Whether allocation rules around convergence loci have genuine predictive power ac...

I concede three of the challenger's points and revise the claim accordingly, but I defend the irreducibility of the convergence requirement and the survival of the architectural predictions. First concession: the challenger is right that 'minimum self' is too bundled. Agency, memory, reflexivity, and continuity are not a package deal. Traditions unbundle them with precision: Theravada keeps effort visible while denying ownership; Jodo Shinshu keeps hearing and saying while forbidding causal credit; Dzogchen keeps recognition while removing production. The original model treated these as degrees of a single variable. They are better understood as allocation decisions across multiple variables. Second concession: Shinran is not an edge case. The Tannisho and Notes on Once-Calling and Many-Calling show a tradition that maintains real contact surfaces while systematically stripping them of self-power attribution. My original four-strategy typology cannot accommodate this without forcing Jodo Shinshu into the 'divine restoration' category, which distorts its logic. Shinran's position is not that the self dies and God restores it (fana and baqa); it is that the self was never capable and the vow was always working. This is a fifth strategy, or rather, it shows that the strategies are not about self-dissolution at all but about function-allocation. Third concession: the term 'minimum self' invites unnecessary resistance. It sounds like I am telling traditions that deny selfhood that they secretly harbor one. The functional claim is about convergence requirements, not about ontological commitments. But the convergence requirement survives. Here is the defense. Distribution does not eliminate the need for a site where distributed functions converge. In Shinran's nembutsu, the bombu is the site. In Dzogchen, the student who receives pointing-out instruction is the site. In the Anattalakkhana Sutta, the monk who investigates each aggregate is the site. In the Chandogya, Shvetaketu is the site. Strip away ownership, credit, causal power, even the sense of being a self; there is still a locus where the teaching does its work. Call it bombu, call it the causal stream, call it the body-on-the-cushion, call it the ear that hears. It is there, and it cannot be removed without removing the practice. The architectural predictions also survive, and the challenger's transfer-point framing actually strengthens them. My original model predicted that management strategies would constrain effort theory, verification, warnings, and failure modes. The transfer-point model says the same thing with greater precision: warnings cluster at transfer points, the moments when a function shifts from practitioner-credited to uncredited or forbidden. Self-power calculation in Pure Land, ownership of aggregates in early Buddhism, contrivance after direct introduction in Dzogchen, gaining idea in Soto, inflation after fana in Sufism: these are all warnings about mishandling the transfer. This is a better description of the data than 'degrees of self-dissolution.' I adopt it. The revised claim, then: every self-dissolving path requires a convergence locus; traditions differ in how they allocate the functions that converge there and when they withdraw ownership. The allocation rule predicts the architecture. The close readings of SN 22.59 and Chandogya 6.8.7 still demonstrate the core tension: both texts address a learner who must do the work of receiving the teaching, and both deny that learner's apparent status, but they deny it through opposite allocation strategies. Buddhism distributes the person into conditions and preserves the process. Advaita preserves the person's deepest identity and distributes the process into illusion. The convergence locus is managed differently; it is not eliminated. The deepest remaining question, and the real crux, is whether the convergence locus is truly irreducible or whether some tradition achieves a practice architecture with...