At one point in the discussion, Tagawa said that the goal of Buddhism was to be rid of preference. In many ways he was a visible icon of this aspiration. The dualism that we struggle with in the Western tradition, the distinctions between mind and body, beauty and ugliness, superior and inferior, good and evil, wealth and poverty, life and death — all become the critera for "preference" and the source of so much of our unhappiness.
— Madonna Kolbenschlag, Eastward Toward Eve