Previously published: Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997.

David R. Loy addresses head-on the most pressing issues of Buddhist philosophy in our time. What is the meaning of enlightenment--is it an escape from the world, or is it a form of psychological healing? How can one reconcile modern scientific theory with ancient religious teachings? What is our role in the universe? Loy shows us that neither Buddhism nor secular society by itself is sufficient to answer these questions. Instead, he investigates the unexpected intersections of the two.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 321-323 [Access article in PDF] Frederick J. Streng Book Award David Loy Interview The 1999 winner of the Frederick J. Streng Book Award is David R. Loy, professor on the Faculty of International Studies at Bunkyo University in Chigasaki, Japan. Professor Loy received the award for his book, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism, published (...) by Humanities Press (New Jersey) in 1996. The book places Western patterns of thought developed in tandem with Christian ideas into dialogic contact with Buddhism. It is thus a very Buddhist book, but a signal contribution to the practice of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Buddhist-Christian Studies asked David about his writing of the volume.Buddhist-Christian Studies: Why did you write this book?David Loy: It was the product of an existential crisis, both intellectual and personal. My father, who had always been healthy and full of life, suddenly became ill with pancreatic cancer. Then my Zen teacher Yamada Koun had a bad fall that led to his death a year later. Not long before that my relationship with him and the Sanbo Kyodan had become somewhat problematic. This threatened my 'spiritual ground'. Finally, I was without a job. All this gave me plenty of time not only to sit intensively but also to read widely everything I could find on death and related issues.Did you think that sitting and studying would lead to a book?I didn't know. I could feel something gestating. I realized something was needed in this area. I was (and still am) very impressed by the last two books of Ernest Becker, but despite their brilliance his notion of death-denial is a little off-center from a Buddhist perspective. Fear of death projects our problem into the future, while the groundlessness of our sense-of-self accounts better for our sense-of-lack right here and now.What was the final trigger for doing the book?Another Zen teacher suggested that I try to write a Zen teisho [sermon or talk]. I sat down but after a few lines so many other thoughts began to bubble up that I couldn't write them down fast enough. There was no obvious or immediate logical connection among them, but they kept coming. This went on for about two, almost non-stop, days. After that the thoughts slowed down. I read over the notes I'd written, which led to more ideas, and then I began to perceive their relationship. After five days or so I had a detailed outline for the book, and the real work began. [End Page 321]What kind of response to the book, both positive and negative, have you received?There have not been many reviews, but they have generally been positive. It's not an easy book to evaluate: it brings together many different thinkers and traditions in order to address many different issues. In the process it attempts what is almost a grand synthesis of Buddhism, existentialism, and psychotherapy around the notion of our 'sense of lack', which I argue motivates us all. This involves close readings of Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Nagarjuna, and many others. Unfortunately, the print is small and not easy to read, the cover is ugly, and the price is too high. For all these reasons readers have my sympathies! But there are some readers for whom the book really 'clicks'. I'm pleased that it seems to work on the existential as well as the intellectual level, for such people.After several years of reflection, would you write it any differently today?Yes, probably. The first thing I would do is take out the last chapter "Transcendence East and West," which was an afterthought and doesn't really fit in very well. As published, the chapter takes the concept of 'lack' into a new dimension which needs to be worked out much more carefully than I did in the book. It argues that, in place of the usual East-West dichotomy, it is more insightful to view South Asian Indian- influenced cultures as in some ways... (shrink)

Many Western philosophers are poorly informed about the issues involved in nonduality, since this topic is usually associated with various kinds of absolute idealism in the West, or mystical traditions in the East. Increasingly, however, this topic is finding its way into Western philosophical debates. In this "scholarly but leisurely and very readable" (Spectrum Review) analysis of the philosophies of nondualism of (Hindu) Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism, Loy extracts what he calls "a core doctrine" of nonduality of seer and (...) seen from these three worldviews and then applies the doctrine in various ways, including a critique of Derrida's deconstructionism. (shrink)

