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

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.