Serenity is the coming to rest of all ways of taking things, the repose of named things: no truth has been taught by a Buddha for anyone, anywhere.

We are not saved by discovering any linguistic truth, for there is no such liberating truth to identify with.

This demotes all Buddhist categories to "skillful means," pointers that may be helpful but not if we take the finger for the moon.


--- David R. Loy, whose quoting of Nagarjuna formed the title

not trapped by discriminative concepts

Nowhere is there a principle that is right in all circumstances.

The method we use yesterday we may discard today and use again in the future;

there are no fixed right and wrong to decide whether we use it or not.


The capacity to pick times and snatch opportunities,

and never be at a loss to answer events belongs to the wise.


--- from the Book of Lieh-tzu

overlooked

According to Buddhism, what needs to be UNsettled is neither the God-question nor the Buddha-question but most of all the "commonsense" everyday world, riddled as it is with unconscious, because automatized, ontological commitments [e.g. to objectively existing self and other].

Merely by subverting such ontological claims, and without making any metaphysical claims of its own, the Buddhist deconstruction of all self-existence (especially our own) can allow something else to manifest---something that has always been there/here yet has been overlooked in our concern to reify (objectify) things in order to fixate on them.

Such deconstruction can heal us by revealing a less dualistic way of understanding and experiencing the relation between us and the supposedly objective world we suppose ourselves to be "in." ....this leaves the world ESSENTIALLY mysterious in a fashion that cannot be resolved and does not need to be resolved.


--- David R. Loy

deconstructing a "commonsense" dualism

...if there is no one nontemporal who is born and dies,

then there are only the events of birth and death.

But if there are only those events, with no one IN them,

then there really is no birth and death.


Such is the consequence of nonduality between me

and that most uncomfortable attribute of all,

"my" birth/death.


--- David Loy commenting on a passage from Dogen's "Genjo-koan"

fixed boundaries?

If the "self" is a construct, so is the "external" world,

for when there is no inside there is no outside.


--- David R. Loy

will, be thine - Meister Eckhart

According to Mahayana, our identity is always SHUNYA, "empty,"

yet realizing that is not problematic,

because our emptiness/formlessness is liberated

to take on the form or forms appropriate to the situation.


--- from "Awareness Bound and Unbound" by David R. Loy

how could there ?

How could there be "a self" ?


Wouldn't it require a second one

to know the first ?


How could there be "an other" ?

Wouldn't that require a self ?

who ?

Suffering (positive and negative)

is synonymous with

dualism.