I have found Buddhism to be distinctive for the clarity and sophistication it brings to understanding the dynamics of the self. In much the same way as systems theory does, Buddhism undermines the dichotomy between self and other and belies the concept of a continuous, self-existent entity, It then goes further than systems theory in showing the pathogenic character of any reifications of the self. It goes further still in offering methods for transcending these difficulties and healing this suffering. (158)
This built nicely on last week's explorations of Daoist ideas of a "porous self," part of a "liquid ecology" which makes it absurd to think of ourselves and our consciousness as apart from an "environment" rather than as emerging from it. I've not had occasion to segue from Daoist to Buddhist ideas in a class before, and this worked well - probably because the Buddhisms in question are shaped by the synergy of Buddhist and Daoist elements in the sinosphere.
Dogen's meta-metaphorical reflections on flowing mountains and water palaces had a new kind of resonance coming after Daoist inner alchemical accounts of bodies as mountainous waterscapes. Of course Dogen warns against Daoist notions that things "arise spontaneously, independent of any form of causality" when they are in fact the compassionate manifestations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, who know how to deploy reality itself in ways conducive to the saving of suffering beings, but that was farther than we were ready to go, even in imagination!
What we were perhaps ready to partake of was a suggestion of Macy's, shaped by a kindred Mahayana appreciation of the way wisdom allows us to redeploy "pathogenic" metaphors in compassionate ways, that
The ecological self, like any notion of selfhood, is a metaphoric construct, useful for what it allows us to perceive and how it helps us to behave. It is dynamic and situational, a perspective we can choose to adopt according to context and need. Note the words: we can choose. Because it's a metaphor and not a rigid category, choices can be made to identify at different moments with different dimensions or aspects of our systematically interrelated existence... (159)
Learning that everything is fluid, liquid, interdependent can seem like a disempowering (or liberating) dissolving of all in all, but this reminds us that we can, and do, choose better and worse ways of perceiving and behaving in our overlapping worlds.
Joanna Macy, "The Greening of the Self" [from World as Lover, World as Self, 1991], in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, ed. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, 2nd ed. (Golden Sufi Center, 2016), 151-62
