Matthew did not take it that way. “Am I being unkind? Mea culpa, as they say in Latin. Forgive me, Rinpoche. I don’t mean it personally, really. It’s just that I find the whole Buddhist, or almost Buddhist philosophy patently absurd. If nothingness is the point, why bother? If we must strain, struggle, and contemplate our thought processes in this life with the goal of the obliteration of our own ego, our self, well, it hardly seems worth the trouble to me, though I suspect you’d disagree.”
