ABSTRACT
By the sixth and seventh centuries Buddhism, both in India and China, had become thoroughly pluralistic. Varying and often opposing interpretations vied for legitimacy and adherents. The psychosophical trajectory called Buddhism had splintered into numerous sub-trajectories. Linguistic reductionism, like mental reductionism, carries psychologistic tendencies. Soteric systematics, which includes basie formulations like the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, but developed into detailed, rich systematics. Chinese Buddhism never made this shift from psychology to logico-epistemology. The emergence of a psychologistic reduction, that coincides with a heavily ontologized notion of self, already is apparent in the early Prajña schools of the fourth century. Dialectical-deconstructive critique, which involves a logical, reasoned approach to matters of importance for Buddhism, but unlike debate and logic, its concern is not to construct a more adeauate or more accurate deseription, much less suggest preseriptive axioms.
