Buddha

First published Thu Feb 17, 2011; substantive revision Thu Feb 14, 2019
The Buddha (fl. circa 450 BCE) is the individual whose teachings form the basis of the Buddhist
tradition. These teachings, preserved in texts known as the Nikāyas or Āgamas, concern the quest
for liberation from suffering. While the ultimate aim of the Buddha’s teachings is thus to help
individuals attain the good life, his analysis of the source of suffering centrally involves claims
concerning the nature of persons, as well as how we acquire knowledge about the world and our
place in it. These teachings formed the basis of a philosophical tradition that developed and
defended a variety of sophisticated theories in metaphysics and epistemology.
• 1. Buddha as Philosopher
• 2. Core Teachings
• 3. Non-Self
• 4. Karma and Rebirth
• 5. Attitude toward Reason
• Bibliography
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Buddha as Philosopher
This entry concerns the historical individual, traditionally called Gautama, who is identified by
modern scholars as the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teachings, there have been
other Buddhas in the past, and there will be yet more in the future. The title ‘Buddha’, which
literally means ‘awakened’, is conferred on an individual who discovers the path to nirvana, the
cessation of suffering, and propagates that discovery so that others may also achieve nirvana. If the
teaching that there have been other Buddhas is true, then Gautama is not the founder of Buddhism.
This entry will follow modern scholarship in taking an agnostic stance on the question of whether
there have been other Buddhas, and likewise for questions concerning the superhuman status and
powers that some Buddhists attribute to Buddhas. The concern of this entry is just those aspects of
the thought of the historical individual Gautama that bear on the development of the Buddhist
philosophical tradition.
The Buddha will here be treated as a philosopher. To so treat him is controversial, but before
coming to why that should be so, let us first rehearse those basic aspects of the Buddha’s life and
teachings that are relatively non-controversial. Tradition has it that Gautama lived to age 80. Up
until recently his dates were thought to be approximately 560–480 BCE, but many scholars now
hold that he must have died around 405 BCE. He was born into a family of some wealth and power,
members of the Śākya clan, in the area of the present border between India and Nepal. The story is
that in early adulthood he abandoned his comfortable life as a householder (as well as his wife and
young son) in order to seek a solution to the problem of existential suffering. He first took up with a
number of different wandering ascetics (śramanas) who claimed to know the path to liberation from
suffering. Finding their teachings unsatisfactory, he struck out on his own, and through a
combination of insight and meditational practice attained the state of enlightenment (bodhi) which
is said to represent the cessation of all further suffering. He then devoted the remaining 45 years of
his life to teaching others the insights and techniques that had led him to this achievement.
Gautama could himself be classified as one of the śramanas. That there existed such a phenomenon
as the śramanas tells us that there was some degree of dissatisfaction with the customary religious
practices then prevailing in the Gangetic basin of North India. These practices consisted largely in
the rituals and sacrifices prescribed in the Vedas. Among the śramanas there were many, including
the Buddha, who rejected the authority of the Vedas as definitive pronouncements on the nature of
the world and our place in it (and for this reason are called ‘heterodox’). But within the Vedic canon
itself there is a stratum of (comparatively late) texts, the Upaniṣads, that likewise displays
disaffection with Brahmin ritualism. Among the new ideas that figure in these (‘orthodox’) texts, as
well as in the teachings of those heterodox śramanas whose doctrines are known to us, are the
following: that sentient beings (including humans, non-human animals, gods, and the inhabitants of
various hells) undergo rebirth; that rebirth is governed by the causal laws of karma (good actions
cause pleasant fruit for the agent, evil actions cause unpleasant fruit, etc.); that continual rebirth is
inherently unsatisfactory; that there is an ideal state for sentient beings involving liberation from the
cycle of rebirth; and that attaining this state requires overcoming ignorance concerning one’s true
identity. Various views are offered concerning this ignorance and how to overcome it. The
Bhagavad Gītā (classified by some orthodox schools as an Upaniṣad) lists four such methods, and
discusses at least two separate views concerning our identity: that there is a plurality of distinct
selves, each being the true agent of a person’s actions and the bearer of karmic merit and demerit
but existing separately from the body and its associated states; and that there is just one self, of the
nature of pure consciousness (a ‘witness’) and identical with the essence of the cosmos, Brahman or
pure undifferentiated Being.
