal series of tropes. If the causal relation itself cannot be ultimately real except at prices Hidalgo’s own sources refuse to pay, then the series is a construction of the same order as the person, and the terminus does not do the work the migration promised.

I proceed as follows. Section 2 reconstructs Hidalgo’s position and isolates the commitment on which my argument turns: that the dharmic base exists ultimately and does the grounding work his replies to Johnston and Parfit require. Section 3 states the catuṣkoṭi under the prasajya reading and defends the bridge premise identifying ultimate existence with svabhāva. Section 4 concedes the direct argument from dependent origination, explaining, with Guerrero and with Siderits and Katsura, why it fails against the Abhidharma understanding of intrinsic nature. Section 5 develops the argument that survives the concession: a trilemma concerning the causal relations among momentary tropes. Section 6 closes two remaining replies, the appeal to conventional adequacy and the charge that emptiness refutes itself. Section 7 states the upshot for the convergence thesis. Section 8 turns to the ethics, marking honestly the difficulty that the emptiness of both pain and the self/other boundary raises for Śāntideva’s argument, and indicating what the trilemma contributes to it. Section 9 concludes.

Two clarifications at the outset. First, my quarrel is not with the claim that some Buddhism is reductionist; Abhidharma plausibly is, and to that extent the convergence with Parfit is real. My quarrel is with the habit of leaving unasked which Buddhism is meant, since what holds of Abhidharma does not hold of Madhyamaka. Second, I do not argue that Parfit is confused on his own terms. I argue that the tradition enlisted to fortify him contains, in its Madhyamaka development, resources that tell against him, so that the migration Hidalgo recommends, if carried through, may not terminate where he halts it.

2. Hidalgo’s Buddhist Reductionism and Its Terminus

Parfit holds that a person’s existence consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of a series of physical and mental events, with no further fact (no soul, no Cartesian ego) grounding identity over time [1] (p. 211). Personal identity consists in Relation R, psychological connectedness and continuity [1] (p. 215), and the cases of fission and the Combined Spectrum are meant to show both that identity can be indeterminate and that it is not what matters [1] (pp. 236–243). Johnston’s reductio targets the bridge from this metaphysics to its normative upshot: if a constituted fact can only inherit importance from its constituents, and if everything is ultimately constituted by valueless fundamental particles, then nothing matters. That is absurd, so the principle licensing the inference must be rejected [8] (p. 167); [9] (p. 310)1.

Hidalgo’s response is not to repair Parfit but to replace him. Drawing on Siderits, he develops a Buddhist reductionism built on two truths and a mereological thesis. Conventionally, persons are real: the personhood convention is a useful fiction that reduces suffering, and that utility is what its conventional truth consists in. Ultimately, persons are unreal, because mereological nihilism is true: composites do not exist in ultimate reality; only their parts do. The Buddhist “neither-identical-nor-distinct” argument supplies the ground: a whole is neither identical with its parts (one thing is not many) nor distinct from them (it would then be an idle posit, inheriting all its properties from the parts), so wholes are not ultimately real [3] (p. 10); [2].

Crucially, the analysis does not halt at persons. Hidalgo follows the Abhidharma in pressing on: the skandhas are themselves aggregates, and analysis terminates only at dharmas, the simple property-particulars (tropes) that remain after division and analysis, “what is left when we cannot, even in thought, divide further” [3] (p. 10), citing Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya [10]. These are the ultimately real. And it is here that Hidalgo anchors value: one dharma, vedanā or hedonic tone, is “part of ultimate reality,” its negative valence impersonally bad and its positive valence intrinsically good, and on it the impersonal reasons of beneficence are grounded [3] (pp. 10, 16).

This is what lets Hidalgo answer Johnston. Buddhist reductionism, he argues, is not even committed to the premise Johnston attacks: since composition never occurs in ultimate reality, the antecedent “one fact consists in others” is never satisfied, and the reductio cannot engage [3] (p. 15). And the rebuilt reductio at the level of dharmas, that mere property-particulars cannot bear value and nihilism follows, is blocked by the claim that vedanā is a value-bearing dharma [3] (p. 16).

