Sublime

Engaging in discussion or conflict is useful when another person respects us, values our well-being, and is open to changing their mind, but when it comes to immovable people or the opinions of strangers, we have to be able to tolerate the distress of rifts that can’t ever be mended.

Mahayanists may be perfectly correct in assuming that the Buddha intended this emphasis as an upaya, a skillful means of enabling one to realize, concretely and vividly, the absurd vicious circle of desiring not to desire, or of trying to get rid of selfishness by oneself. For this is certainly the conclusion to which the practice of the Buddha’s d

Realdialektik is best stated as the infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity. The utter distinction between, and yet possible relation of, time and eternity is the real dialectic.

One more weirdness; one more crazy, deep-rooted delusion that I’m stuck with. I am stuck with it. And in time, I’ll have to do something about it. In spite of what my father will say or do to me, in spite of the poisonous rottenness outside the wall where I might be exiled, I’ll have to do something about it. That reality scares me to death.

That way of experiencing life as either/or, and ourselves in terms of have or have not, is the shape of our most basic conflicts. The koan challenges us not to answer the question, but to radically escape from its (and our own) arbitrary dichotomies.

Nagarjuna’s method is simply to show that all things are without “self-nature” (svabhava) or independent reality since they exist only in relation to other things. Nothing in the universe can stand by itself–no thing, no fact, no being, no event—and for this reason it is absurd to single anything out as the ideal to be grasped. For what is singled