The Buddha agreed with those of his contemporaries embarked on the same soteriological project
that it is ignorance about our identity that is responsible for suffering. What sets his teachings apart
(at this level of analysis) lies in what he says that ignorance consists in: the conceit that there is an
‘I’ and a ‘mine’. This is the famous Buddhist teaching of non-self (anātman). And it is with this
teaching that the controversy begins concerning whether Gautama may legitimately be represented
as a philosopher. First there are those who (correctly) point out that the Buddha never categorically
denies the existence of a self that transcends what is empirically given, namely the five skandhas or
psychophysical elements. While the Buddha does deny that any of the psychophysical elements is a
self, these interpreters claim that he at least leaves open the possibility that there is a self that is
transcendent in the sense of being non-empirical. To this it may be objected that all of classical
Indian philosophy—Buddhist and orthodox alike—understood the Buddha to have denied the self
tout court. To this it is sometimes replied that the later philosophical tradition simply got the
Buddha wrong, at least in part because the Buddha sought to indicate something that cannot be
grasped through the exercise of philosophical rationality. On this interpretation, the Buddha should
be seen not as a proponent of the philosophical methods of analysis and argumentation, but rather as
one who sees those methods as obstacles to final release.
Another reason one sometimes encounters for denying that the Buddha is a philosopher is that he
rejects the characteristically philosophical activity of theorizing about matters that lack evident
practical application. On this interpretation as well, those later Buddhist thinkers who did go in for
the construction of theories about the ultimate nature of everything simply failed to heed or properly
appreciate the Buddha’s advice that we avoid theorizing for its own sake and confine our attention
to those matters that are directly relevant to liberation from suffering. On this view the teaching of
non-self is not a bit of metaphysics, just some practical advice to the effect that we should avoid
identifying with things that are transitory and so bound to yield dissatisfaction. What both
interpretations share is the assumption that it is possible to arrive at what the Buddha himself
thought without relying on the understanding of his teachings developed in the subsequent Buddhist
philosophical tradition.
This assumption may be questioned. Our knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings comes by way of
texts that were not written down until several centuries after his death, are in languages (Pāli, and
Chinese translations of Sanskrit) other than the one he is likely to have spoken, and disagree in
important respects. The first difficulty may not be as serious as it seems, given that the Buddha’s
discourses were probably rehearsed shortly after his death and preserved through oral transmission
until the time they were committed to writing. And the second need not be insuperable either. But
the third is troubling, in that it suggests textual transmission involved processes of insertion and
deletion in aid of one side or another in sectarian disputes. Our ancient sources attest to this: one
will encounter a dispute among Buddhist thinkers where one side cites some utterance of the
Buddha in support of their position, only to have the other side respond that the text from which the
quotation is taken is not universally recognized as authoritatively the word of the Buddha. This
suggests that our record of the Buddha’s teaching may be colored by the philosophical elaboration
of those teachings propounded by later thinkers in the Buddhist tradition.
Some scholars are more sanguine than others about the possibility of overcoming this difficulty, and
thereby getting at what the Buddha himself had thought, as opposed to what later Buddhist
philosophers thought he had thought. No position will be taken on this dispute here. We will be
treating the Buddha’s thought as it was understood within the later philosophical tradition that he
had inspired. The resulting interpretation may or may not be faithful to his intentions. It is at least
logically possible that he believed there to be a transcendent self that can only be known by
mystical intuition, or that the exercise of philosophical rationality leads only to sterile theorizing
and away from real emancipation. What we can say with some assurance is that this is not how the
Buddhist philosophical tradition understood him. It is their understanding that will be the subject of
this essay.

2. Core Teachings
The Buddha’s basic teachings are usually summarized using the device of the Four Noble Truths:
1. There is suffering.
2. There is the origination of suffering.
3. There is the cessation of suffering.
4. There is a path to the cessation of suffering.
The first of these claims might seem obvious, even when ‘suffering’ is understood to mean not mere
pain but existential suffering, the sort of frustration, alienation and despair that arise out of our
experience of transitoriness. But there are said to be different levels of appreciation of this truth,
some quite subtle and difficult to attain; the highest of these is said to involve the realization that
everything is of the nature of suffering. Perhaps it is sufficient for present purposes to point out that
while this is not the implausible claim that all of life’s states and events are necessarily experienced
as unsatisfactory, still the realization that all (oneself included) is impermanent can undermine a
precondition for real enjoyment of the events in a life: that such events are meaningful by virtue of
their having a place in an open-ended narrative.
It is with the development and elaboration of (2) that substantive philosophical controversy begins.
