It could well be argued that death, or human awareness of mortality, is the
driving force behind all religion and philosophy, the conundrum of the
sphinx which we must all face someday. In earlier works (such as Breaking
the circle, SIU Press, 1993), I have illustrated ways in which the Indian,
Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhist tradition interpreted death, rebirth, and
nirvana, drawing heavily on the meditative visions of Buddhist monks and on
near-death experiences in each of these traditions.

In Lack and transcendence, Zen Master David Loy illuminates another
parallel tradition in Mahayana Buddhism: those philosophies which overcome
human sense of lack (suffering, duhkha) not by promising karmic retribution
or offering a meditative transcendence to other realms of consciousness,
but by identifying the changing self with the changing world and thus
overcoming our sense-of-self and sense of separation from everything else.

In charting the turbulent waters around this archipelago of the psyche, Loy
relies on three traditions which have significant influence and
implications for Western thought: psychotherapy, particularly of Freud,
Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, and Otto Rank; existentialism, particularly of
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegget, and Sartre; and Buddhism, particularly
as interpreted by Nagarjuna (150250?, founder of Indian Madhyamika
Buddhism), Hui-Neng (638-713, Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Ch'an Buddhism),
and Dogen Kigen (1200-1253, founder of Japanese Soto Zen).

In addition, Loy draws heavily upon Ernest Becker and James Carse in
developing his arguments about man's fears of facing his mortality, and on
Hajime Nakamura in his analysis of the differences of Indian and Japanese
societies. While readers may disagree as to whether the above figures
adequately represent the psychotherapeutic, existentialist, and Buddhist
traditions, these figures have been well selected for their common concerns
with mortality.

Loy is a philosophy professor of impressive breadth, who has spent decades
in Asia doing zazen as well as teaching contemporary philosophy and
studying the problems of the contemporary world. Loy proposes that a great
deal of psychological suffering is due to a sense of lack caused by our
unconscious desires to reify our egos and to make something objective and
permanent of our mortal existence. This sense of lack, in turn, is driven
by our unwillingness to face mortality. In Loy's poetic phrase: 'Time is
the canvas we erect before us to hide the sneering skull, the bottomless
void' (p. 39).

Thus far, there is nothing new about these arguments. Readers acquainted
with Foucault, Aries, and (Ernest) Becker will find much familiar here.
However, Loy extends Becker's thesis that our denial of death leads to vain
searches for fame and conspicuous consumerism, to embrace even our modem
pursuit of romantic attachments and the very myth of technological progress
itself. He goes yet one step further in suggesting the more radical
Buddhist thesis that what we fear is not only our future deaths, but a
radical realization of our impermanence now.

Even the terror of death represses something, for that terror is preferable
to facing one's lack of being now. Death-fear at least allows us to project
the problem into the future. In that way we avoid facing what we are (or
are not) right now .... The death fear is itself symbolic of a yet deeper
fear, that right here and now I am not real (pp. 27-28).

Loy critiques the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger for their
failures to fully cognize non-self and impermanence, and attacks all
'fame-projects' which purport to give their authors some fleeting
permanence in a universe of constant change. At times his argument becomes
complicated by the need to use terms for subjects and objects in English.
Indeed, there is an ongoing debate between philosophical linguists: are
Indo-European languages which require subjects and objects more
sophisticated (so in some sense more 'correct') than languages like
Japanese which blur subjects, objects, and causal agency? Or are they
rather strait-jackets which impel us to seek agencies and imply subjects
when in fact everything can be viewed as a single flowing flux? Loy's Zen
Buddhist views proffer the latter approach:

A sense-of-self can never expel the trace of lack that constitutes it
insofar as it is illusory; while in the most important sense we are already
self-existing, because the infinite set of differential traces that
constitutes each of us is nothing less than the whole net (p. 91).

Loy repeatedly uses animals as examples of beings who are not preoccupied
with questions of self, future, and death. He quotes with approval the
lilies of the field, 'which take no thought for the morrow' (p. 35);
Rilke's 'the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in
front, and moves... in eternity' (p. 49), in contrast to the human 'animal
who endeavors to real-ize himself in ways that keep unravelling' (p. 98).

On one level, Loy is indeed advocating that we learn to live moment by
moment, like the animals, less caught up in projects of fame and social
status. This can be achieved by meditation and enlightenment, not to attain
some different realm of existence, but to realize our interconnectedness
with everything else:

In one way, nothing becomes different: one still gets up in the morning,
eats breakfast, goes to work, and so on. Yet there is something timeless
about these activities. In place of the apparently solid self that does
them and feels them to be lacking something, there is a groundless and
therefore indisturbably peaceful quality to them (p. 48).

