Situation
“What exists in reality is at one with the Life of the universe. This view may seem to leave us out of the picture altogether, but it only means that in our looking and listening, the activities of looking and listening have emerged somewhere from the depths of the universe. Our looking and listening and all the other things we do issue from a point where all things form a single living bond…..”1
Whether it be substance or essence, ens or esse, being or becoming, universal or particular- a great fixation in western philosophy has been with ‘being’ as a problem to be explained. Not that such an approach is absent from humanity in Eastern or South Asia. Nor that the ways in which this problem has been considered in the east have been absent from the west. Nor that these designations of east and west are anything other than arbitrary and relative.
In a very, very truncated and crude rendering, it could be said that positive “being” was privileged in the west, while negative, or non-being was considered of great importance in the east. As early as the Vedas, the fear of restriction, or of being bound and thus afflicted was in evidence as a central concern in South Asia, taking precedence over “beginnings”, while certainty in “whatness” or “howness” questions came to the fore as a concern in the west.
No doubt the concatenation of respective circumstances of these human societies gave direction and emphasis to these features, but of course for any tradition to be alive it should be responsive and changing. All together, the differentiated spiritual and philosophical systems emerge as the filling out of a wider vista of human consciousness. They could be regarded as a diversification of expression unified at the root in human experience. Whatever my own disposition may be that I favour some interpretations historically more developed in the east should not be taken as anything more than an example of natural variation inherent in human populations everywhere.
However I am sensitive to the prevalence of certain problems which have become super-emphasised in modern culture, particularly in the west. Though I think I recognise the conditions that underlie these problems, I do think there are more helpful and more harmful ways with which these underlying conditions can be addressed. The emphasis on “identity” and “we, them, our characteristics and culture vs theirs” is one such unhelpful reaction to the problems of underlying, economic conditions.
You probably see here the way in which Buddhist concepts of “no-individual-self” and “impermanence”, even out of a purely Buddhist context and in very mundane applications, could be of great benefit. Again, it must be stressed that the negative-emphasis in the characterisation of being, or non-being, emptiness, nothingness in various schools of Buddhist philosophy is not nihilism. In fact the very duality of nihilism/eternalism was an explicit concern (explicit in it’s rejection) of Buddhist thought from very early on.
In any case, binding, fixing, imposing, grasping, rejecting, ignoring when applied to human beings, and indeed other sentient beings, in short – objectifying and manipulating sentient beings rather than arranging beneficially the material conditions of society is something that has only, will only, can only foster more suffering.
Having the levers of social media influence, of which identity culture, (of every variety- but in recent years increasingly of the antagonist sorts; the political, cultural, ethnic, national, even religious and sexual) is a major bloodstream, as the ‘private’ possessions of - to put it bluntly- amoral, positively malicious persons, entwined with the national security and intelligence agencies of the western power(s) is a very menacing situation.
“Nishida Kitaro, The Man and His Thought”, Nishitani Keiji, Chisokudo Publications, Nagoya, Japan, 2016