Whatever is dependently co-arisen…is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way. […] Whoever sees dependent arising also sees suffering and its arising and its cessation as well as the path.

It is not the nature of prajna (mystical intuition) to remain in a state of sunyata (the void) absolutely motionless. It demands of itself that it differentiates itself unlimitedly, and at the same time it desires to remain in itself. This is why sunyata is said to be a reservoir of infinite possibilities, and not just a state of mere emptiness. Differentiating itself and yet remaining itself undifferentiated, and thus to go on eternally in the work of creation…we can say that it is creation out of nothing. Sunyata is not to be conceived statically but dynamically, or better, as at once static and dynamic.

If God is really unconditional love, his self-emptying must be total, not partial. It must not be that God becomes something else by his partial self-giving, but that in and through his total self-emptying God is something—or more precisely, God is each and every thing. This emphasis, however, should not be taken to signify pantheism. On the contrary, only through this total kenosis and his self-sacrificial identification with everything in the world is God truly God. Here, the reality and actuality of God, which is entirely beyond conception and objectification, is fully realized. This kenotic God is the ground of the kenotic Christ. God is not truly God if God the Father continues to be God in the self-emptying of the Son of God. […] This means that kenosis or emptying is not an attribute (however important it may be) of God, but the fundamental nature of God himself. God is God, not because he had the Son of God take a human form and be sacrificed, while he himself remained God, but because he himself is a suffering God, a self-sacrificial God through his total kenosis.

Death is the ending of everything that you know. It is the ending of every attachment—all the money you have accumulated, which you cannot take with you—therefore you are frightened. Fear is part of your life. And so whatever you are, however rich, however poor, however highly placed, whatever power you have, there is the ending, which is called death. And what is it that is dying? It is the “me” with all the accumulations that it has gathered in this life, all the pain, the loneliness, the despair, the tears, the laughter, the suffering that is the “me” with all its words. […] Can one live with death and understand the meaning of ending? That is to understand the meaning of negation; ending one’s attachments, ending one’s beliefs, by negating. When one negates, ends, there is something totally new. So, while living, can one negate attachment completely? That is living with death. Death is an ending and has extraordinary importance in life. Not suicide, not euthanasia, but the ending of one’s attachments, one’s pride, one’s antagonism or hatred for another. When one looks holistically at life, then the dying, the living, the agony, the despair, the loneliness, and the suffering are all one movement. When one sees holistically, there is total freedom from death. There is a sense of ending and therefore there is no continuity; there is freedom from the fear of not being able to continue, even though the body will be destroyed.

An organism is just its responses to those aspects of the milieu that perturb its stability, and its milieu is always the milieu of this or that active and self-bounding being. Whereas traditional organicist models were explicitly models – such that one being or mode of relations was taken to be normative – systems theory, or the synaptic model, appears to liberate itself from the body. Models of emergence regard the whole to be a contingent outcome, and regard each aspect of that whole not as a part or organ, but as a function or operation. There is no closed or bounded form from which one might either explain, judge or derive relations: so it is not the case that there is either a transcendent cause (such as God as harmonizing principle of reason) or an immanent causality (where the organism bears a form that it ought to maintain and that might define and govern relations in advance). Indeed, it is just this distinction between life as norm/model and life as potentiality for relations that might allow us to begin to mark a further distinction between vitalism in general and organicism.

The religious faith of a Tiantai Buddhist is that there is some being in the universe who has lived the specific self-made nightmare that is my own plight, and has made good on it, has found the contextualization that allows its inherent Buddhahood to shine forth, and that this being has vowed to connect to other sentient beings in the universe suffering from a similar set of values, i.e., set of delusions, and to respond to their special needs by helping them contextualize this in a way that will again open up its eternal Buddhahood, will show that this folly has itself always already been Buddhahood. My good faith is ultimate and unimpeachable: I am being what I am being. Even though that inevitably goes wrong and hurts everybody, including me, that does not mean it has to be abandoned and replaced with someone else’s values, i.e., someone else’s folly, someone else’s obsessions and one-sidedness—whether that someone else is a Buddha, or the Lord God, or a wise man, or an ethicist, or a jurist representing society. The divine has no values! That is atheism! But that means all values are equally divine—if we can find the way to divinize them—and that is the challenge, the sole religious task!