Emptiness

 

The Sanskrit word "sunyata" is translated into English as "emptiness." That must be one of most poorly translated words ever. "Interconnectedness" would have been a much better translation.

Warning: One reader of this site declared the following to be a "social and political rant." Ann Landers once got a letter from a wife who made some complaint about her husband and when she published the letter, hundreds of husbands wrote in to defend themselves. Ann said: "When you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is the one that was hit."

People who do not feel interconnected with all life are the ones who cause the most misery in the human dharma realm.

They are the people who own guns to protect themselves in a world they perceive as dangerous.

They hunt and kill wild animals and call it sport. They raise and slaughter farm animals.

They take fish from the water under the theory that their god put those creatures on earth so that people could eat them.

They support pre-emptive war because they are certain their country is performing a noble liberation for which the attacked nation should be most grateful.

When they grow weary of their war they announce that they have done enough for the attacked country and it is time for the attacked to start helping themselves.

They do not acknowledge that their noble invasion was a war crime and that their on-going occupation is another war crime.

They refer to themselves as the salt of the earth and they put Jesus stickers on their cars.

They fear immigration and they fear foreigners. They dislike gays because gays, like foreigners and immigrants, are “other.” Nor are they fond of people of other races.

They have a strong sense of the reality of their god, and they believe that He (the pronoun they use) is not fond of gays, foreigners, and immigrants, either.

They are against abortion because they believe in the sanctity of life but they support the death penalty and animal slaughter. They cannot see the contradiction inherent in their anti-abortion, anti-vegetarian, pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty and pro-god views.

Those who hold one of these views hold all of them. Intolerance, spiritual arrogance, and lack of connection with all living beings come in the same package.

When his gun was taken from him, Homer Simpson complained: “But I felt so powerful when I had a gun. I felt like God must feel when He has a gun.”

All of us know people like Homer. They are superficially nice, friendly people on the surface and are even kind to foreigners, immigrants and gays when they deal with them face to face. But they vote for mean-minded people who start wars and murder millions. They listen to and cheer the hate-mongers on the radio, TV, and the Internet.

They adorn their gas-guzzling vehicles with Support Our Troops stickers and they go to church every Sunday. And to the chicken dinners afterwards.

Those who are appalled by the invasion of foreign countries, who don’t want a gun in their house, who don’t believe in killing people for killing people, who respect animals and plant life, and who hold other such views based on wisdom and compassion are dismissed by the fearful as being hopelessly naïve at best and un-American at worse. Anne Coulter calls such people "traitors."

As one awakens to the spiritual truth of emptiness, one’s desire to go to war, to buy guns, to applaud executions of criminals, to discriminate against gays and immigrants, to slaughter animals for food, to sell harmful products, and to cling to the idea of an independent self that requires protection from a hostile world just fades away.

The fearful are victims of the psychological terrorism that has been unleashed upon them by organized religion. They fear that they will go to hell and burn forever if they don't do what their god tells them to do. And their god is a mean, nasty god who gets so mad sometimes that smoke pours from his ears and he orders the wholesale slaughter of human beings who don't believe in him.

Mind, like the electromagnetic spectrum, has no limits. We are aware of a small slice of mind.

Our eyes can see just the visible light part of the spectrum; a part so small it approaches being negligible in comparison with the entire spectrum. Our unenlightened minds have the same restriction.

At one end of the mind spectrum lies the deluded, fearful, isolated, I-am-an-independent-self-trapped-in-a-doomed-body mind.

At the other end of the spectrum is the enlightened, fearless, connected, there-is-no-independent-self-that-has-a-beginning-and-an-ending mind.

All of us have minds somewhere in that infinite spectrum. And there is no end at either end.

The core concept of Buddhism is emptiness of self which simply means that no individual is an independent being. All things exist only in dependence on all other things. Even the word “exist” is not the best choice of words; perhaps we should say that all things appear to exist in dependence upon all other things that appear to exist.

We can measure our distance from enlightenment by the strength of our opinions. Dropping one's opinions can happen in a heartbeat; that's because Buddhahood is inherent in all of us. We have no long path to travel, no belief system to adopt. We just cease to hold opinions and that's It.

We sit quietly in meditation and argue with no one.

When the Buddha was asked: "What is your philosophy?" he replied: "I argue with no one."

In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha observed that in all the eons of time, no independent being has ever been born into existence, and no independent being has ever departed from existence. No one has ever been born and no one has ever died. That sure goes against what we call common sense, doesn't it?

But when we break through the Zen barrier, we discover that the Buddha got it right.

The Unconditioned State of Absolute Reality is free of ego-delusion. And the Unconditioned State of Absolute Reality doesn't really have a name. It doesn't even have features or characteristics.

Many religions teach that eventually we will live forever, either in heaven or hell. That's not Buddhism.

The "we" or "I" simply isn't there. We don't begin at birth and we don't end at death. Awareness itself is all there is. It is unborn and indestructible. But it isn't an independent self.

When you hear a bird singing in a tree, there is no bird independent of everything else and there is no tree independent of everything else. And there is no independent "you" that hears the song. Hearing Awareness hears the song, and it is not an entity with a beginning and an end.

You are not the thinker behind your thoughts; there is no thinker behind any thought. There are merely thoughts which when conditions are right can cluster together to form an apparent being.

Just as clouds form in the sky when conditions are right, and dissipate when the conditions are not right, so do apparent beings form when conditions are right and dissipate when conditions are not right.

No cloud has a self and we know it. That's why we don't celebrate the formation of a cloud and we don't mourn its dissipation.

One of the greatest Ch'an (Zen) masters of all time chose his name to be Hsu Yun. That's Chinese for Empty Cloud. What name could say more?

What did the Buddha mean when he said: "There are no two things."? He meant exactly what he said. There is nothing tricky about his blunt statement. There is no independent self and no independent other. No life and death. All of those dualistic concepts are concepts of an independent, deluded self, a self that sees itself set in opposition to everything outside itself. An independent self can exist only in delusion.

The concept of no-self cannot be comprehended by thinking about it. Math problems can be solved by thought, but thought cannot reach no-self.

Master Hsuan Hua says if you want to be a dog, think like a dog. If you want to be a Buddha, think like a Buddha. How can we think like a Buddha? When no amount of thinking can lead to no-self?

All we can do is to practice Zen. Buddhahood appears when conditions are right. We can't make it happen, but we can practice Zen so that it can happen. We practice Zen to create the conditions that allow awakening to occur.

Awakening seldom occurs during mundane activities such as tailgate parties before football games; such pleasure-seeking, self-centered moments are not conducive to deep insights concerning the Unconditioned State of Ultimate Reality, or whatever name we pin on suchness.

Most people don't practice Zen because all they know about it is that it's zany (thank you Jon Stewart) and has something to do with Buddhism and Buddhism teaches people to be nice so Buddhism is cool and Zen must be cool also.

Practicing Zen every day all day long is not easy. Zen masters advise us, however, that it is our sense of self that tells us: "This is hard." So they say to take everything light-heartedly. A great Japanese Zen Master once humorously observed: "Suicide is the result of taking yourself too seriously."

He could just as easily have said: "All unhappiness or sorrow is the result of taking oneself too seriously."

The converse is true as well. All happiness is the result of taking one's self too seriously as well.

Emptiness of self is the key to true liberation.

The Buddha referred to the wrong view of self as sakkaya ditthi. See the blog on this site for more about sakkaya ditthi, the first of the Ten Fetters.