As mentioned earlier that the sculptural work in which trees in the process of decay become seemingly "eternal" sculptures is a kind of dialectical dialogue between two mental states, a state painted in the brutal ephemerality of the trees and a state painted in the illusory permanence of the sculptures. This observation corresponds with my master's research thesis philosophy (see below) on the Buddhist philosophy of the Yogacara.
Buddhism's worldview on reality is that it is empty of objects with a permanent and self-essence, it denies the existence of things of an ontological value. This philosophy undermines the basic intuition of human beings about the existence of real fundamentals entities. Reality is said to be a continuous stream of objectless events - this is what the Mahayana Buddhism defines as emptiness and also called the absolute reality. This is very radical and hard to accept but it is not a nihilist philosophy.
If indeed reality is empty, what do we experience as objects? Mahayana Buddhism claims that concrete or abstract objects like Things, Self, God, Love, Good, Evil etc. are all pure creations of our consciousness and exist as such only in our minds. In fact, everything that language can point to does not exist as an object of essence in the absolute reality but as an internal object in our experience. These objects are created out of a hunger to cling to, to hold, to be identified with some kind of constant existence and meaning. In this sense we create an internal and yet essential "road map" that allows us to find our way in emptiness, but this map has no ontological value. This reality is called the relative reality. The philosophy does not claim that relative reality is an illusion ONLY on the background of emptiness but not in itself; we are born and evolve into it, we act within it and die in it, relative reality is completely real in this sense, however the belief that all this really exists outside the mind is an absolute illusion according to the Mahayana.
Buddhist liberation is a state of total awakening to the absolute reality while continuing to dwell and engage in the relative reality in a committed, moral and devoted manner. In my research I tried to argue that the state of liberation (nirvana) is not a state of stable, infinite quietness or whatever other superlatives that Western culture imagines regarding this imported concept of Nirvana, but it is a stable and quiet state in deep and infinite dialectical state between the two mental universes, the relative and that of emptiness. Nirvana, according to my understanding, is a quiet and stable attendance in an eternal conflict between the nature of emptiness and the world of objects as the universe where life as we know it is possible.
By the way, quantum physics has a very similar opinion about these two modes of perception of reality (for a comprehensive article on the subject click here).
