1. This “lack of center” or “lack of stability” shared by postmodernism and Buddhism stems, in part, from the postmodern tendency to critique previous more essentialist philosophies of the West, including our use of language itself. It is quite natural that the West, in rejecting many of the tenets of its earlier philosophies, has ended up where the East has already arrived. Buddhists, long before poststructuralists existed, recognized that the “differences” needed for cultural order and for language arise mutually and arbitrarily without an absolute center that “escapes structurality.” They recognized that our definitions of the world are culturally created rather than real. What is “real” simply IS.