I want to extract one commitment and hold it up to the light. Both moves (the answer to Johnston and the grounding of value) require that the dharmic base be ultimately real. Call this the Terminus Thesis (T). There is a level of analysis at which the entities found (for Hidalgo, dharmas, and paradigmatically vedanā) exist ultimately: their existence does not depend on conceptual imputation, and further analysis either halts or reveals only more ultimately existent entities.

Everything that follows is an argument about (T) and the work it is asked to do. If the argument succeeds, then either (T) is preserved only at prices Hidalgo’s own sources refuse to pay, or it survives for the tropes while the causal series that was to do the person’s work drops out of the ultimate truth. In every case the reply to Johnston loses the ontological floor on which it stands, vedanā loses its standing as the ultimate ground of a life’s value, and, most importantly for the comparative question, the “Buddhist” reductionism Hidalgo recommends turns out to rest on a question about causation that the Buddhist traditions themselves dispute.

3. The Catuṣkoṭi as Instrument, and the Bridge Premise

The tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi) arrays four positions on any question of existence. With respect to the intrinsic existence (svabhāva) of any candidate entity X,

(i)

X exists with svabhāva;

(ii)

X does not exist (is a sheer nonentity);

(iii)

X both exists and does not exist;

(iv)

X neither exists nor does not exist.

On the reading I take from the Madhyamaka, Nāgārjuna negates all four lemmas with respect to ultimate or intrinsic existence2. The negation is prasajya: commitment-less or non-implicative. To deny lemma (i), “X exists with svabhāva,” is not thereby to assert lemma (ii), “X is a sheer nonentity.” This asymmetry is the whole engine of the view. It is what allows the Mādhyamika to refuse the claim that anything exists intrinsically without lapsing into the nihilist claim that nothing exists at all, the very lapse that Parfit, rightly, refuses when he declines the Eliminativist View [1] (p. 281; cf. pp. 210–212).

Catuṣkoṭi constraint (C): For any X, the question “does X exist with svabhāva?” has no true answer among (i)–(iv). Nothing has svabhāva; and “having svabhāva” is the only thing “existing ultimately” could amount to.

The second sentence of (C) states the premise that makes the constraint bite on Hidalgo. Call it the Bridge (B): to exist ultimately in the sense (T) requires (independent of conceptual imputation, as the terminus of analysis) just is to exist with svabhāva, intrinsic or own-being existence.

(B) is the premise a defender of Hidalgo will naturally wish to contest first, so let me say what may be said for it. The defence is that the identification is not mine but the tradition’s, and indeed the convergence camp’s own. For Nāgārjuna, to be ultimately real is to be non-dependent, to possess one’s being from one’s own side; svabhāva simply names that non-dependence. An essence, in Garfield’s rendering of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā XV.1–2, is “uncaused, independent of other phenomena, and not fabricated from other things,” so that “without essence, there are no inherently existing entities” [11] (p. 221). Siderits, on whom Hidalgo relies, glosses ultimate reality in just this way: the ultimately real is what bears its nature intrinsically, what survives analysis without remainder of imputation (Siderits, 2016)3. The convergence reading could not, then, easily reject (B) without abandoning the gloss on “ultimate” that its own reconstruction of Buddhist reductionism employs. (B) is not a Madhyamaka imposition on a neutral debate; it is the shared currency in which the debate is already conducted. Siderits elsewhere puts the point in so many words: that to be ultimately real a thing must have svabhāva is, he writes, common ground between Abhidharma and Madhyamaka [7] (p. 396).

With (B) in hand, the Abhidharma notion of an ultimately real terminus and the Madhyamaka target of svabhāva-denial are one target under two names. That identity is what makes the disagreement between Abhidharma and Madhyamaka substantive rather than verbal, a point I will need against the appeal to conventional adequacy in Section 6.