(2) is the simple claim that there are causes and conditions for the arising of suffering. (3) then
makes the obvious point that if the origination of suffering depends on causes, future suffering can
be prevented by bringing about the cessation of those causes. (4) specifies a set of techniques that
are said to be effective in such cessation. Much then hangs on the correct identification of the
causes of suffering. The answer is traditionally spelled out in a list consisting of twelve links in a
causal chain that begins with ignorance and ends with suffering (represented by the states of old
age, disease and death). Modern scholarship has established that this list is a later compilation. For
the texts that claim to convey the Buddha’s own teachings give two slightly different formulations
of this list, and shorter formulations containing only some of the twelve items are also found in the
texts. But it seems safe to say that the Buddha taught an analysis of the origins of suffering roughly
along the following lines: given the existence of a fully functioning assemblage of psychophysical
elements (the parts that make up a sentient being), ignorance concerning the three characteristics of
sentient existence—suffering, impermanence and non-self—will lead, in the course of normal
interactions with the environment, to appropriation (the identification of certain elements as ‘I’ and
‘mine’). This leads in turn to the formation of attachments, in the form of desire and aversion, and
the strengthening of ignorance concerning the true nature of sentient existence. These ensure future
rebirth, and thus future instances of old age, disease and death, in a potentially unending cycle.
The key to escape from this cycle is said to lie in realization of the truth about sentient existence—
that it is characterized by suffering, impermanence and non-self. But this realization is not easily
achieved, since acts of appropriation have already made desire, aversion and ignorance deeply
entrenched habits of mind. Thus the measures specified in (4) include various forms of training
designed to replace such habits with others that are more conducive to seeing things as they are.
Training in meditation is also prescribed, as a way of enhancing one’s observational abilities,
especially with respect to one’s own psychological states. Insight is cultivated through the use of
these newly developed observational powers, as informed by knowledge acquired through the
exercise of philosophical rationality. There is a debate in the later tradition as to whether final
release can be attained through theoretical insight alone, through meditation alone, or only by using
both techniques. Ch’an, for instance, is based on the premise that enlightenment can be attained
through meditation alone, whereas Theravāda advocates using both but also holds that analysis
alone may be sufficient for some. (This disagreement begins with a dispute over how to interpret D
I.77–84.) The third option seems the most plausible, but the first is certainly of some interest given
its suggestion that one can attain the ideal state for humans just by doing philosophy.
The Buddha seems to have held (2) to constitute the core of his discovery. He calls his teachings a
‘middle path’ between two extreme views, and it is this claim concerning the causal origins of
suffering that he identifies as the key to avoiding those extremes. The extremes are eternalism, the
view that persons are eternal, and annihilationism, the view that persons go utterly out of existence
(usually understood to mean at death, though a term still shorter than one lifetime is not ruled out).
It will be apparent that eternalism requires the existence of the sort of self that the Buddha denies.
What is not immediately evident is why the denial of such a self is not tantamount to the claim that
the person is annihilated at death (or even sooner, depending on just how impermanent one takes the
psychophysical elements to be). The solution to this puzzle lies in the fact that eternalism and
annihilationism both share the presupposition that there is an ‘I’ whose existence might either
extend beyond death or terminate at death. The idea of the ‘middle path’ is that all of life’s
continuities can be explained in terms of facts about a causal series of psychophysical elements.
There being nothing more than a succession of these impermanent, impersonal events and states, the
question of the ultimate fate of this ‘I’, the supposed owner of these elements, simply does not arise.
This reductionist view of sentient beings was later articulated in terms of the distinction between
two kinds of truth, conventional and ultimate. Each kind of truth has its own domain of objects, the
things that are only conventionally real and the things that are ultimately real respectively.
Conventionally real entities are those things that are accepted as real by common sense, but that
turn out on further analysis to be wholes compounded out of simpler entities and thus not strictly
speaking real at all. The stock example of a conventionally real entity is the chariot, which we take
to be real only because it is more convenient, given our interests and cognitive limitations, to have a
single name for the parts when assembled in the right way. Since our belief that there are chariots is
thus due to our having a certain useful concept, the chariot is said to be a mere conceptual fiction.
(This does not, however, mean that all conceptualization is falsification; only concepts that allow of
reductive analysis lead to this artificial inflation of our ontology, and thus to a kind of error.)
Ultimately real entities are those ultimate parts into which conceptual fictions are analyzable. An
ultimately true statement is one that correctly describes how certain ultimately real entities are
arranged. A conventionally true statement is one that, given how the ultimately real entities are
arranged, would correctly describe certain conceptual fictions if they also existed. The ultimate
truth concerning the relevant ultimately real entities helps explain why it should turn out to be
useful to accept conventionally true statements (such as ‘King Milinda rode in a chariot’) when the
objects described in those statements are mere fictions.
