The mode of creative synthesis that Process Buddhism both deploys and exemplifies is not sublation or Hegelian-style reconciliation of contradiction. It is rather what we can term “asymmetrical interdependence,” where oppositional contrasts are affirmed to be both mutually or symmetrically implicated at the level of conceptual thought (each depends on the other notionally), but asymmetrically related at the level of actual practice (the relative, typically subordinated, term is affirmed to condition the absolute, typically superordinate, term, but not the reverse).
A case example would be: rather than developing a synthetic notion of Becoming that unfolds from the dialectical interplay of Being and Non-Being, they are understood to be asymmetrically interdependent. Being and Non-Being are mutually implicated in that the identity of each depends on its difference from the other and so neither can be found independently of the other, which entails that both notions are empty of inherent existence of their own. This emptiness of inherent existence is the very ground of the contrast itself, which suggests that Non-Being (which is aligned with emptiness due to its negative character) is a condition for Being but not the reverse. Yet, to re-emphasize their mutually implicated nature, we never find Non-Being alone, by itself, independent of Being. This ensures that Being exists, but it is by nature empty (impermanent, unsatisfying, not-self), and therefore it is *open* to becoming more. This is not a specific, rationally necessary form of Becoming but a plural, “molecular” becoming that unfolds from the open/empty space of Being itself.
Here is a situation where a contrast is harmonized in a kind of state of dynamic equilibrium where the dialectical tension is preserved without resolution (this resonates with Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka and Adorno’s negative dialectics) which facilitates a fecund open space where the creative and dialogical play of difference can unfold (this resonates with Deleuze’s affirmation of pure difference and Bakhtin’s dialogic theory).
This same dynamic equilibrium is why Process Buddhism (as a creative integration of Process philosophy and Buddhist thought) remains systematically incomplete and metabolically open, which allows it to iteratively and continuously integrate data from the actual world into its own process of development, without reducing that data to some autopoietic function that would self-enclose Process Buddhism into an internally inconsistent and only purportedly self-sufficient “master” theory of everything. The collection and integration of the data is conditioned by the underlying subjective aim of Process Buddhism, which is to undermine dualism (at every level, from the metaphysical to political to soteriological) and arrest the negative consequences that flow from such dualism (ecological collapse being one particularly existentially threatening consequence of entrenched dualism).
Holopoiesis 