Emptiness

 

Many critics of Buddhism see emptiness as a form of nihilism, contradiction,  or plain absurdity. But these accusations are based on shallow understanding. In fact, throughout its history,   Buddhist philosophy has developed at least  5 distinct meanings of śūnyatā. Each of these is profound enough to change one’s entire perception of reality.  In any case, I have to warn you. The great Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna wrote that  ‘when it is wrongly seen, emptiness destroys the dull-witted, like a snake wrongly grasped’.  

 

1 NO SUBJECT: 

In the Suñña Sutta, Buddha talks about emptiness like this: ‘It is … because it is empty of self and of what belongs to self that it is said, ‘Empty is the world.’’ The first meaning of emptiness is that in the world of our experience a self (or anything belonging to a self) is nowhere to be found. Anatta.

 

For the Buddha, as music arises is when the musician is playing her instrument. In this same way, consciousness arises when sense objects come in contact with sense organs. It is in these three components of experience – sense objects, sense organs, and consciousness, that the Buddha says a self cannot be found. 

 

Buddha says: ‘The ear is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. Sounds, ear-consciousness, and ear-contact empty of a self  or of anything pertaining to a self.’ He applies this same logic to all six senses, including the mind,  which he considers a sixth type of sense. Hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, seeing, and thinking are all automatic processes that occur when the right causes appear in the right conditions. 

  

2 NO OBJECT 

If the Buddha said there is no ‘you’ experiencing things, the 2^nd century philosopher Nagarjuna added there are also no ‘things’ being experienced.  He tells us every seeming object or phenomenon, of whatever kind, is a bundle of causes and conditions. There is nothing in experience that can exist apart from everything else. Things also cannot exist without their opposite. There could be no front without back, no high without low, no good without evil. (Heraclitus was alive at the exact same time when the Buddha was teaching his Dharma in India. He said you cannot step on the same river twice). 

Nagarjuna’s point is that nothing possesses a svabhava, an individual essence. All things are a form of dependent origination – their origin is dependent on other things. To Nāgārjuna, emptiness, understood properly, is a middle way between these two wrong views.  That’s why the school of Buddhism he founded is called Madhyamaka, meaning ‘the Middle Way’. To see the interdependence of all things is to see that all suffering in your life is also a dependent phenomenon. An effect originating from causes and conditions. This means that if you understand the causes and conditions for your suffering and remove them, so too would you remove the suffering that springs from them. Nāgārjuna believed that to cultivate insight into śūnyatā is the essence of walking the Buddhist path. The path leading out from suffering and ignorance.  

 

3 NO SUBJECT & OBJECT

The Buddha showed us the sense of self is empty of reality. Nagarjuna showed us objects too are empty of individual essence. So, after the subject and object have been shown to have no ultimate reality, we are left only with the mysterious fact of experience. 

This is a funny position we find ourselves in. How is experience possible if there is no one who can have an experience – and nothing that can be experienced!?  Yet experience is the one thing we can't deny. You can question all aspects of your experience, you can even question whether it is ‘your’ experience… But the one thing you can’t deny is that something - rather than nothing - is happening. 

What the Yogacara’s (the path of meditation) did was inquire into the nature of that 'something' we call 'experience'. Could you experience seeing this color if the color was not here? Obviously not. Without the object, you cannot experience said object. Now how about the reverse question. If you were not seeing this color right now, would it exist? Here the natural answer is 'Yes, of course orange would still exist if I was not seeing it! Colors don't just disappear every time I look away from them!' But wait a minute. How would this orange exist if you were not seeing it right now?  What evidence do you have to support this? Our experience is the base upon which existence is confirmed. Yogācārins took it very seriously. Their deep meditative experience, combined with their philosophical genius, discovered that what we call 'objects of experience' are really inseparable from what we call 'experience'. 

Orange and seeing orange are like the full and empty halves of a glass. One has no meaning without the other. One cannot be said to exist without the other.  The Yogacara’s reached the same conclusion about what we call ‘self’ or 'subject’ of experience. There is simply no place where we can draw the line between you as an experiencer and your experience. You as an experiencing subject and your experience are completely co-dependent in your existence. 

When the Yogacara’s used the term sunyata, they meant that the division of experience into subject and object is empty.  Remember, Yogacara's philosophy is rooted in insight gained through meditation. The Yogacara said ultimate reality cannot be conceptualized. It is not a thought you can have. It also cannot be spoken or written down or represented in any way. At best, it can be pointed at. But even here language is misleading. Once you do experience ultimate reality, you are no longer ‘you’ and it is no longer ‘it’.  They saw all objects, phenomena, and experiences like dreams – mental projections produced by the psyche. No wonder some call this school the depth psychologists of Buddhism. 

 

4 BUDDHA NATURE 

Tathāgatagarbha.   

