Deconstruction, Dependent Co-Arising, and Yin-Yang: Exploring Cause, Condition, and Context.

Dosti Regmi
January 8, 2025
10:18 am

Dr. Dosti Regmi

Language has flaws. We have seen words break things in our lives when they carried meanings we did not intend to express. When we have a dispute, the grudges we hold will be over certain words or phrases that were used. Noble Silence is Budha’s advice for word-weariness. They say, “Speak only when your words can improve on your silence.” We are often misunderstood and we cannot mend the word inflicted wounds. Words are fatal. They inflict violence upon the truth we hold. Words and bullets cannot be reversed they say. But words often fail to hit our targets. The essence is missed in the translation of meanings to words in the sender’s part and words to meanings in the receiver’s side. Buddha says there is no essence irrespective of the cause and conditions.

Another flaw that logocentrism carries is the binary view of the world. Good and bad habits. Healthy and unhealthy food. Good and bad people. I was brought up with the same binaries. The binaries creep into my solitude. “Either I am happy or I am sad.”, and “Either they like me or hate me.”

Derrida’s deconstruction critiques the idea of fixed, intrinsic meanings in language and philosophy. He argues that meaning is always deferred and no term or idea can stand independently of its relational context. There is nothing without context. The Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka school of Buddhism teaches sunyata (emptiness), asserting that all phenomena lack intrinsic existence and are interdependent. Like Derrida, Nagarjuna dismantles fixed concepts to reveal the dependent co-arising (pratityasamutpada) of all things.

So I started talking, at least to myself, in a binary-neutral language just like the gender-neutral language. I don’t jump to the opinion, the sun is so warm. There are a thousand shades of warmth while I am in the sun mixed with the chill of the blowing wind with a myriad dance of warmth and cold that gives that particular sensation. There was chill underlying the skin this winter day while I was inside the building, setting the stage for the warmth to arise. I don’t just label my feelings as anxiety when something is worrying me. I try to figure out what score I am in if getting burned alive is a 100 score. Reality is not dualistic. It lies somewhere in between in the gray zone.

Derrida says in his book On Grammatology that meaning always depends on what isn’t there. Nothing exists in pure isolation. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Everything carries traces of what is not there. When you think about breakfast, that word only makes sense because it carries traces of not-breakfast, like lunch and dinner. Like in the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, each side contains elements of its opposite. continuously transforming into one another to maintain balance. The same pattern is true with emotions, too. Your feeling of happiness right now carries traces of past happiness and past sadness. Each experience leaves a mark – a trace – that shapes how you understand the present moment. Just as Buddha says nothing has an essence in itself, everything has a cause or condition. Deridda’s deconstructionist says the same thing. There is nothing out of the context. Everything is in the context.

The traditional concept of The Book is one where all the truths are. Just like a Bhagawat Geeta or Dhammapada where you open any page and find a line that will show you the way. Or The Book that has a complete story or argument with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This idea of completeness is a common way of thinking, where knowledge is seen as something organized and finished like a book neatly placed on a shelf. However, Derrida noticed that this way of thinking is changing. Today, we gather information differently. You might read a news article, which links to a video, then to a social media discussion heated with debates for and against it. There’s no clear start or finish—just an endless network of ideas that connect in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.

The majority of people including me turn to spirituality and meditation in pursuit of meaning and bliss (which is just an elite-sounding word for pleasure). But the search for the meaning itself carries the trace of meaninglessness that our past pursuits had demonstrated. So the pursuit and try are doomed to fail. After all, do not try, do not search. They are the baits that will lure you into what you are not, what is not your home. Your home may be the same dullness and languish, who knows, and the definition of peace and pleasure would lose its meaning. Maybe the same ordinary things that we avoided in the pursuit of the extraordinary are in fact the extraordinary. Maybe, as Yuval Harari says, the road to true pleasure goes through boredom.

Mingyur Rimpoche says “Peace, calm and clarity is not the essence of meditation. Awareness is. Hence meditation can happen even in dullness”. Consciousness and awareness transcend the duality and wishing of the goodies. It embraces the other side as well.

Out of rhyme, a thought came to my mind. Let me search and play a particular song that is ringing in my mind. Maybe I think that song will give me peace and calm. But will that not mean that here-now is erroneously labeled boring and chaotic without even sincere scrutiny? Every thought and effort is switching the awareness from the inside to outside, here-now to elsewhere. When the focus is on the out-there, the here-now will fall into the blind spot of our awareness. Let me not try to escape. The pursuit is futile. There is futility in every pursuit. Pursuit is violence to what is.

And what is meaning? What is truth? What is beauty? Derrida says, “Beauty cannot happen twice.” He emphasizes the uniqueness and singularity of beauty as an experience. For Derrida, beauty is not a static quality that can be reproduced identically. It is an event—a specific convergence of time, context, perception, and emotion. When we encounter something beautiful, the experience is shaped by unique conditions that cannot be perfectly replicated. Even if we witness the same object or scene again, our perception and circumstances will have changed, altering the experience. So is the truth and meaning. Happening every moment but always new and afresh. Craving and clinging is the violence against the beauty and truth.