{May 2022: I see that this old and rather casual post gets a fair amount of traffic, presumably from people who are searching for combinations of “Hegel[ian]” and “Budd[ism].” A better post of mine would be “a Hegelian meditation.” See also: T.C. Morton, “Hegel on Buddhism” or Ariën Voogt, “Spirituality in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: An analysis in the wake of Foucault,” Metaphilosophy 52.5 (2021): 616-627.}

Contrary to popular belief, Hegel’s dialectic has nothing to do with “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” The characteristic pattern is rather:

• Consciousness: one experiences, thinks, and acts according to habit, custom, or instinct;
• Self-consciousness: one becomes aware of one’s habits, customs, or instincts, leading to irony, discomfort, conflict, and creativity;
• Reason: One chooses a particular way of thinking and being.

The cycle can repeat if one realizes that what looked like “reason” was, from a more distant perspective, an arbitrary choice.

I studied Hegel long ago and have found his structure widely applicable. Only lately have I paid serious attention to the thinker we call the Buddha. A characteristic pattern for him is:

• Suffering: the experience of all sentient beings, which inevitably includes frustration, fear, pain, and loss;
• Attachment: suffering that arises from wanting something that one cannot control (and often from knowing that what one wants cannot be had);
• Cessation of suffering, which arises from renouncing attachment;
• Equanimity, which is not complete dis-attachment or lack of concern but rather deliberate engagement with the world without a futile sense of frustration.

The parallels seem to me interesting and fruitful, although not exact.