When we despair in the right way, what happens? Abandoning the hope that we will eventually become something, we yield to our nothingness and discover how we have always been everything. As Dogen expressed it in Genjokoan, to forget oneself is to be actualised by myriad things, which is to perceive oneself as all things. What does such mutual interpenetration imply about the meaning of life? For Buddhism, meaning too is neither objective nor subjective. Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless but what might be called meaningfree. To forget oneself and become nothing is to wake up and find oneself in or, less dualistically, as a situation -- not confronted by it but one with it -- and if one is not self-preoccupied then meaning arises naturally within that situation. As Buber put it, you start with yourself in order to forget yourself and immerse yourself in the world; you understand yourself in order not to be preoccupied with yourself.
David Loy, Beyond Good and Evil? A Buddhist critique of Nietzsche