4. A Concession: Dependent Origination Does Not, by Itself, Empty the Base

There is an argument a Mādhyamika will reach for first, and it was, in an earlier version of this paper, the argument I gave. Every conditioned dharma arises in dependence on causes and conditions; whatever arises dependently lacks svabhāva, since svabhāva is non-dependent being; therefore the dharmas lack svabhāva, and, by (B), do not exist ultimately. The argument is ancient, and its second premise is exactly what Nāgārjuna asserts at Mūlamadhyamakakārikā XV.1–2. It should nonetheless be conceded to fail as it stands4.

The reason is that the second premise assumes an account of svabhāva that the Ābhidharmika does not hold. On the Abhidharma criterion, an entity lacks intrinsic nature just in case analysis shows its nature to be reducible to that of more fundamental entities; what the criterion excludes is reductive dependence, not dependence as such. Guerrero has made the point with precision: if x reductively analyses into more fundamental ys, the ys are candidates for ultimate reality, and it does not follow that the ys’ further, non-reductive dependences on other equally fundamental entities strip them of svabhāva, “unless one already assumes that svabhāva entails complete independence, which is the question at issue” [5] (p. 7). The Sarvāstivādins themselves allow a variety of such dependences among dharmas, a cognition depending existentially on object and faculty among them, while insisting that the dependent dharma’s nature is not thereby reduced; so “causal dependence passes the Abhidharma test for svabhāva without contradicting their explicitly stated criterion” [5] (pp. 7–8). Siderits, from the other side of the debate, concedes the same point in advance: since the Ābhidharmikas held both that dharmas have svabhāva and that they dependently originate, “the Mādhyamikas owe us an argument to establish that anything that is dependently originated must be devoid of svabhāva” [7] (p. 396). A premise that simply asserts what is owed is not payment.

Nor can the debt be paid by the fire-and-heat argument of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā XV as usually read. Siderits and Katsura, commenting on the passage, state the difficulty plainly: that heat is the product of causes and conditions “seems irrelevant to the question of whether it is the intrinsic nature of fire.” The argument bites only if the dharma and its nature are conceptually distinct, so that the nature is something the dharma “owns” and receives from its conditions; and they observe that “the consistent position for Abhidharma would be to identify a dharma with its nature (thus treating dharmas as equivalent to what philosophers now call tropes)” [6] (p. 157). This identification is no escape hatch devised for the occasion. It is Hidalgo’s stated view: his dharmas just are property-particulars, tropes [3] (p. 10). With the identification in place there is nothing left for the crude argument to grip; there is no bearer, distinct from the caused nature, whose independence the causation of that nature could impugn. So I concede the point in full, and I concede it in the opponent’s strongest form. The dharmas’ natures survive dependent origination. The question is what else Hidalgo needs, and whether it survives.

5. The Blade’s Last Pass: The Relations Among the Tropes

The concession sharpens the situation; it does not relax it. Everything at the ultimate level is now a momentary trope identical with its own nature. But Buddhist reductionism did not replace the person with a heap of such tropes; it replaced her with a causal series of them. The conventional person is a useful fiction whose utility consists in how it tracks a causally connected continuum of aggregates; the impersonal description that states the ultimate truth is the description of that continuum; and the aggregation of vedanā across a life, on which Hidalgo’s impersonal reasons operate, sums along its causal thread. Take the connexion away and the terminus is a scatter of instants. So the question the concession forces is this: is the causal relation among the tropes itself ultimately real?