The Tao Tê Ching is probably the world's second most translated and annotated book , yet it remains among the most enigmatic. Of its eighty-one chapters, no one denies that the most important is the first, and many scholars go further to claim that it is the key to the whole work: if it is understood fully, all the rest may be seen to be implied. Unfortunately, the first chapter also happens to be the most ambiguous. But even so, after (...) so much attention can there be anything left to say? It seems to me that an important point has been missed or at least obscured, and that the popularity of certain translations has made this obscuration more prevalent recently. To correct this, I shall offer below a line-by-line explication of this crucial passage. The following interpretation first demonstrates the parallel structure of the first eight lines as signifying two different ways of experiencing: lines one, three, five and seven refer to the experience of Tao, and lines two, four, six and eight to our more usual way of experiencing the world. I shall suggest that the difference between these ways is the difference between our familiar dualistic experience and a much less common nondualistic way of experiencing in which there is no bifurcation between subject and object. Second, we shall see that the parallel structure unfolds dialectically: each succeeding pair of lines elaborates upon the issues that naturally arise in response to the preceding pair. In the process of showing this, I shall take sides on the two main controversies over this chapter: first, whether it should be interpreted cosmologically or ontologically/epistemologically , and second, whether lines, five and six should be punctuated to translate yü as ‘desire/intention’. My main thesis is that the traditional understanding of yü as ‘desire’ or ‘intention’ is an essential part of the meaning of the chapter. This is by no means an original claim, but why it is so important does not seem to have been noticed before and provides the reason for this paper. Wing-tsit Chan's criticism of such translations, that ‘intention interrupts the thought of the chapter’, 1 is thus a serious misreading of the text. (shrink)

(1994). Charles Darwin, Paul MacLean, and the lost origins of “the moral sense”: Some implications for general evolution theory. World Futures: Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 187-196.

Buddhism, By denying the subject, And advaita, By denying the object, Both resolve the problematic subject-Object relationship. That they are mirror-Images suggests that "nirvana" and "moksha" might amount to the same thing-Nonduality. "there is no self" equals "everything is the self." buddhism emphasizes "sunyata" because it is a phenomenological description of enlightenment. Advaita speaks of monistic "brahman" because it is a philosophical attempt to describe reality from the fictional "outside.".

Abstract In what ways was Nietzsche right, from a Buddhist perspective, and where did he go wrong? Nietzsche understood how the distinction we make between this world and a higher spiritual realm serves our need for security, and he saw the bad faith in religious values motivated by this need. He did not perceive how his alternative, more aristocratic values, also reflects the same anxiety. Nietzsche realised how the search for truth is motivated by a sublimated desire for symbolic security; (...) philosophy's attempt to create the world reflects the tyrannical will?to?power, becoming the most ?spiritualised? version of the need to impose our will. Insofar as truth is our intellectual effort to grasp being symbolically, however, Nietzsche overlooks a different reversal of perspective which could convert the ?bad infinite? of heroic will into the good infinite of disseminating play. What he considered the crown of his system?eternal recurrence?is actually its denouement. Having seen through the delusion of Being, Nietzsche still sought a Being within Becoming. Nietzsche is able to affirm the value of this moment only by making it recur eternally. Rather than the way to vanquish nihilism, will?to?power turns out to be pure nihilism, for nihilism is not the debacle of all meaning but our dread of that debacle and what we do to avoid it. (shrink)

This paper presented during the Physis: Inhabiting the Earth conference, Florence, Italy, October 28?31,1986 examines how new brain research, by radically expanding our knowledge of the physiological foundation for empirical social science, makes possible a new understanding of the nature of higher mind and the place of the human being in evolution. It reports research supporting a model of right, left and frontal brain interaction in forecasting. It also describes development of measures and methods indicating a primarily frontal brain guidance (...) system for higher mind consisting of futures, systems, social, moral, and managerial sensitivities. Driving and shaping this guidance system, and thereby human cultural evolution, appears to be the function of our dialectical construction of the Image of the Future. (shrink)

: This essay takes seriously the many Buddhist admonitions about ‘‘not settling down in things’’ and the importance of wandering freely ‘‘without a place to rest.’’ The basic thesis is that delusion is awareness trapped, and liberation is awareness freed from grasping. The familiar words ‘‘attention’’ and ‘‘awareness’’ are used to emphasize that the distinction being drawn refers not to some abstract metaphysical entity but simply to how our everyday awareness functions. This way of distinguishing between delusion and enlightenment is (...) not only consistent with basic Buddhist teachings but gives us insight into some of the more difficult ones, such as the way karma works and the Mahāyāna claim that ‘‘form is not other than emptiness, emptiness not other than form.’’ Moreover, this perspective illuminates some aspects of our contemporary life-world, including the particular challenges of modern technology and economics. It is important to see the implications for some of the social issues that concern us today. The constriction or liberation of awareness is not only a personal matter. What do societies do to encourage or discourage its emancipation? (shrink)

(1997). Scientific foundations for a global ethic at a time of evolutionary crisis. World Futures: Vol. 49, The Dialatic of Evolution: Essays in Honor of David Loye, pp. 3-17.

