Samsara Diagnostics

We do not seek a beyond to life; rather we seek the beyond which is within life already. Life is already too much for itself.

What is Samsara Diagnostics?

In Buddhism, Samsara is the name for the realm we inhabit — the cycle of birth and death. Samsara is the domain marked above all by suffering.

The Buddha diagnosed the source of this suffering as consciousness, and especially the way that the self which only exists in consciousness is constantly plagued by the problem of desire. Having made his diagnosis, the Buddha pointed the way towards Nirvana, a state where the self was no-self, and desire was extinguished.

However, as Buddhism traveled from India to the far reaches of the East, it took root on the island of Japan, where Zen Buddhism produced a profound realization — Nirvana is Samsara. Salvation is therefore not to be sought beyond life, but only in and through life. Nirvana is simply a mode of being-in Samsara.

We are thus forced to re-think the nature of emancipation, traveling beyond the Buddha’s teaching of unity with nothingness, and discovering afresh the brutal path which has been inexorably carved for us as linguistic creatures.

But this strange maneuver of embracing (even enjoying!) suffering seems to take us beyond even the Buddha's diagnosis. Perhaps the answer to suffering is not to look to the vegetal life of nature or the undifferentiated flux of the animal, but rather to press further into the contradiction which we humans are – to witness it, to embody it, to mediate it, and make something beautiful from it all.

Here we begin to traverse the space between peaceful smile of the deceased Buddha to the agony of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross, crying out in utter abjection. For it's only his brutal death which opens the door to resurrection, which is not simply life, but life redoubled – a radiant and disturbing excess!

The Samsara Diagnostics project puts Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Christianity in conversation with Buddhism, asking questions like: What can the human capacity for self-destruction teach us about what we are? What if lack is more fundamental than wholeness? Is freedom the result of incompleteness? Can we have freedom without contradiction or suffering?