Using this distinction between the two truths, the key insight of the ‘middle path’ may be expressed
as follows. The ultimate truth about sentient beings is just that there is a causal series of
impermanent, impersonal psychophysical elements. Since these are all impermanent, and lack other
properties that would be required of an essence of the person, none of them is a self. But given the
right arrangement of such entities in a causal series, it is useful to think of them as making up one
thing, a person. It is thus conventionally true that there are persons, things that endure for a lifetime
and possibly (if there is rebirth) longer. This is conventionally true because generally speaking there
is more overall happiness and less overall pain and suffering when one part of such a series
identifies with other parts of the same series. For instance, when the present set of psychophysical
elements identifies with future elements, it is less likely to engage in behavior (such as smoking)
that results in present pleasure but far greater future pain. The utility of this convention is, however,
limited. Past a certain point—namely the point at which we take it too seriously, as more than just a
useful fiction—it results in existential suffering. The cessation of suffering is attained by extirpating
all sense of an ‘I’ that serves as agent and owner.
3. Non-Self
The Buddha’s ‘middle path’ strategy can be seen as one of first arguing that there is nothing that the
word ‘I’ genuinely denotes, and then explaining that our erroneous sense of an ‘I’ stems from our
employment of the useful fiction represented by the concept of the person. While the second part of
this strategy only receives its full articulation in the later development of the theory of two truths,
the first part can be found in the Buddha’s own teachings, in the form of several philosophical
arguments for non-self. Best known among these is the argument from impermanence (S III.66–8),
which has this basic structure:
1. If there were a self it would be permanent.
2. None of the five kinds of psychophysical element is permanent.
3. ∴ There is no self.
It is the fact that this argument does not contain a premise explicitly asserting that the five skandhas
(classes of psychophysical element) are exhaustive of the constituents of persons, plus the fact that
these are all said to be empirically observable, that leads some to claim that the Buddha did not
intend to deny the existence of a self tout court. There is, however, evidence that the Buddha was
generally hostile toward attempts to establish the existence of unobservable entities. In the
Pohapāda Sutta (D I.178–203), for instance, the Buddha compares someone who posits an unseen
seer in order to explain our introspective awareness of cognitions, to a man who has conceived a
longing for the most beautiful woman in the world based solely on the thought that such a woman
must surely exist. And in the Tevijja Sutta (D I.235–52), the Buddha rejects the claim of certain
Brahmins to know the path to oneness with Brahman, on the grounds that no one has actually
observed this Brahman. This makes more plausible the assumption that the argument has as an
implicit premise the claim that there is no more to the person than the five skandhas.
Premise (1) appears to be based on the assumption that persons undergo rebirth, together with the
thought that one function of a self would be to account for diachronic personal identity. By
‘permanent’ is here meant continued existence over at least several lives. This is shown by the fact
that the Buddha rules out the body as a self on the grounds that the body exists for just one lifetime.
(This also demonstrates that the Buddha did not mean by ‘impermanent’ what some later Buddhist
philosophers meant, viz., existing for just a moment; the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness
represents a later development.) The mental entities that make up the remaining four types of
psychophysical element might seem like more promising candidates, but these are ruled out on the
grounds that these all originate in dependence on contact between sense faculty and object, and last
no longer than a particular sense-object-contact event. That he listed five kinds of psychophysical
element, and not just one, shows that the Buddha embraced a kind of dualism. But this strategy for
demonstrating the impermanence of the psychological elements shows that his dualism was not the
sort of mind-body dualism familiar from substance ontologies like those of Descartes and of the
Nyāya school of orthodox Indian philosophy. Instead of seeing the mind as the persisting bearer of
such transient events as occurrences of cognition, feeling and volition, he treats ‘mind’ as a kind of
aggregate term for bundles of transient mental events. These events being impermanent, they too
fail to account for diachronic personal identity in the way in which a self might be expected to.
Another argument for non-self, which might be called the argument from control (S III.66–8), has
this structure:
1. If there were a self, one could never desire that it be changed.
 2. Each of the five kinds of psychophysical element is such that one can desire that it be
changed.
3.  ∴ There is no self.
Premise (1) is puzzling. It appears to presuppose that the self should have complete control over
itself, so that it would effortlessly adjust its state to its desires. That the self should be thought of as
the locus of control is certainly plausible. Those Indian self-theorists who claim that the self is a
mere passive witness recognize that the burden of proof is on them to show that the self is not an
agent. But it seems implausibly demanding to require of the self that it have complete control over
itself. We do not require that vision see itself if it is to see other things. The case of vision suggests
an alternative interpretation, however. We might hold that vision does not see itself for the reason
that this would violate an irreflexivity principle, to the effect that an entity cannot operate on itself.
