Buddhism & Process within Process-Buddhism

Within Process Buddhism, the sides of Buddhism and Process both debate and dialogue with one another.

First, Process articulates reality and experience categorically.

Then, Buddhism responds that this speculation obscures the true nature of the non-categorical condition of these categories.

Then, Process responds that the Buddhist critique of the categorical and its emphasis on the non-categorical undermines the possibility of thought and practice.

Then, Buddhism responds that it includes the categorical within a graded scale that leads us to the non-categorical.

Then, Process responds with the emphasis that the categorical scheme is only ever supposed to be adequate to, not identical with, reality and experience (such an identity is impossible anyway due to the temporal nature of being), so the abstract categorical scheme is always subject to revision upon encounter with non-categorical concrete experience.

Then, Buddhism responds with the emphasis that repeated creative refinement of the categorical scheme is appropriate as long as it is informed by and aimed towards encounter with the non-categorical conditions of experience, which is none other than our own gnosis qua buddha-nature.

Then, Process says to Buddhism “I heed your call to pay attention to the profound non-categorical condition of experience that is my own ultimate nature: emptiness and clarity in blissful union, compassionately aimed towards the liberation of self and other by unleashing our core potential, no longer simply reflecting upon but supremely exemplifying, in our very mode of being-becoming, the creative advance into novelty.”

Then, Buddhism says to Process “I recognize the vast depth and breadth of your skillful means in logic, metaphysics, and phenomenology producing a systematic and inclusive categorical scheme that is constantly subject to revision by ever more comprehensive perspectives that never close but open us up to the non-categorical ultimate free from all extremes.”

By the end, Buddhism and Process are consummated in union but never do they become “one”, yet they can no longer be considered “many” either, since in “Process Buddhism” they form the indivisible dipolar aspects of the same comprehensive perspective in-process.

This dialectic-dialogue as the gradual formation of a Process Buddhist synthesis has been presented here diachronically as a successive series of calls and responses, but it should also be understood as forming the synchronic logical structure immanent to any instance of Process Buddhism as a whole.