Thich Nhat Hanh, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Diamond Sutra (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2010) ("A person has to get rid of the four notions of self, a person, a living being, and a life span in order in order to have the wisdom of nondiscrimination. 'Self' refers to a permanent, changeless identity. but since according to Buddhism. nothing is permanent and what we normally call a self is made entirely of nonself elements, there is really no such entity a a self. Our concept of self arises when we have concepts about things that are not self. Using the sword of conceptualization to cut reality into pieces, we call one part 'I' and the rest 'not I'." Id. at 45-46. "All the media around us encourage us to focus on ourselves. What is self? It is our imagining. The barrier between self and nonself is created by deluded mind. How do we remove that barrier and liberate ourselves from the notion of self? The Buddha advises us to meditate on the nonself nature of things Whenever we look at a leaf, a pebble, a cloud, a river, a baby, a society, or a human being, we look deeply into it to see its nonself nature, so we can liberate ourselves from the notion of self. The meditation on nonself needs to be practiced every day, in every moment of our daily lives. Whether we're eating, walking, siting, working in the garden, whenever we look at other people, the clouds, the grass, we see that we are in those elements and those elements are in us; we are not separate." "We often forget that the human being is a creature that evolved from animals, plants, and minerals and that humans appeared only recently in the evolution of life on Earth. When we think we have the right to do anything we want and that other animals, plants, and minerals are only the means for us to get what we want, then we have a very wrong notion about what it is to be a human being. . . ." Id. at 145-146. "Subhuti asks what this sutra should be called and how we should practice its teachings, and the Buddha answers that is should be called The Diamond That Cuts through Illusions. A diamond has the capacity to cut through all ignorance and afflictions. He also says that we should practice in an intelligent way, that we should learn to look deeply so that we will realize that even transcendent understanding is not an independently existing dharma and that his teaching has no separate nature. That is why Subhuti says, 'The Tathagata has nothing to teach.' " Id. at 89.).
* " 'I don't have illusions. I'm one of those people who see through to nothing.' " Flannery O'Connor, Good Country People, reprinted in Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1985), at 263-281.