Here the reductionist camp’s own analysis takes over. Siderits, reconstructing Nāgārjuna’s causal arguments, observes that among the conditions for an entity’s origination is the absence of that entity at the relevant time and place; the total cause therefore exists only while the effect does not, and has ceased when the effect arises. “Thus when the set of conditions exists, the effect does not yet exist, and when the effect does exist the set of conditions no longer exists” [7] (pp. 408–409). Cause and effect never co-exist, and strict momentariness makes the point vivid: nothing outlasts its moment to meet its offspring. This also disposes of a distinction a critic might press on the Abhidharma’s behalf, between a dharma’s depending on the past for its coming-to-exist and its depending on nothing present for being what it now is. For a strictly momentary trope there is no now distinct from its arising in which the second, innocent relatum of that distinction could stand; its being what it is and its arising from what preceded it are one occurrence. The distinction is available only to an ontology in which dharmas outlast their origination, and that admission is the first horn of what follows.

For if cause and effect never co-exist, a mind-independent causal relation between them can be had in only three ways. The first is to deny the premise of non-co-existence by letting past, present, and future dharmas all exist: the Sarvāstivāda doctrine of the three times. This is, in effect, Guerrero’s route. Her rescue of Vaibhāṣika causation from the argument of the three times goes through the thesis that dharmas exist in all three temporal modes, read as an ontological pluralism of modes of being, an interpretation she develops elsewhere [5] (p. 12). I do not say the route is closed to everyone. I say it is closed to Hidalgo at any acceptable price. His authority for the dharmas is Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, and Vasubandhu the Sautrāntika presentist is, as Guerrero herself records, among the critics of the three-times ontology [5] (p. 12), while Siderits, whose Buddhist reductionism Hidalgo adopts wholesale, judges that the block-universe conception of time “renders impossible a coherent account of change, and thus in the end leads to eternalism” [7] (p. 409). Eternalism is not, for a Buddhist, a neutral theoretical cost; it is one of the two named extremes the middle path exists to avoid. To save the terminus by Sarvāstivāda is to save it with an ontology the terminus’s own sponsors condemn.

The second way keeps presentism and momentariness and insists that the causal relation is mind-independently real although its relata never co-exist. Then the old debt of the asatkāryavādin falls due: if cause and effect are wholly distinct existents, some account is owed of the necessary connexion between them, of why just this arises from just that and not anything from anything. Siderits surveys the contemporary candidates for such an account, model-theoretic necessity chief among them, and finds them wanting: the connexion is not logical, and possible worlds can be described in which the conditions obtain and the effect fails [7] (pp. 409–410). I do not claim the debt can never be paid. I claim it is unpaid; and a reductionism whose ultimate truth waits upon its payment has not secured its terminus, but mortgaged it.

The third way is the one Siderits himself takes, and Bhāvaviveka before him, and Hume before either in another idiom: concede that the causal relation is conceptually constructed. There is no error in speaking of the conditions as producing the effect, “provided we are willing to concede that the causal relation is conceptually constructed”; our experience of past association leads us to expect the one upon the other, “and the causal relation is just our projection of that expectation” [7] (p. 409). This is the best horn, and it is the reductionist’s own resolution. But mark its price for Hidalgo. If the causal relation is conceptually constructed, then the causal series is; the connectedness of the tropes is not part of the ultimate truth. And the series is precisely what Buddhist reductionism put where the person had been. The impersonal continuities that were to do Relation R’s work are now constructions of the same order as the person they replaced; the “ultimate truth” that was to be what the world is really like [3] (p. 18) describes a world in which nothing is really connected to anything; and the aggregation of vedanā across a life, on which the impersonal reasons of beneficence operate, sums along a line that our concepts, not the world, have drawn. The blade Hidalgo borrowed does not stop. Granted a pass at the natures, it returns for the relations, and with them for all the work the terminus was for. This, and not the emptiness of the natures, is where the instability lies; and every premise in it, the Abhidharma criterion, the trope-identification, the precedence of the total cause, the verdict on the three times, the constructed relation, is signed by the reductionist camp itself.

