Buddhism

Personal identity is a hard problem for everyone, and that should be said. The difference is that Christianity affirms an enduring self that makes moral continuity intelligible, and its puzzle is about the mechanism, whereas Buddhism denies the enduring self and so has to explain how moral continuity works without one. Thanissaro’s resolution, that anatta is a strategy rather than a metaphysical claim, deserves to be presented whole; the question that remains even on his reading is what the moral agent is. The Buddhist answer, the causal stream, is coherent, and who gets free is a fair question to ask rather than a refutation.

The Parfit comparison is apt; Parfit himself said his view was close to the Buddha’s. The Christian reply is that on Parfit’s view moral responsibility across time becomes a matter of degree and convention, which Parfit accepted and which most people find hard to accept, and that Buddhism’s karma doctrine seems to require more than convention. So the question is real, but it should be put precisely: can a no-further-fact view of persons support the full weight of karma? That is a question the tradition has noticed and argued about, not one it has missed.

Mostly yes, and the word concession is wrong; the distinction between craving and wholesome desire is original to the tradition, not something it was caught out by. The puzzle is a puzzle for the popular slogan Buddhism says desire causes suffering, not for the doctrine. What survives is smaller and more interesting: if the tradition distinguishes good desire from craving by the object and manner of desiring, then the deepest problem is not desire itself but misdirected desire, which is close to Augustine’s analysis of disordered love. That is a point of contact rather than a defect.

Correct. The raft parable teaches non-attachment even to the teaching; it does not concede that the cure depends on craving, and the critique in that form targets a position no Buddhist holds. The most that can be said is that the tradition uses directed desire as scaffolding and then transcends it, which is a coherent position that a Christian may find incomplete but not self-undermining. The incompleteness, if there is one, is about where the scaffolding leads, not about the scaffolding.

The premise does need correcting, in line with the earlier point about conditioned things. The question can be reframed to survive: does the unconditioned, as Buddhism describes it, have the character (personal, good, purposive) that could ground objective moral obligation, or is it beyond such categories? Many Buddhists would say the latter, at which point the grounding question is fair again. It should be asked about the actual Buddhist view of ultimate reality, not about a caricature of total flux, and it is the same question the Atheism and Relativism cases put to naturalism.

The parallel is real and should be honored, but sameness does not follow. Amida is not the Creator, the Pure Land is a stage toward enlightenment rather than communion with God, and the final goal is still the dissolving of the self in nirvana, not resurrection and relationship. What the parallel gives is a starting point of deep agreement, that rescue comes from outside us and is received by trust, from which the differences about who rescues, and into what, can be explored rather than assumed away.

It can be humility, and there is something bracing about refusing to pretend to knowledge one does not have. The Christian reply is not that the Buddha should have speculated more, but that the question of God is not idle. If there is a Creator who made us for himself, then the deepest source of suffering is estrangement from him, and setting that aside would mean treating the wound while missing its cause. The claim is that God has stepped into history, so the question is no longer pure speculation but a response to something that happened.