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
Monday, March 28, 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Loy has also written an interesting variation on this theme as follows: "merely by subverting such ontological claims the Buddhist deconstruction of self-existence (especially our own) can allow something else to become apparent---something that has always been apparent yet is overlooked in our preoccupation with satisfying desires and trying to make ourselves more real (self-existent). For Nagarjuna this is the everyday world experienced as Nirvana, since there is no specifiable difference whatever between them except for our deluded way of "taking" the world."
ReplyDelete