One might look for a position between the horns. Could the Ābhidharmika grant that the causal relation is not ultimately real while holding that the causal series, or at least its effects, is? Half of this is already granted, and the grant matters: every effect is a trope and is as real as any dharma, which is why the conclusion of this paper is that the convergence fails for the connexion and not for the natures. The other half is where the position gives way. A series is not a further dharma alongside its members; it is those members in a certain order, each arising from its predecessor and not from a member of some neighbouring series. Withdraw the ultimate reality of the arising-from, and what remains at the ultimate level is the members, a heap rather than a series; what orders the heap into a continuum, and tells it apart from the continuum next to it, is just the relation that was to be set aside. If instead the continuum is granted ultimate reality in its own right, over and above its members, it becomes an ultimately real composite, which is what the mereological nihilism Hidalgo borrowed against persons forbids; and the Abhidharma criterion returns the same verdict, since a continuum analysed into its moments is no longer conceived as a continuum [12] (p. 19), and only the dharmas are what remain after division and analysis [3] (p. 10). The last way to read the proposal, that causal efficacy is an intrinsic power of each dharma so that no relation is needed, moves the question one step back rather than answering it. A power is a power to produce what does not yet exist. What makes this effect the exercise of that power, rather than merely its successor, is either a necessary connexion between the two, or a regularity we project onto them, or their co-existence across the three times. Those are the three horns again.

6. Two Remaining Replies

Two replies remain to the trilemma itself; the second is the deep one, and answering it is where the view earns its coherence.

The series is conventionally real, and conventional is enough. grant, the reply runs, that causal connexion is constructed. it is a construction no one can do without, least of all a buddhist, and the two truths permit the reductionist to say that the series is conventionally real while only the tropes are ultimate. Quite so; and nothing in my argument disturbs the convention. What the reply surrenders is everything hidalgo needed the series for at the ultimate level. his answer to johnston required an ultimately existent base for which the question of constituted importance does not arise; his theory of value required vedanā’s badness to be an ultimate matter and its accumulation across a life to track something more than our bookkeeping; and his ultimate truth was to be what the world is really like independently of our conceptual activity [3] (p. 18). A series that is real only by convention grounds none of this. it is, in the relevant respect, exactly what the person was; the two truths do not rescue the terminus, they relocate the reductionist’s load-bearing wall into the constructed storey.

A two-truths framing of the reply is, moreover, Hidalgo’s explicit move against Parfit’s charge of eliminativism: the two truths let the Buddhist say persons are conventionally real while only the dharmic base is ultimate [3] (p. 18). But notice what the reply presupposes. It presupposes the Abhidharma construal of the two truths, on which the ultimate truth is an inventory: the list of dharmas that survive analysis. The Madhyamaka redraws the distinction at exactly this point. For the Mādhyamika, the ultimate truth is not a privileged inventory but the emptiness of everything that any inventory would list: the ultimate truth about the dharmas is that they, too, are empty of svabhāva (MMK XXIV.8–10) [11] (pp. 298–299)5. So appealing to “the two truths” does not adjudicate the dispute in Hidalgo’s favour; it merely restates the Abhidharma side of the very dispute at issue. By (B), the two construals are not two harmless idioms but two incompatible claims about one thing (whether the terminus has svabhāva) and the Madhyamaka says it does not.

It is worth being exact about how much this concedes and how little. I grant Hidalgo that persons are conventionally real; nothing in my argument makes persons (or dharmas) eliminable. The reductio empties the reducing base of intrinsic existence; it does not assert that there is nothing there. That is a sharper and more limited claim than eliminativism about persons, and it is the claim Hidalgo has not addressed, because his two-truths reply is calibrated against eliminativism (against the denial that persons exist at all) not against the denial that the base exists ultimately. The distinction between “there are no persons” and “the ultimate base is empty” is the hinge of this paper, and the two-truths reply, aimed at the former, passes the latter by.

