The Educational Idea of Buddhism from the View of Desire

ABSTRACT

This study aims to understand Buddhism in the view of desire and to discuss how to communicate modern theory of desire with the linguistic viewpoints of Buddhism. In modern linguistic structuralism, language has the fundamental lack that makes impossible to show the real world perfectly. Buddhism and J. Lacan s linguistic view have the common feature that the limit of language inevitably makes discrimination that justify to give birth the Subject. The discrimination between I and others constitutes disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity, and these kinds of misunderstanding about immutable self make an obsession of dichotomy between One and Others. In Buddhism, there is no unchangeable subject behind all activities in the world. There is suffering but no sufferer, which means there is desire but no subject of desire. As Lacan s opinion, man takes the other s desires as his owns and mistakes himself for the subject of desire, but he can not realize that he is enslaved to his own desire. As there is no sufferer in the suffering, as there are no subjects in pleasure that teach us to free ourself from the desire through Buddhistic truth such an Emptiness of self. It is impossible to attain that man adheres to know the truth of world and the essence of things by way of congenitally limited language. In Buddhism, knowledges are composed of chains of concepts which mean Emptiness unto themselves, in other words, meanings are merely formed by the plays of differences in concepts. In that reasons, we experience a sense of alienation from the knowledge and fail to integrate the fixed knowledges with the dynamic life-world. It is available in modern world that teach us to overcome the desire by realizing the true meaning of Emptiness.