Pūrvapakṣa — the Buddhist view
There is no permanent self. What we call a person is a causal stream of momentary physical and mental events, named for convenience, like a chariot or a river.
Siddhānta — the Nyāya reply
There is an enduring self — a substance distinct from body, senses and mind — that is the subject of knowing, remembering, desiring and acting.
The Exchange
who answered whom
Gautama BuddhaLook into each of the five aggregates — body, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness. Each is impermanent; none can be called “my self”. There is nothing else to find.
- GAGautama Akṣapāda
Then who recognises? I touch in the dark what I saw by daylight and know it is the same thing. Sight and touch are different senses; one subject must hold both experiences.
- VVasubandhu
Memory needs causal continuity, not identity. The later moment of the stream inherits the impression of the earlier, as a seed passes its nature to the fruit.
- UUdayana
One person does not remember what another saw. If each moment is a different subject, memory is as impossible as my remembering your dream.
- DDharmakīrti
Your “enduring self” can do nothing, because whatever endures unchanged cannot be a cause. Only momentary things act. A permanent self would be idle.
- UUdayana
And your momentariness cannot explain why karma reaches the right person, or why I desire what pleased me before. Desire presupposes one who remembers pleasure.
This debate follows the classical Indian form: first the opponent’s view (pūrvapakṣa) is stated at full strength, then refuted, then the conclusion (siddhānta) established. Here the Nyāya side is given the last word, as in a Nyāya text — but a Buddhist text would reverse the order. See Anattā (No-Self), Nyāya, and the What Is the Self? — The Indian Argument ladder.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsNyāya
India’s great school of logic and epistemology — the theory of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), the five-membered syllogism, the catalogue of fallacies, realist metaphysics, and the most famous arguments for God in Indian philosophy. Its later form, Navya-Nyāya, became the technical language of all Indian scholarship.
Buddhism
The tradition founded by the Buddha — suffering, impermanence, no-self, and the path to nirvāṇa — later dividing into Theravāda, Mahāyāna (Madhyamaka, Yogācāra) and Vajrayāna.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The philosopher raised by the Theosophists to be a “World Teacher”, who renounced the role in 1929 — “truth is a pathless land” — and spent sixty years teaching that freedom comes only from seeing the movement of one’s own mind, without authority, method or guru.
The Nyāya Sūtras
The root text of Indian logic — about 530 aphorisms on the means of valid knowledge, the structure of argument, the art of debate and its dishonest tricks, and the self, the world and liberation.
Dignāga
The founder of Buddhist logic and epistemology — only perception and inference give knowledge, perception grasps bare particulars, concepts are constructions, and words mean by excluding (apoha). He revolutionised the logic of every Indian school.
Yogācāra
The “mind-only” school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, founded by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu — the world we experience is a construction of consciousness, carried by a “storehouse” of karmic seeds; awakening is the transformation of the basis of consciousness itself.