Then emptiness refutes itself. the serious reply is the ancient one. If everything is empty of svabhāva, then emptiness is empty; and then either the thesis undoes itself, or, to save it, the MāDhyamika must exempt emptiness and so smuggle in an ultimately real item, becoming, after all, no better off than parfit, with a terminus of his own.

The reply, I shall suggest, takes for a flaw what is better seen as the view’s consistency. The emptiness of emptiness (śūnyatā-śūnyatā) is not a patch applied under duress but the consistent completion of the view (MMK XXIV.18–19) [11] (pp. 300–304)6. Emptiness is not a second-order entity, a super-dharma standing behind the dharmas. It is the absence of svabhāva, and an absence is not the kind of thing that could itself possess svabhāva. To say emptiness is empty is to say only that “lacking intrinsic existence” is not itself an intrinsically existent feature; it, too, is dependently designated, parasitic on the very phenomena whose emptiness it is. Here the prasajya character of the negation does the decisive work. To deny that emptiness ultimately exists is not to assert that emptiness is a sheer nonentity. The dilemma (either a self-undermining thesis or a smuggled terminus) assumes that denying ultimate existence commits one to asserting utter nonexistence, which is exactly the commitment prasajya negation refuses. The Mādhyamika takes neither horn because the logic of his negation was never bivalent in the way the dilemma needs.

And this is precisely where the asymmetry with Parfit and Hidalgo becomes visible. They do posit a terminus: the impersonal facts are, the dharmas are, vedanā is. They therefore cannot avail themselves of the emptiness-of-emptiness manoeuvre, because their position is built on an affirmation of ultimate existence at the base, not on its commitment-less denial. The Mādhyamika can keep analysing without arriving anywhere, because he asserts no resting place; the reductionist cannot, because his whole account depends on the analysis stopping at something real. The charge of self-refutation, pressed home, returns to its sender: it is the reductionist, not the Mādhyamika, who must either find a non-arbitrary resting place for the blade or allow that the stopping point was chosen rather than found.

7. The Upshot for the Convergence Thesis

Return now to the comparative claim with which we began. The convergence reading (Parfit and the Buddhist as fellow reductionists) is not false across the board. It is true of Abhidharma. The Abhidharmika and Parfit do indeed reduce the person to an impersonal base and treat that base as what is ultimately there; Siderits’ fusion is, to that extent, well founded, and Hidalgo’s migration is a coherent passage from one reductionism to a more thoroughgoing one. What the literature has tended to pass over is that this thoroughgoing reductionism is a local Buddhist position, not the Buddhist position, and that its deepening does not run in the direction of greater convergence with Parfit but past it: first to the question, which neither pauses over, of whether the relations among the base are themselves ultimately real, and then, if the third horn is taken, most of the way toward the tradition that made that question its centre.

For the Madhyamaka, the convergence inverts. Parfit and the Abhidharmika are, in the catuṣkoṭi’s terms, occupants of the first lemma: they affirm that the base exists (impersonally, dharmically) with the intrinsic existence that makes it the terminus of analysis, and that its members stand in ultimately real relations of succession. The Mādhyamika’s quarrel with them is not the quarrel of a fellow reductionist offering a better reduction; it is the quarrel of a critic who denies that the reduction terminates at all. Perrett saw something adjacent when he aligned the Mādhyamaka with Johnston’s minimalism [4]. But minimalism makes the metaphysics idle, epiphenomenal to practice, whereas the reading defended here makes the Madhyamaka metaphysics active: the catuṣkoṭi does work, the work of removing the terminus that Parfit and Hidalgo require. The Mādhyamika is not the quietist who sets metaphysics aside but the dialectician who follows the opponent’s own analysis past the point where the opponent elects to stop.