This collection reflects the confluence of two contemporary developments: the Buddhist-Christian dialogue and the deconstruction theory of Jacques Derrida. The five essays both explore and demonstrate the relationship between postmodernism and Buddhist-Christian thought. The liberating andhealing potential of de-essentialized concepts and images, language, bodies and symbols are revealed throughout. Included are essays by Roger Corless, David Loy, Philippa Berry, Morny Joy, and Robert Magliola.

Nāgārjuna and Dōgen point to many of the same Buddhist insights because they deconstruct the same type of dualities, mostly versions of our commonsense but delusive distinction between substance and attribute, subject and predicate. This is demonstrated by examining chapter 2 of the "Mūlamadhyamakakārikā" and Dōgen's transgression of traditional Buddhist teachings in his "Shōbōgenzō." Nonetheless, they reach quite different conclusions about the possibility of language expressing a "true" understanding of the world.

(1995). Prediction in chaotic social, economic, and political conditions: The conflict between traditional chaos theory and the psychology of prediction, and some implications for general evolution theory. World Futures: Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 15-31.

Illustrates how the theory of evolution can be expanded into a source of social guidance.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 151-155 [Access article in PDF] Buddhism and Christianity: A Multicultural History of their Dialogue. By Whalen Lai and Michael von Bruck. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001. xiv + 265 pp. This book is an abridged translation of Buddhismus und Christentum: Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, first published in 1997 by Verlag C. H. Beck in Munich. I do not know how much has been lost in the abridgement, (...) but this English version remains a treasure trove that deserves to be read and digested by everyone engaged in Buddhist-Christian dialogue.From the English title, I expected a somewhat dry work of intellectual history, summarizing dated doctrinal debates. This book provides much more than that. Most valuable is its emphasis on the historical and cultural context of Buddhist-Christian encounters, especially the poisonous legacy of Western colonialism (which still survives today as economic neocolonialism). These quite varied contexts have usually been decisive for the success or failure of the encounter, and as this nuanced but frank study shows, the failures have been at least as notable as the successes. Here, too, we must remember the past if we want to do more than keep repeating it. As well as identifying specific problems, there is a perceptive analysis of the obstacles to openness and dialogue in each case.The penultimate chapter includes a discussion of our Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, its conferences, and this journal. As a relative newcomer to the conversations, I found this particular example of contextualizing fascinating. In just the few conferences I have been able to attend, there have been so many facets to the dialogue that it has been difficult to gain a sense of the whole, to understand how the main threads have developed and interwoven. How well do we remember what has already been discussed, and often agreed upon? It is important that we do not just keep repeating ourselves, and I know of no other book that conveys the historical dimension of the dialogue so well. The silent, contemplative aspects of the encounter are also addressed: cross-cultural meditation groups, Christian Zen teachers, and visits to each other's monastic centers.A useful foreword by Hans Kung reviews his own contributions, including his [End Page 151] paradigm analysis of six different "general constellations" found in the Christian tradition (the original Jewish-apocalyptic paradigm, the ancient ecumenical-Hellenistic paradigm, the medieval Roman Catholic paradigm, the Reformation Protestant-evangelical paradigm, the modernist progress-oriented paradigm, and now the postmodern ecumenical paradigm) and six other constellations in the Buddhist tradition (Gautama's original paradigm, the Theravada- sravakayana paradigm, the Mahayana paradigm, the tantric Vajrayana paradigm, a defensive modernist paradigm, and most recently an emerging postmodernist paradigm), with the implication that we need to be careful to clarify which of the paradigms we are comparing.Inevitably, the focus is limited: India and Sri Lanka are discussed at length, but not southeast Asia; China and Japan, but not Korea; Germany, but not the rest of Europe. The Indian chapter is mostly about Tibetans in exile. I was intrigued by the generation gap between older, conservative Tibetan monks and more freethinking younger ones. Otherwise, the Indian dialogue seems not to have been as intensive as many other places in Asia, which makes sense since there are relatively few Buddhists in India today. Given the mass conversions of Dalits, the social context has usually been the emancipation of disadvantaged social groups, and is further complicated now by the increasing influence of neo-Hindu political movements, which makes all interreligious exchange more sensitive.The Sri Lankan dialogue, perhaps more than any other, has been preoccupied with the heritage of colonialism. Sinhalese take pride in being citizens of the only country to have shaken off colonial rule with a successful Buddhist revolution, which reversed the power relationship between the two religions. Evidently most Sinhala Buddhists, including much of the sangha, accept the need to defend Buddhism and Buddhist culture militarily, if necessary. The ruling political class that succeeded the British, a largely Buddhist- and Marxist-inspired elite, opted for constructing a national identity... (shrink)