On the other hand, Loy is not arguing that we abandon human philosophizing,
religion, or responsibility for our human condition. Quite to the contrary,
he is keenly aware of the ecological and political problems which plague
our planet. Rather than facing them with more human contrivances and
policies alone, however, Loy suggests a change of mentality which alone can
overcome the snowballing effects of consumptive materialism:

The ecological crisis, which is no longer impending but something we are
now well into, signifies the end of this collective dream [of technological
progress], although it remains to be seen whether our collective psyche
will recognize the fact in time (p. 150) ... Indra's Net locates the sacred
dimension in this world not by privileging particular social structures or
even Homo sapiens as a species, but by sacralizing the totality. The crisis
of the biosphere testifies to our need for this type of universalist
perspective, not for a 'higher world' that is other than and therefore
opposed to this world, but for the kind of overview that is able to
evaluate and respond to the needs of the whole because it is not limited by
the demands of a specific nexus such as one's own social class or nation or
species. Since rain forests and whales cannot vote or protest, we must
realize that their needs are our needs. Perhaps that is what is unique
about Homo sapiens: we are the species which can transcend itself by making
that leap to identify with everything (p. 172).

Nor is this recognition a merely passive meditative state. In the best
sense, it enables engagement in activity, not as a self choosing to
participate, but as a human who recognizes her inseparability from
everything in her environment.

Loy draws upon Irvin Yalom: 'Engagement does not logically refute the
lethal questions raised by the galactic perspective, but it causes these
questions not to matter .... Wholehearted engagement in any of the infinite
array of life's activities not only disarms the galactic view but enhances
the possibility of one's completing the patterning of the events of one's
life in some coherent fashion' (p. 127).

As Becker's solution to the Denial of Death involves recognizing our own
mortality and discovering more meaningful life-projects than collecting
fame and money before we die, Loy's solution to the Sense of Lack involves
recognizing the ultimacy of our groundlessness, and learning to live in the
now, conscious of the interpenetrating interdependence of the whole. We
achieve true selflessness, not simply by engaging ourselves in some
movement or cause which in turn can be an origin of egoistic activity, but
also by realizing our inherent worthlessness, which in turn liberates us to
work for the whole with both engagement and psychological detachment:

This whole book is an argument that in the end we cannot avoid religious
terms .... (p. 150) The question, finally, is not whether the world can be
resacralized, but whether we will sacralize it fetishistically, because
unconsciously, or wholeheartedly, because awake (p. xvii).

Overall, this book is an intellectual tour de force in the Mahayana
Buddhist tradition: a 'Guide to Letting Go for the Chronic Worrier'; an
intellectual proof that nothing needs proving and there is no one to prove.
Yet Loy's philosophical depth belies the practical applicability of the
teachings he embraces. These Buddhist approaches to mortality are not only
rhetorical arguments but real approaches to deathbed counselling used by
Japanese Buddhist monks in our respective traditions.

Zen Buddhist monks tell their terminal patients: 'You have nothing to fear,
for all that exists is now. If you feel pain, feel the pain, but do not
react against it. If you fear separation, realize that in one sense
everything is already separated, and in another sense nothing is ever
separated. All things flow in cycles of life and death, and you are a part
of the cycle of all things, so flow with it. Live each moment of your life
without attachment or fear'. Indeed, this was the teaching of many samurai,
and leads the more reflective of patients and families to a philosophical
acceptance of their state.

The vast majority of Chinese and Japanese Buddhists subscribed not to the
meditative Ch'an/Zen tradition, but to the tradition of devotion to the
heavenly Pure Land of Amida. Pure Land monks tell their terminal patients:
'You have nothing to fear, for you will soon be relieved from all physical
suffering. The Bodhisattva Amida will greet you as you depart from this
world, to take you up into the Pure Land of Infinite Life and Light. There
you may meet your departed parents and friends, and free from the
encumbrances of this old physical body, you may meditate and commune until
you all enter nirvana together. This has been promised by the Sacred
Sutras, and has been observed by thousands of your forefathers on their
deathbeds. Meditate on the holy name of Amida, and look forward to your
journey in peace'.

As one concerned with counselling terminal patients and their bereaved
families, I have seen countless hospitalized, bedridden Japanese
grandmothers in their 80s and 90s, rarely visited by their families, and
with little to look forward to in their remaining years. On rare occasions
I encounter an unusually bright and optimistic octogenarian, and when I ask
the reason, I am often assured 'The Buddha Amida is soon coming to reunite
me with my husband and family'.

I sense that Loy's Zen Buddhism and this Pure Land Buddhism of the typical
Japanese grandmother are complementary rather than contradictory. For the
existentialist who fears 'that right here and now he is not real' (p. 28),
Loy's Zen tradition will take him to the root of those fears, prove his
unreality, and convince him that only in interdependent interaction can
true peace of mind be found. For the grandmother or Toyota line-worker who
fears that death will separate her from everything, the Pure Land tradition
promises the continuity of a better world to come for those who believe.

Lack and transcendence proposes a sophisticated, erudite, and challenging
approach to transcending our mortality through transcending our notions of
selfhood. While he cannot claim to represent every Buddhist tradition, Loy
deconstructs our fears of mortality in terms a modem audience ought well to
appreciate. We might only wish that the publisher had seen fit to use
somewhat larger type and margins. We should look forward to a sequel volume
in which Loy applies his philosophical discoveries to the crises of
civilization and the environment.