Indian philosophers who accept this principle cite supportive instances such as the knife that cannot
cut itself and the finger-tip that cannot touch itself. If this principle is accepted, then if the self were
the locus of control it would follow that it could never exercise this function on itself. A self that
was the controller could never find itself in the position of seeking to change its state to one that it
deemed more desirable. On this interpretation, the first premise seems to be true. And there is ample
evidence that (2) is true: it is difficult to imagine a bodily or psychological state over which one
might not wish to exercise control. Consequently, given the assumption that the person is wholly
composed of the psychophysical elements, it appears to follow that a self of this description does
not exist.
These two arguments appear, then, to give good reason to deny a self that might ground diachronic
personal identity and serve as locus of control, given the assumption that there is no more to the
person than the empirically given psychophysical elements. But it now becomes something of a
puzzle how one is to explain diachronic personal identity and agency. To start with the latter, does
the argument from control not suggest that control must be exercised by something other than the
psychophysical elements? This was precisely the conclusion of the Sāṃkhya school of orthodox
Indian philosophy. One of their arguments for the existence of a self was that it is possible to
exercise control over all the empirically given constituents of the person; while they agree with the
Buddha that a self is never observed, they take the phenomena of agency to be grounds for positing
a self that transcends all possible experience.
This line of objection to the Buddha’s teaching of non-self is more commonly formulated in
response to the argument from impermanence, however. Perhaps its most dramatic form is aimed at
the Buddha’s acceptance of the doctrines of karma and rebirth. It is clear that the body ceases to
exist at death. And given the Buddha’s argument that mental states all originate in dependence on
sense-object contact events, it seems no psychological constituent of the person can transmigrate
either. Yet the Buddha claims that persons who have not yet achieved enlightenment will be reborn
as sentient beings of some sort after they die. If there is no constituent whatever that moves from
one life to the next, how could the being in the next life be the same person as the being in this life?
This question becomes all the more pointed when it is added that rebirth is governed by karma,
something that functions as a kind of cosmic justice: those born into fortunate circumstances do so
as a result of good deeds in prior lives, while unpleasant births result from evil past deeds. Such a
system of reward and punishment could be just only if the recipient of pleasant or unpleasant
karmic fruit is the same person as the agent of the good or evil action. And the opponent finds it
incomprehensible how this could be so in the absence of a persisting self.
4. Karma and Rebirth
It is not just classical Indian self-theorists who have found this objection persuasive. Some
Buddhists have as well. Among these Buddhists, however, this has led to the rejection not of non-
self but of rebirth. (Historically this response was not unknown among East Asian Buddhists, and it
is not rare among Western Buddhists today.) The evidence that the Buddha himself accepted rebirth
and karma seems quite strong, however. The later tradition would distinguish between two types of
discourse in the body of the Buddha’s teachings: those intended for an audience of householders
seeking instruction from a sage, and those intended for an audience of monastic renunciates already
versed in his teachings. And it would be one thing if his use of the concepts of karma and rebirth
were limited to the former. For then such appeals could be explained away as another instance of
the Buddha’s pedagogical skill (commonly referred to as upāya). The idea would be that
householders who fail to comply with the most basic demands of morality are not likely (for reasons
to be discussed shortly) to make significant progress toward the cessation of suffering, and the
teaching of karma and rebirth, even if not strictly speaking true, does give those who accept it a
(prudential) reason to be moral. But this sort of ‘noble lie’ justification for the Buddha teaching a
doctrine he does not accept fails in the face of the evidence that he also taught it to quite advanced
monastics (e.g., A III.33). And what he taught is not the version of karma popular in certain circles
today, according to which, for instance, an act done out of hatred makes the agent somewhat more
disposed to perform similar actions out of similar motives in the future, which in turn makes
negative experiences more likely for the agent. What the Buddha teaches is instead the far stricter
view that each action has its own specific consequence for the agent, the hedonic nature of which is
determined in accordance with causal laws and in such a way as to require rebirth as long as action
continues. So if there is a conflict between the doctrine of non-self and the teaching of karma and
rebirth, it is not to be resolved by weakening the Buddha’s commitment to the latter.