Ultimate reality possesses the qualities of a self. And not just any self,  but the capital ‘S’ Self of the Tathagata. Ultimate reality is the Buddha. Screen metaphor: Let me explain this with a metaphor I learned from the great Rupert Spira.  You’re probably watching this on some sort of screen right now. Think of all the things you can watch on this screen. You can watch something funny like Rick and Morty. You can watch something tragic like footage from the Turkey and Syria earthquake. You can receive spiritual guidance from Rupert Spira. You can watch porn. These are all different types of content that can appear on your screen. Each of these would provide an entirely different experience, and yet through all of them, the screen will remain the same. Watching a Dharma talk will not make this screen a good screen. Watching a Nazi rally will not make it a bad screen. In other words, the screen can display any content, but it is not itself affected by what appears on it. The screen on which this video is appearing is not a part of the video. At the same time, this video could not appear without the screen. The whole time you have been watching this video, you have been watching the screen, even though the screen itself has never been the subject of the video. 

Qualities of conscious awareness:

First, your conscious awareness is luminous. In other words, it shines light on things. Whatever appears in it is instantaneously perceived.  Like how an object is immediately reflected when it appears in front of a mirror. Could my conscious awareness lack this quality? No. Because then it wouldn’t be conscious awareness. Second, your conscious awareness has no preferences. It lacks resistance and attachment.  Thirdly, your conscious awareness is empty. It can hold any thought, emotion, feeling, and experience because it is itself empty of thoughts, emotions,  feelings, and experiences. It is like the space of an empty room which can be filled with furniture, because it is itself empty of furniture.  Could my conscious awareness lack this empty, spacious nature? No, because then it would be an object of awareness and not awareness itself. 

Finally, your conscious awareness is outside time and space. Time and space appear in it as objects, but it itself cannot be located anywhere within time or space.   As the Buddha says in the   Mahāyāna Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, ‘Hidden within the defilements of greed, desire, anger, and stupidity there is seated …  the Tathāgata’s wisdom, the Tathāgata’s vision, and the Tathāgata’s body… all beings, though they find themselves with all sorts of defilements, have a tathāgatagarbha that  is eternally unsullied, and that is replete with virtues no different from my own.’  Like a mirror covered with dust, our Buddha nature is always there within us. The goal of Buddhist practice then is seen as wiping the dust off the mirror. 

 

Well, some Buddhists believe the tathāgatagarbha is the natural completion of śūnyatā. Others believe it is a perversion of the Dharma and a heresy. Both sides have strong arguments.  Without getting too much into it, I should say Nāgārjuna specifically warned against taking emptiness to be some sort of Ultimate reality.  To him, even the term ‘emptiness’ is ultimately empty; it only means something relative to our unenlightened, everyday views on reality.  Some criticize the tathāgatagarbha doctrine as a mistaken interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s emptiness. Others point to the clear contradiction between the tathāgatagarbha and the Buddha’s original no-self teaching. To them, the tathāgatagarbha is an alien concept smuggled into Buddhism from other traditions like as Hinduism.  

Another argument for the tathāgatagarbha is that if reality is empty all the way down, then why would the Buddha waste 45 years of his life teaching the Dharma to empty people living in an empty world? Yes, the Buddha said the everyday world of saṃsāra is impermanent, full of suffering, and without a self. But then it is logical that nirvāṇa, being the opposite of samsara, should have the opposite qualities. Namely, it should be permanent, lacking suffering, and possessing a self. The self of the fully awakened, fully liberated Tathagata. So, which is it? Is there a capital ‘S’ Self or no-self? This has remained an open debate for centuries.  

I invite you to approach it with curiosity and not settle too quickly on any final opinion. I know all of us, at different stops on our path, espouse different (sometimes conflicting) views. The Buddha himself, when asked if the self exists, remained silent.  Then he was asked if the self doesn’t exist. He remained silent still. In the end, I return to what Niels Bohr said: ‘The opposite of a great truth is another truth’. Such is the paradox of life and no single view can capture it. 

 

5 NO VIEWS

We’ve seen how sunyata, the doctrine of emptiness, challenges our understanding  

of 1) ourselves, 2) the objects of our experience, 3) the experience itself, and 4) the ultimate nature of reality. But there is another meaning of emptiness, which points in an entirely different direction. This fifth aspect of emptiness is perhaps the most dangerous of them all. But like everything we’ve covered so far, it also holds the potential to free our minds from ignorance and suffering. I am talking about the emptiness of views. 

 

This teaching was first given by the historical Buddha and it was developed at much greater length by the Mahayana philosophers, Nagarjuna key among them. Yet, strictly speaking, the emptiness of views is not a Buddhist teaching. You might even say it is an anti-Buddhist teaching. In fact, it is not even a teaching at all, but an anti-teaching. 

 

Let me explain. From the outset, Buddhist philosophy recognizes  

two kinds of truth: 1) conventional truth and 2) ultimate truth. Let me demonstrate the difference. 

So, conventional truth is important. It is also a bridge to the ultimate. As Nagarjuna writes:  Without depending on the conventional truth The meaning of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the meaning of the ultimate, Nirvana is not achieved. 

Now, everything we’ve covered so far in this video, the last four meanings of emptiness, it’s all ultimate truth. But the emptiness of views is not ultimate truth. It is not conventional truth either. But it is also not untruth. We can either call it hyper-ultimate truth… or anti-truth. 

