Becoming Responsibly Responsive

Abstract

This chapter explores the concept of being responsibly responsive and examines how we might become responsibly responsive from three different perspectives. Firstly, drawing on the practices of the four reflections and four exact realizations, the author examines the role of language in dominating our worldview and how the habitual force of hypostatization and reification might hinder us from seeing things as they really are—which is the moral basis for becoming responsibly responsive. Secondly, the author explores the educational significance of the injunctions of the four noble truths for overcoming the stultifying effects of passivity brought about by pain. Thirdly, drawing on Lusthaus’s (Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch’eng Wei-shih Lun. New York, NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002) analysis of the appropriational circuit between the grasper and the grasped as well as Pinar’s (Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution, and Curriculum Theory: An Introduction. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution, and Curriculum Theory (pp. 1–15). The Proceedings of the Rochester Conference (Rochester, New York, May 3–5, 1973), 1974) analysis of dehumanization and movie consciousness, the author shows that becoming responsibly responsive is first and foremost an inner work of overcoming the sharp subject–object dichotomy.