The Sanskrit term karma literally means ‘action’. What is nowadays referred to somewhat loosely
as the theory of karma is, speaking more strictly, the view that there is a causal relationship between
action (karma) and ‘fruit’ (phala), the latter being an experience of pleasure, pain or indifference for
the agent of the action. This is the view that the Buddha appears to have accepted in its most
straightforward form. Actions are said to be of three types: bodily, verbal and mental. The Buddha
insists, however, that by action is meant not the movement or change involved, but rather the
volition or intention that brought about the change. As Gombrich (2009) points out, the Buddha’s
insistence on this point reflects the transition from an earlier ritualistic view of action to a view that
brings action within the purview of ethics. For it is when actions are seen as subject to moral
assessment that intention becomes relevant. One does not, for instance, perform the morally
blameworthy action of speaking insultingly to an elder just by making sounds that approximate to
the pronunciation of profanities in the presence of an elder; parrots and prelinguistic children can do
as much. What matters for moral assessment is the mental state (if any) that produced the bodily,
verbal or mental change. And it is the occurrence of these mental states that is said to cause the
subsequent occurrence of hedonically good, bad and neutral experiences. More specifically, it is the
occurrence of the three ‘defiled’ mental states that brings about karmic fruit. The three defilements
(kleśas) are desire, aversion and ignorance. And we are told quite specifically (A III.33) that actions
performed by an agent in whom these three defilements have been destroyed do not have karmic
consequences; such an agent is experiencing their last birth.
Some caution is required in understanding this claim about the defilements. The Buddha seems to
be saying that it is possible to act not only without ignorance, but also in the absence of desire or
aversion, yet it is difficult to see how there could be intentional action without some positive or
negative motivation. To see one’s way around this difficulty, one must realize that by ‘desire’ and
‘aversion’ are meant those positive and negative motives respectively that are colored by ignorance,
viz. ignorance concerning suffering, impermanence and non-self. Presumably the enlightened
person, while knowing the truth about these matters, can still engage in motivated action. Their
actions are not based on the presupposition that there is an ‘I’ for which those actions can have
significance. Ignorance concerning these matters perpetuates rebirth, and thus further occasions for
existential suffering, by facilitating a motivational structure that reinforces one’s ignorance. We can
now see how compliance with common-sense morality could be seen as an initial step on the path to
the cessation of suffering. While the presence of ignorance makes all action—even that deemed
morally good—karmically potent, those actions commonly considered morally evil are especially
powerful reinforcers of ignorance, in that they stem from the assumption that the agent’s welfare is
of paramount importance. While recognition of the moral value of others may still involve the
conceit that there is an ‘I’, it can nonetheless constitute progress toward dissolution of the sense of
self.
This excursus into what the Buddha meant by karma may help us see how his middle path strategy
could be used to reply to the objection to non-self from rebirth. That objection was that the reward
and punishment generated by karma across lives could never be deserved in the absence of a
transmigrating self. The middle path strategy generally involves locating and rejecting an
assumption shared by a pair of extreme views. In this case the views will be (1) that the person in
the later life deserves the fruit generated by the action in the earlier life, and (2) that this person
does not deserve the fruit. One assumption shared by (1) and (2) is that persons deserve reward and
punishment depending on the moral character of their actions, and one might deny this assumption.
But that would be tantamount to moral nihilism, and a middle path is said to avoid nihilisms (such
as annihilationism). A more promising alternative might be to deny that there are ultimately such
things as persons that could bear moral properties like desert. This is what the Buddha seems to
mean when he asserts that the earlier and the later person are neither the same nor different (S II.62;
S II.76; S II.113). Since any two existing things must be either identical or distinct, to say of the two
persons that they are neither is to say that strictly speaking they do not exist.
This alternative is more promising because it avoids moral nihilism. For it allows one to assert that
persons and their moral properties are conventionally real. To say this is to say that given our
interests and cognitive limitations, we do better at achieving our aim—minimizing overall pain and
suffering—by acting as though there are persons with morally significant properties. Ultimately
there are just impersonal entities and events in causal sequence: ignorance, the sorts of desires that
ignorance facilitates, an intention formed on the basis of such a desire, a bodily, verbal or mental
action, a feeling of pleasure, pain or indifference, and an occasion of suffering. The claim is that this
situation is usefully thought of as, for instance, a person who performs an evil deed due to their
ignorance of the true nature of things, receives the unpleasant fruit they deserve in the next life, and
suffers through their continuing on the wheel of saṃsāra. It is useful to think of the situation in this
way because it helps us locate the appropriate places to intervene to prevent future pain (the evil
deed) and future suffering (ignorance).
It is no doubt quite difficult to believe that karma and rebirth exist in the form that the Buddha
claims. It is said that their existence can be confirmed by those who have developed the power of
retrocognition through advanced yogic technique. But this is of little help to those not already
convinced that meditation is a reliable means of knowledge. What can be said with some assurance
is that karma and rebirth are not inconsistent with non-self. Rebirth without transmigration is
logically possible.