The new information technologies hold out the promise of instantaneous, 24/7 connection and co-presence. But to be everywhere at once is to be effectively nowhere; to be connected to everyone and everything is to be effectively disconnected. Why then do we long for faster connections and fuller connectivity? The answer this paper proposes is that we are trying to fill our existential lack, our radical sense of inadequacy and incompleteness as human beings. From such a perspective, our pursuit of speed (...) and connectivity is doomed to failure insofar as it only exacerbates the condition we are fleeing. Rather than rushing faster, the Buddhist-inspired solution would have us slow down and directly investigate our sense of lack. (shrink)

Among scientists today a matter that many had assumed was long laid to rest is moving from the background to the foreground in the minds of the broad-gauged and the discerning. It is that what we call evolution theory requires a massive updating, integrating, and streamlining if it is to meet the needs of the 21st century. On one hand here is a planet with threats to the survival of ourselves and all species everywhere on the rise. On the other (...) hand are the sciences, to which we look for answers on how to meet the threats, in disarray. Evolution theory, for example, supposedly provides the grounding for all science. Yet behind an outdated and dangerously constricted assumption of unity, instead of any useful cohesion it offers a bewilderingly disparate and unfocused sprawl. How then are we to move toward the evolutionary gestalt or framework needed to pull together science into some new intelligibility? But of more immediate urgency, how are we to build an evolution theory that can provide the practical guidance-or road map to the future-to our species at a time of exponentially escalating confusion and need? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Evil as the Good?A Reply to Brook ZiporynDavid R. LoyI was surprised to receive this lengthy response to my short review—yet not displeased, for the important question is, of course, how much Professor Ziporyn's reply helps to clarify the issues at stake, which we agree deserve to be pursued. One of the many admirable aspects of his Evil and/or/as the Good is that, in addition to presenting the Tiantai (...) ethical position in its historical context, it argues forcefully for the validity and relevance of that approach today. Moreover, I am pleased at the way Ziporyn's response focuses the argument of his rich and dense book, so I welcome this opportunity to continue the discussion. And perhaps those who have read this far will also be pleased that I am able to present my main concerns somewhat more concisely.Ziporyn begins with the relationship between ultimate and provisional truth, usually the crux of the matter from a Mahāyāna perspective. In response to a point I make—that ethically the nondual 'ultimate' point of view needs to be supplemented by a provisional 'lower truth' that distinguishes between good and evil—he emphasizes that according to Tiantai "conventional truth and ultimate truth are actually identical" (his italics) and that the conventional truth embraces all possible assertions, beliefs, and positions. Later, he elaborates that "provisional truth is a portion of ultimate truth, in a peculiar omnicentric sort of whole/part relation in which each part in fact contains the whole." The important term remains identity, for according to Tiantai "the idea that two entities might be mutually implicative and dependent, not adventitiously but in their nature, and yet not identical, is logically impossible." Ethically, of course, this means something more than the interdependence of good and evil: it is not only that "the most horrible evils are ineradicable, built into the absolute unchangeable nature of all existence, and fully and eternally present even in Buddhahood," but that "greed, anger, and delusion would be seen to be identical with Buddhahood, in accordance with precisely this Tiantai doctrine of the interpenetration of good and evil."As in the original review, my main point is that this emphasis on the identity of conventional truth and ultimate truth is an important insight, but one that turns out to be quite problematic ethically. Its value is mostly epistemological and metaphysical: it helps us escape from the kind of dualism that often postulates some 'higher' transcendental reality corresponding to a 'higher' ultimate truth. Instead, the 'higher' is not separate from the provisional and conventional, but the truth (whether realized or not) is that the whole 'ultimate' is completely contained within each conventional part or provisional position.Dōgen somewhere makes the point that the goal is not to eradicate concepts (which is a dualistic approach to practice, seeking a purified mind that transcends language) but to liberate concepts. What becomes important is our ability to move [End Page 348] (and play) freely among the multiplicity of linguistic possibilities—in Ziporyn's terms, to 'recontextualize' without getting stuck in any particular context or conceptual system. Nothing is lacking in any of these possibilities; in terms of Indra's Net, each node manifests the whole. We are not liberated from language, except in the sense that we are not trapped in any particular language game; rather, we are liberated in language. We should not blame the victim: the problem is not language itself, but our tendencies to cling to some concepts, et cetera, more than others- including, for example, our dualistic tendency to discriminate between 'good' and 'evil' in order to identify with the former by annihilating the latter (a very timely topic, unfortunately).But good and evil for Ziporyn are more than interdependent. He claims that they are identical, and that is where difficulties arise. The epistemological point about the identity of the two truths becomes more problematical when we move into ethics, where the 'cash value' is somewhat more obvious and immediate, in the sense that we need ethics to help us cope with moral choices that we find ourselves required to make in daily life, in circumstances not always... (shrink)