 

Translations can be good; they can be a piece of art in themselves… but they are never the original. This idea is as profound as it is simple. All theory, all teachings, all opinions – in short, all views depend on language. 

 

Language takes the infinite complexity of the world and compresses it into semantic units. It thus ends up being a low-resolution map of reality. The emptiness of views is simply a warning not to mistake the map with the terrain it is mapping. It is a reminder that no matter how deep and complete, our theories are always a pale reflection of the true complexity of reality. You could say this is a special case of Nagarjuna’s emptiness of objects. Like how objects lack a svabhava, an independent essence, so too concepts are artificial divisions of reality.  

The idea of wisdom is inseparable from the idea of ignorance. The notion of purity is inseparable from the notion of defilement. In other words, language is the conventional division of reality into ideas small enough for the human mind to understand. Even the very words of the Buddha, spoken during his deepest sermons are ultimately conventions. Ultimately untrue. Yes, this is controversial. But what’s even more surprising is that this is a mainstream Mahāyāna doctrine. In the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (or the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sutra), we read: ‘There is no ignorance and no cessation of ignorance… no suffering and no knowledge of suffering, no cause [of suffering], and no abandoning of the cause, no cessation  [of suffering], and no realization of cessation, and no path and no development of the path…’

 

If you are familiar with the Four Noble Truths, you will recognize this passage refers to them and refutes them. And this is a passage from a major Mahāyāna text! Is this an extreme form of nihilism? Is this telling us we shouldn’t bother learning the Buddha’s Dharma since even it, like everything else in life, is meaningless? Did the disciples of the Buddha turn their backs on his teaching? 

Well… I told you the emptiness of views is dangerous. Like with a poisonous snake, one should be very careful with how one grasps it. But also like the snake’s poison, this anti-truth can be used as medicine. The emptiness of views, like all Buddhist doctrine, is aimed at freeing us from suffering. This anti-teaching springs from the insight that much of our suffering in life comes from our views, expectations, and prejudices. In our ignorance, we jump to conclusions far too quickly. Our ideas and opinions give us unearned self-assurance and we build a sense of self around them. This robs us of the humility we need to continue learning and growing. Rigid views take away our spontaneity, our ability to face life as it is rather than as we imagine it to be. They close our eyes to the paradoxes of life, which are the wellsprings of true wisdom.

 

All these can result from the simple fact that I hold one strong view and you hold another. The emptiness of views is a safety measure. It is a reminder left by the greatest Buddhist teachers, the Buddha first among them, to take the Dharma seriously, really seriously… but not too seriously. To take all teachings, theories, models, philosophies, and concepts seriously – but not as seriously as we take life. It is a reminder that human thinking is simply too linear, too dualistic, and naïve to capture the ultimate truth. 

Perhaps this same idea drove the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to conclude: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ 

In later Buddhist tradition there is the image of a finger pointing at the moon. A reasonable person will know the moon is what the finger is pointing at. Ignorant one will think the finger is the moon. The emptiness of views is not nihilism. It does not tell us there is no truth in life.  It is simply a warning not to mistake the moon with the finger pointing at it. Not to mistake life with our ideas about it. 

Like the Yogācārin śūnyatā, the emptiness of views tells us ultimate truth cannot be communicated. To reach the ultimate truth, one has to experience it for oneself. In this sense, the ultimate truth is the most private of things. Shortly before dying, the Buddha encouraged his disciples with the following words: ‘Monks, be islands unto yourselves, be your own refuge, having no other; let the Dharma be an island and a refuge to you, having no other.’ I believe the Buddha was not telling his disciples what they should be, but what they already are.  What we all already are. The seeker of truth walks a lonely path. He can have companions, enemies, teachers, and disciples… but in the end, he encounters truth alone in the wilderness of his heart. 

But truth requires space. It fills you only to the degree that you are empty of falsehood and half-truths. Even the idea that there is some great, final, ultimate truth must be surrendered if indeed you wish to be filled by the great, final, and ultimate truth.

 

CONCLUSION 

First and foremost, by now you’ve seen emptiness is really a teaching about the interconnectedness of things. It is not a denial that anything exists, but a denial that anything exists on its own. 

 

Carl Jung wrote that: ‘No tree… can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell’.  

 

Ying and yang are interdependent.

 

Tathāgatagarbha, that mystery of conscious awareness within us, is the one true base of love and compassion.  After all what, does love mean if not taking another to be as real as you? In the Gospel of Mathew, Christ sums up His teaching thus: ‘In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ 

 

Concrete individuals, we believe ourselves to be. But who knows… In the end, even this concealment of ultimate truth, even this confusion of the eternal with the temporary, the unlimited with the limited, wisdom with ignorance, the self with the world… Perhaps even this is nothing other than the pure, direct experience of ultimate truth. As the Heart Sutra says.  all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing.

Excerpts from youtube video essay "The Emptiness Explained" by https://youtu.be/wcc_qdzpeDY?si=js4fDLFCDYqxHt35