by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
In the previous article of this series I started with the exploration of the concept that every civilization eventually arrives at the edge of its own knowing. It was not meant to be exhaustive or a critique but rather exploration of certain themes in Western thinking. Based on the feedback I have decided to dive into Buddhist thinking to clarify the scope of this exploration. How Buddhist thought approached the limits of its thinking is very different from the West. For Buddhist thought, and dharmic thought in general, the problem of limits of knowledge was not that knowledge had limits. The problem was that we had mistaken our concepts for reality itself. What might appear as an impassable boundary was, on closer inspection, an illusion created by the mind’s need to divide the world into knower and known.
From its earliest philosophical formulations, Buddhism did not ask how far knowledge could reach. It asked instead whether the question itself was coherent. In the Pali cannon there are fourteen questions that Buddha is said to have described as being unanswerable. The task of thought was not to extend reason to its horizon, but to dissolve the horizon altogether. The literature that emerged from this tradition does not always accumulate answers. It erodes the ground on which answering stands, the most well known examples being from Zen Buddhism. In contrast to Western thinking, the Buddhist literature of limits offers neither mastery nor despair, but release. This is way of seeing in which the limits dissolve precisely because the self that sought it gives way. This way of thinking can be epitomized by the most radical thinker of Buddhist philosophy, Nagarjuna sought to dismantle the very conditions that make limits intelligible. In the Mulamadhyamakakarika, he applies relentless logic to every fundamental concept whether it is cause, substance, self, or time. The goal is to show that each of these collapses under analysis. Things do not exist independently, nor do they fail to exist. According to Nagarjuna, they arise only in dependence, empty of fixed essence.
From here, we move to the limits of language. In various Buddhist traditions language was addressed as a tool designed to dismantle itself. Words are used not to represent reality but to loosen the mind’s attachment to representation. They point, and then they step aside. Nowhere is this clearer than in the tradition of Zen koans. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is not a question awaiting an answer, but a tool to understand the question itself. One could argues that Zen koans have an ancient precedent in the story of the Flower Sermon. The Buddha is said to have stood before an assembly and said nothing. He simply held up a lotus. Only one of his disciple Mahakasyapa smiled, recognizing that the teaching lay not in speech but in recognition. Zen later called this a direct transmission outside the scriptures. Buddhist thinkers often treated silence not as a limit but as as one of its primary methods of transmission. Dogen, the great Japanese Zen master and philosopher, wrote densely recursive essays that seem to loop back on themselves, not to confuse but to enact non-duality through syntax. In Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra, mountains walk and waters flow. In Being-Time, time is being and being is time. Reading him feels less like decoding an argument than like watching thought dissolve in real time.
In other words, Dogen is saying that the way we normally divide the world into moving things and still things isn’t as solid as we think. Mountains feel stable and unmoving, rivers feel active and always changing. However, this is just how they look from our point of view. Even mountains are moving over time, and even rivers have a kind of stillness within their flow. He uses this to make a bigger point about time and existence i.e., things don’t exist inside time the way objects sit inside a room. Instead, each thing is its own moment of time. What something is and when it is can’t really be separated. That’s why reading him feels strange. He is not trying to convince us with step-by-step logic. He is trying to shake our usual way of thinking until it loosens, so we experience the idea rather than just understand it intellectually. Not surprisingly, poetry became the ideal literary form for such insights. Basho’s haiku, pared down to seventeen syllables, capture perception at the moment before meaning crystallizes:
An old pond
a frog leaps in,
the sound of water.
Nothing is explained. Nothing is concluded. The poem ends exactly where experience begins. This is the literature of limits at its most distilled i.e., language used to gesture toward what exceeds it, without claiming possession. In other words, Basho isn’t telling us what the moment means. He is handing the moment to us as it is, and then stepping out of the way. In Buddhism, then, the failure of language is not tragic. It is pedagogical. Speech fails because it must. This is because clinging to it would reinscribe the very boundaries that insight seeks to dissolve. The unsayable is not the edge of thought, but its release! Buddhist art makes this dissolution visible. Where Western aesthetics often seek completion, resolution, and permanence, Buddhist aesthetics lean into transience. Beauty appears not despite impermanence, but because of it. This sensibility finds its most distilled expression in wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of imperfection and incompletion: A cracked bowl, a fading scroll, an asymmetrical garden etc. Nothing demands finality. Nothing insists on essence. The incomplete is not a failure of form but it is the way things are. Perhaps nowhere is this philosophy enacted more explicitly than in sand mandalas, painstakingly composed by monks over days or weeks, only to be swept away upon completion. The gesture is not only symbolic but it is also instructional. Creation and destruction are not opposites but phases of the same process. The mandala is meant to teach us about the nature of existence by vanishing. We can also see this philosophy in Zen gardens which operate by subtraction. Carefully placed stones float in fields of raked emptiness, inviting perception to linger without attachment. In these examples, the limit is aesthetic rather than epistemic. Art does not gesture toward transcendence, nor does it mirror despair. It simply shows things as they are i.e., contingent, interdependent, passing.
At the most ultimate level Buddhism seeks to dissolve the most intimate limit of all i.e., the self. The doctrine of anatta, no enduring self, is not just a metaphysical claim but also an experiential one. What we call the “I” is revealed, upon inspection, to be a temporary assembly of sensations, memories, intentions, and habits. There is no fixed center to defend, no boundary to cross. The limit disappears because the one who sought it does. This insight suffuses Buddhist literature. Zen death poems, often written moments before dying, often express a startling calm:
Empty-handed I entered the world,
barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going —
two simple happenings
that got entangled.
There is no heroism here, no tragic grandeur. The end of life is not framed as a frontier, but as a release into continuity. Buddhist thought approached the edge of thought and discovered dissolution. There was no wall to breach, no abyss to fear. In this literature of limits, wisdom does not lie in mastering the infinite or naming the unsayable, but in loosening the need for either. The question dissolves, and with it, the urgency that once drove it forward. More is said with less. Sometimes silence also says more than words!