ces for further actions and thoughts and experiences. It is a reformulation of the familiar Western cultural idea that one can never step into the same river twice; Abe the Buddhist view is that the river is not a river at all and that the flow is not a process but rather the river itself (85). It is also more correct to say that the Buddhist idea illustrates what (human or cosmic) reality is not, i.e., essence or essential substance (91). Because actions can be connected to experience and behavior, and because experience and behavior flow from desire or active mental engagement with the world, it follows that the primary and most permanent reality, if it may be so called, of the universe, is that it has no primary reality.
And if it is the case that the opposites are alike not permanent in nature, then it follows that the reality of the whole universe is illusory. Now this is perplexing and paradoxical because, as Abe says, the "doctrine of Emptiness is, as is obvious, highly subversive of our commonsense notions of reality" (91). But the Buddhist answer is not to give up on the conceptual/metaphysical/ontological project. Instead, as Abe says, "the possibility of life in a new dimension is generated" (91). This explains Abe's statement (81) that Buddhism "accepts the fact of the absence of the Self and aims at the extinction of the Self while functioning as a dynamic organism" (i.e., as if the Self and functioning alike had relevance and import).
It is in this general sense that the doctrine of anatman and skandhas can be connected to the doctrine of rebirth. According to Abe, the Buddha's method of connection was to advise "a middle course between eternalism and annihilationism." Thus even though it is true that the universe is not permanent and essential but rather changing all the time, it is also true that the very process and persistence of the universe "give rise to another set of causes and conditions" (Abe 108).
Th...