5. Attitude toward Reason

When the Buddha says that a person in one life and the person in another life are neither the same
nor different, one’s first response might be to take ‘different’ to mean something other than ‘not the
same’. But while this is possible in English given the ambiguity of ‘the same’, it is not possible in
the Pāli source, where the Buddha is represented as unambiguously denying both numerical identity
and numerical distinctness. This has led some to wonder whether the Buddha does not employ a
deviant logic. Such suspicions are strengthened by those cases where the options are not two but
four, cases of the so-called tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi). For instance, when the Buddha is questioned
about the post-mortem status of the enlightened person or arhat (e.g., at M I.483–8) the possibilities
are listed as: (1) the arhat continues to exist after death, (2) does not exist after death, (3) both
exists and does not exist after death, and (4) neither exists nor does not exist after death. When the
Buddha rejects both (1) and (2) we get a repetition of ‘neither the same nor different’. But when he
goes on to entertain, and then reject, (3) and (4) the logical difficulties are compounded. Since each
of (3) and (4) appears to be formally contradictory, to entertain either is to entertain the possibility
that a contradiction might be true. And their denial seems tantamount to affirmation of excluded
middle, which is prima facie incompatible with the denial of both (1) and (2). One might wonder
whether we are here in the presence of the mystical.
There were some Buddhist philosophers who took ‘neither the same nor different’ in this way.
These were the Personalists (Pudgalavādins), who were so called because they affirmed the
ultimate existence of the person as something named and conceptualized in dependence on the
psychophysical elements. They claimed that the person is neither identical with nor distinct from
the psychophysical elements. They were prepared to accept, as a consequence, that nothing
whatever can be said about the relation between person and elements. But their view was rejected
by most Buddhist philosophers, in part on the grounds that it quickly leads to an ineffability
paradox: one can say neither that the person’s relation to the elements is inexpressible, nor that it is
not inexpressible. The consensus view was instead that the fact that the person can be said to be
neither identical with nor distinct from the elements is grounds for taking the person to be a mere
conceptual fiction. Concerning the persons in the two lives, they understood the negations involved
in ‘neither the same nor different’ to be of the commitmentless variety, i.e., to function like
illocutionary negation. If we agree that the statement ‘7 is green’ is semantically ill-formed, on the
grounds that abstract objects such as numbers do not have colors, then we might go on to say, ‘Do
not say that 7 is green, and do not say that it is not green either’. There is no contradiction here,
since the illocutionary negation operator ‘do not say’ generates no commitment to an alternative
characterization.
There is also evidence that claims of type (3) involve parameterization. For instance, the claim
about the arhat would be that there is some respect in which they can be said to exist after death,
and some other respect in which they can be said to no longer exist after death. Entertaining such a
proposition does not require that one believe there might be true contradictions. And while claims of
type (4) would seem to be logically equivalent to those of type (3) (regardless of whether or not
they involve parameterization), the tradition treated this type as asserting that the subject is beyond
all conceptualization. To reject the type (4) claim about the arhat is to close off one natural response
to the rejections of the first three claims: that the status of the arhat after death transcends rational
understanding. That the Buddha rejected all four possibilities concerning this and related questions
is not evidence that he employed a deviant logic.
The Buddha’s response to questions like those concerning the arhat is sometimes cited in defense of
a different claim about his attitude toward rationality. This is the claim that the Buddha was
essentially a pragmatist, someone who rejects philosophical theorizing for its own sake and employs
philosophical rationality only to the extent that doing so can help solve the practical problem of
eliminating suffering. The Buddha does seem to be embracing something like this attitude when he
defends his refusal to answer questions like that about the arhat, or whether the series of lives has a
beginning, or whether the living principle (jīva) is identical with the body. He calls all the possible
views with respect to such questions distractions insofar as answering them would not lead to the
cessation of the defilements and thus to the end of suffering. And in a famous simile (M I.429) he
compares someone who insists that the Buddha answer these questions to someone who has been
wounded by an arrow but will not have the wound treated until they are told who shot the arrow,
what sort of wood the arrow is made of, and the like.
Passages such as these surely attest to the great importance the Buddha placed on sharing his
insights to help others overcome suffering. But this is consistent with the belief that philosophical
rationality may be used to answer questions that lack evident connection with pressing practical
concerns. And on at least one occasion the Buddha does just this. Pressed to give his answers to the
questions about the arhat and the like, the Buddha first rejects all the possibilities of the tetralemma,
and defends his refusal on the grounds that such theories are not conducive to liberation from
saṃsāra. But when his questioner shows signs of thereby losing confidence in the value of the
Buddha’s teachings about the path to the cessation of suffering, the Buddha responds with the
example of a fire that goes out after exhausting its fuel. If one were asked where this fire has gone,
the Buddha points out, one could consistently deny that it has gone to the north, to the south, or in
any other direction. This is so for the simple reason that the questions ‘Has it gone to the north?’,
‘Has it gone to the south?’, etc., all share the false presupposition that the fire continues to exist.
