In A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End there is a chapter by Bob Hass. I am told he gave his talk with no notes. His only materials were the poems he was to read. In the Hass chapter he says:
And there’s a final, interesting complication I would be inclined to go to the poem with rather than to external sources. It’s connected to the question of the difference between a Buddhist and a nihilist. What’s the difference between the European critical tradition that says there’s no ground, that there’s no place to stand from which to say anything is true, and the Buddhist position that also says there’s no place to stand to say anything is true because it’s all samsara in the first place? Hence the argument of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” in which he says you have to have a mind of winter to see “nothing that is not there” and “the nothing that is.” Meanwhile, of course, while poets and philosophers figure out in what sense harbor seals, canyon wrens, coral reefs, and glaciers “are” they are wholly at risk from the technologies we live through. Snyder was, of course, one of the first English language poets in the middle of the twentieth century to write from this concern. We are reading his poem, begun in the middle of the century, at the end of it. It makes sense that part of what we bring to the poem at the end of the century is a question about the terms on which the human imagination can project and has projected meaning onto the world. (158).
So, the deconstructionists (which gave LANGPO its marching orders) tend to come from a stance of “there can be no place to stand from” nihilism while the Buddhists come from a positive nihilism where they believe everything is empty. (Which quantum physics has validated.) All of this is an illusion. The Buddhist nihilism also comes with the notion of dharma which can be translated to “cosmic order” or how things work in this world created by ordinary people, along with The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Truth #1 life is suffering. #2 DESIRE causes suffering. #3 Desire can cease if we are happy with what we have #4 desire is natural and so to overcome it we need to live our lives in accordance with the eightfold path: 1. Right View 2. Right Intention 3. Right Action 4. Right Speech 5. Right Livelihood 6. Right Effort 7. Right Mindfulness 8. Right Meditation. I think you see the difference quite clearly in how the deconstructionists end up: Deleuze jumping out of a high rise suffering from cancer, Derrida, pancreatic cancer (unable to enjoy the sweet things in life), &c &c. Buddhists get cancer too but the way they relate to life and death is more noble, I think.
I see these giant intellects who get mired in the life of the mind and if they were to find Buddhism, there is so much “theory” about it, they can have a happy mind lost in the folds of all these decades of thought about the existence of life, but then always come back to sitting, to being in your body, to noticing your breath, and just plain noticing and being here and now. I think Buddhism can save people like this.
I hope this is helpful.