ABSTRACT
We live in interesting times, and are fortunate to witness the encounter between an irresistible force and an immovable object. The irresistible force is the Buddhist tradition, which has swept across Asia in past centuries and now impacts the world as a whole. The immovable object is the Western tradition, along with its entrenched ethnocentrism and lingering attitudes of intellectual ascendancy. Of particular interest is the encounter between the notions of selfhood and identity, so central to Western thought, and the radical challenge to these assumptions posed by the Buddhist teachings of non-self. Nothing is quite so cherished in Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Euro-Enlightenment, Romantic-American and contemporary psycho-spiritual civilization as the self, which one might even say acts as the central organizing principle around which Western culture is patterned. And nothing is quite as uniquely Buddhist as the critique of this idea.
