Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

by David R. Loy

therefore the usual English translations “empty” and “emptiness” can be supplemented with the notion of “pregnant with possibilities.”

And the vehicle of this common-sense metaphysics, creating and sustaining it, is language, which presents us with a set of nouns (self-existing things) that have temporal and causal predicates (appear, change, and cease).

For Nāgārjuna as well as Derrida, différance/śūnyatā is valuable because it provides a “nonphilosophical site” from which to question philosophy itself.

The basic difficulty is that insofar as I feel separate (i.e., an autonomous, self-existing consciousness) I also feel uncomfortable, because an illusory sense of separateness is inevitably insecure.

As long as I am motivated by sense of lack, I shall seek to real-ize myself by fixating on something that dissolves in my grasp,

Origination, duration, and cessation are “like an illusion, a dream, or an imaginary city in the sky”

“Having realized that this world is like a dream, and that all Buddhas are like mere reflections, that all things are like an echo, you move unimpeded in the world.”

We try to peel away the apparent world to get at the real one, but that dualism between them is our problematic delusion, which leaves, as the only remaining candidate for real world, the apparent one — a world whose actual nature has not been noticed because we have been so concerned to transcend it. And without any effective dualism between real and apparent, the question of whether the world is real or apparent loses meaning.174

In other words, the objective world of material things, which interact causally in space and time, is metaphysical through and through. It is this metaphysics that most needs to be deconstructed, according to Buddhism, because this is the metaphysics, disguised as common-sense reality, which makes me suffer, especially insofar as I understand myself to be one such self-existing being in time that will nonetheless die.

Meditation is learning how to die by learning to forget the sense of self, which happens when I become absorbed into my meditation-exercise.

This process implies that what we fear as nothingness is not really nothingness, for that is the perspective of a sense of self anxious about losing its grip on itself. According to Buddhism, letting go of myself and merging with that no-thing-ness leads to something else.

When consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become no-thing, and discover that I am everything — or, more precisely, that I can be anything. Then, when I no longer strive to make myself real through things, I find myself “actualized” by them, says Dōgen.

each jewel in Indra’s Net mutually conditions and is conditioned by all the other jewels, then to become completely groundless is also to become completely grounded, not in some particular but in the whole web of interdependent relations.

Buddhism implies that I am groundless and ungroundable insofar as delusively feeling myself to be separate from the world, yet I have always been fully grounded insofar as I am not other than the world.