Likewise the questions about the arhat and the like all share the false presupposition that there is
such a thing as a person who might either continue to exist after death, cease to exist at death, etc.
(Anālayo 2018, 41) The difficulty with these questions is not that they try to extend philosophical
rationality beyond its legitimate domain, as the handmaiden of soteriologically useful practice. It is
rather that they rest on a false presupposition—something that is disclosed through the employment
of philosophical rationality.
A different sort of challenge to the claim that the Buddha valued philosophical rationality for its
own sake comes from the role played by authority in Buddhist soteriology. For instance, in the
Buddhist tradition one sometimes encounters the claim that only enlightened persons such as the
Buddha can know all the details of karmic causation. And to the extent that the moral rules are
thought to be determined by the details of karmic causation, this might be taken to mean that our
knowledge of the moral rules is dependent on the authority of the Buddha. Again, the subsequent
development of Buddhist philosophy seems to have been constrained by the need to make theory
compatible with certain key claims of the Buddha. For instance, one school developed an elaborate
form of four-dimensionalism, not because of any deep dissatisfaction with presentism, but because
they believed the non-existence of the past and the future to be incompatible with the Buddha’s
alleged ability to cognize past and future events. And some modern scholars go so far as to wonder
whether non-self functions as anything more than a sort of linguistic taboo against the use of words
like ‘I’ and ‘self’ in the Buddhist tradition (Collins 1982: 183). The suggestion is that just as in
some other religious traditions the views of the founder or the statements of scripture trump all
other considerations, including any views arrived at through the free exercise of rational inquiry, so
in Buddhism as well there can be at best only a highly constrained arena for the deployment of
philosophical rationality.
Now it could be that while this is true of the tradition that developed out of the Buddha’s teachings,
the Buddha himself held the unfettered use of rationality in quite high esteem. This would seem to
conflict with what he is represented as saying in response to the report that he arrived at his
conclusions through reasoning and analysis alone: that such a report is libelous, since he possesses a
number of superhuman cognitive powers (M I.68). But at least some scholars take this passage to be
not the Buddha’s own words but an expression of later devotionalist concerns (Gombrich 2009:
164). Indeed one does find a spirited discussion within the tradition concerning the question
whether the Buddha is omniscient, a discussion that may well reflect competition between
Buddhism and those Brahmanical schools that posit an omniscient creator. And at least for the most
part the Buddhist tradition is careful not to attribute to the Buddha the sort of omniscience usually
ascribed to an all-perfect being: the actual cognition, at any one time, of all truths. Instead a Buddha
is said to be omniscient only in the much weaker sense of always having the ability to cognize any
individual fact relevant to the soteriological project, viz. the details of their own past lives, the
workings of the karmic causal laws, and whether a given individual’s defilements have been
extirpated. Moreover, these abilities are said to be ones that a Buddha acquires through a specific
course of training, and thus ones that others may reasonably aspire to as well. The attitude of the
later tradition seems to be that while one could discover the relevant facts on one’s own, it would be
more reasonable to take advantage of the fact that the Buddha has already done all the epistemic
labor involved. When we arrive in a new town we could always find our final destination through
trial and error, but it would make more sense to ask someone who already knows their way about.
The Buddhist philosophical tradition grew out of earlier efforts to systematize the Buddha’s
teachings. Within a century or two of the death of the Buddha, exegetical differences led to debates
concerning the Buddha’s true intention on some matter, such as that between the Personalists and
others over the status of the person. While the parties to these debates use many of the standard
tools and techniques of philosophy, they were still circumscribed by the assumption that the
Buddha’s views on the matter at hand are authoritative. In time, however, the discussion widened to
include interlocutors representing various Brahmanical systems. Since the latter did not take the
Buddha’s word as authoritative, Buddhist thinkers were required to defend their positions in other
ways. The resulting debate (which continued for about nine centuries) touched on most of the topics
now considered standard in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language, and was
characterized by considerable sophistication in philosophical methodology. What the Buddha would
have thought of these developments we cannot say with any certainty. What we can say is that many
Buddhists have believed that the unfettered exercise of philosophical rationality is quite consistent
with his teachings.
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Other Internet Resources
• The Pali Tipitaka, Pali texts
• Ten Philosophical Questions to Ask About Buddhism, a series of talks by Richard P. Hayes
• Access to Insight, Readings in Therevada Buddhism
• Buddhanet, Buddha Dharma Education Association

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