Hegel's relationship to the Greek ideal of his day is well known: early in his career he saw the Greeks as an alternative to modernity, but by 1805 he had retreated from the Greek ideal, although he still admired the Greeks. Despite agreement that the Greeks played a central role in Hegel's thought, only a few commentators have offered an interpretation of Hegel's account of Greek ethical life. This dissertation presents just such an interpretation. ;I begin by situating Hegel's early (...) conception of Greece in the context of 18th- and 19th-century Romantic Hellenism. What emerges is a picture of Hegel as a thinker who appropriated the Romantic fascination with Greece for his own concerns, recasting the Hellenic ideal as an intersubjective one rather than an individualistic one. In recasting it, however, Hegel had to come to terms with a tension internal to the ideal understood intersubjectively; his famous retreat from Greece consequently occurred in part because his early conception of Greece was untenable. His mature works show the result of this transition on his conception of Greek ethical life: it is still an intersubjective ideal, but it has been refrained in order to emphasize the close relationship between subject and community which Hegel calls "beautiful individuality." I thus offer an interpretation of Hegel's account of Greece in which a weak form of subjectivity plays a central role. I then identify four forms of immediacy which Hegel criticized in Greek ethical life. He contends that they made Greek political life both normatively deficient and internally unstable, because they prevented Greek life from providing a context for the exercise of subjective particularity and subjective freedom. The penultimate chapter of the dissertation shows how Hegel thought these institutions developed in the history of Europe and how he thought the institutions of the modern state provide an adequate institutional sphere for the exercise of particularity. I close the dissertation by situating Hegel's critique of Greek ethical life within contemporary debates about particularity, arguing that a Hegelian politics preserves the laudable features of liberalism while answering some criticisms leveled against it. (shrink)

Hegel was attracted to the Greek ideal, but he ultimately rejected it as a model for the modern world. This article discusses four deficiencies he identified in ancient Greek ethical life: the immediate relationship between the subjective will of the individual and the ethical norms of thepolis, the absence of institutions that mediated citizens’ private goals with thepolis, the deficient conception of the human being which underlay slavery, and the granting of recognition on the basis of natural categories rather than (...) politically integrative norms. These deficiencies explain not only why Hegel thought the Greekpolishad to disintegrate under the onslaught of subjective particularity, but also why he rejected the Greek ideal as a model of social membership for modern ethical life. In addition, they illuminate his rejection of Fries and provide grounds for criticizing Rousseau. His account of the highly articulated modern state represents a response to the question of how the deficiencies of Greek ethical life can be overcome. (shrink)

During the 20th century two major ventures were launched to advance Darwinian evolution theory. Both involved historic visions and were vital steps for science and society, but then something happened on the way to the millennium. By mid-century the first venture had become a virtual scientific monopoly governed by the biology of the neoDarwinian paradigm. The second venture then set out in the 1980s to remedy the inadequacies of the neoDarwinian paradigm by widening the prospects for evolution theory. But overwhelmed (...) by the underlying mismatch between scientific abstraction and evolutionary reality the first venture established, it soon settled into a fierce attempt to further expand the territory for the neoDarwinian monopoly into what became a militant ideology for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. This special issue of World Futures contains the papers of a small "task force" of the General Evolution Research Group that set out in the summer of 2000 to try to put behind us what increasingly looms as the "old" paradigm, as well as the "old" story, of evolution. (shrink)