If this is right, then the recommendation “a Parfitian should become a Buddhist reductionist” appears either too weak or self-undermining. Too weak, if “Buddhist” means “Abhidharma”: then it names a real but parochial option and obscures the deeper Buddhist verdict on the very notion of an ultimate base. Self-undermining, if “Buddhist” is allowed its full development: then the migration does not rest where Hidalgo halts it: pressed only as far as the reductionist camp’s own verdicts on causation, it arrives at real tropes without really related successors, a terminus that cannot carry a series; and whether tropes that have lost their relations can long withhold their natures from the same analysis is exactly the question on which Madhyamaka waits. Either way, it becomes doubtful whether the convergence can bear the weight the comparative literature has placed on it. The right slogan is not “Buddhism is a reductionism” but “ask which Buddhism; and ask, before resting on the base, what holds it together.”

8. The Ethical Argument and Its Hard Problem

I have confined the argument to metaphysics, but the ethics cannot be waved at and left; the difficulty there is real, and it should be stated at full strength. Śāntideva’s celebrated argument runs from no-self to impartial benevolence [13] (8.90–103)7: with the owner of suffering gone, the partition that would justify relieving my pain but not yours has no ground. Read at the Abhidharma level, the argument turns on an asymmetry: pain is ultimately there; the self/other boundary is not, so the reason to remove pain survives the removal of its proprietor. Williams [14] pressed the classic objection that without an owner the argument loses its addressee; and in a Madhyamaka setting the difficulty sharpens rather than eases, for there the boundary is empty but so is the pain, both alike real at the conventional level and empty at the ultimate, and it is then unobvious why everyday egoism, which lives entirely at the conventional level, should be touched at all. A literature now exists that tries to run Śāntideva’s argument in that setting (see the essays collected in The Cowherds [15] and Harris [16]); assessing those proposals is a task for another paper, and I no longer pretend the deferral is a small one.

What the present argument contributes is a position the debate has not isolated. On the third horn of the trilemma, the ultimate inventory contains real vedanā-tropes, while the causal series, and with it the diachronic ownership-structure that strings feelings into lives, is conceptually constructed. That is enough for an Abhidharma-internal Śāntideva at a time: the painfulness of this moment’s pain is no construction, while the proprietary line that would reserve it to me is; the asymmetry his argument needs survives the trilemma intact, synchronically. What totters is something else, and something Parfitian: the diachronic bookkeeping. If the boundaries between lives were to matter less because they are shallow, the third horn adds that the boundary between moments belongs to the same ledger. Whether an ethics of impartial beneficence can be built from momentary disvalue without ultimately real accumulation, and whether the Mādhyamika’s fully general emptiness helps or harms that construction, are the questions the sequel owes; here I record only that the trilemma does not silence Śāntideva’s argument, but relocates it.

9. Conclusions

Hidalgo invites the Parfitian to become a Buddhist reductionist, on the ground that the mereological nihilism at the base of the Buddhist view secures what Parfit’s reductionism could not. I have argued that the invitation, accepted in earnest, may not lead where it promises, and I have argued it while conceding to the Ābhidharmika everything the recent defence of Buddhist foundationalism demands. Dependent origination does not, by itself, empty the dharmas; the Abhidharma criterion of svabhāva excludes only reductive dependence, and the consistent trope-identification of a dharma with its nature, which is Hidalgo’s own position, leaves the old argument nothing to grip. But the concession only moves the weight. What replaced the person was a causal series, and the causal relation among momentary tropes can be ultimately real only on terms the reductionist camp itself refuses: the Sarvāstivāda three times, condemned by Vasubandhu and by Siderits alike as eternalism; or a necessary connexion between distinct existents that remains an unpaid debt; or on the resolution Siderits himself endorses, a relation that is conceptually constructed, whereupon the series doing the person’s work is a fiction of the person’s own order, and the terminus grounds nothing that needed grounding. Under the catuṣkoṭi, read with a prasajya negation, this is the familiar lesson in a new place: the analysis that dissolves wholes finds no resting point, only now its last pass falls on the relations rather than the natures. The convergence with Parfit holds for what the dharmas are and fails for what connects them; and a terminus of unconnected instants is not a terminus on which a self, a value, or a series can stand.