Emptiness
by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Copyright © 1997 Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at
experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and
mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether
there's anything lying behind them.
This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the
presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and
world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these
stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract
questions they raise -- of our true identity and the reality of the world outside -- pull
attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the
immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the
problem of suffering.
Say for instance, that you're meditating, and a feeling of
anger toward your mother appears. Immediately, the mind's reaction is to identify the
anger as "my" anger, or to say that "I'm" angry. It then elaborates on
the feeling, either working it into the story of your relationship to your mother, or to
your general views about when and where anger toward one's mother can be justified. The
problem with all this, from the Buddha's perspective, is that these stories and views
entail a lot of suffering. The more you get involved in them, the more you get distracted
from seeing the actual cause of the suffering: the labels of "I" and
"mine" that set the whole process in motion. As a result, you can't find the way
to unravel that cause and bring the suffering to an end.
If, however, you can adopt the emptiness mode -- by not
acting on or reacting to the anger, but simply watching it as a series of events, in and
of themselves -- you can see that the anger is empty of anything worth identifying with or
possessing. As you master the emptiness mode more consistently, you see that this truth
holds not only for such gross emotions as anger, but also for even the most subtle events
in the realm of experience. This is the sense in which all things are empty. When you see
this, you realize that labels of "I" and "mine" are inappropriate,
unnecessary, and cause nothing but stress and pain. You can then drop them. When you drop
them totally, you discover a mode of experience that lies deeper still, one that's totally
free.
To master the emptiness mode of perception requires
training in firm virtue, concentration, and discernment. Without this training, the mind
tends to stay in the mode that keeps creating stories and world views. And from the
perspective of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or
world view with new ground rules. In terms of the story of your relationship with your
mother, it seems to be saying that there's really no mother, no you. In terms of your
views about the world, it seems to be saying either that the world doesn't really exist,
or else that emptiness is the great undifferentiated ground of being from which we all
came to which someday we'll all return.
These interpretations not only miss the meaning of
emptiness but also keep the mind from getting into the proper mode. If the world and the
people in the story of your life don't really exist, then all the actions and reactions in
that story seem like a mathematics of zeros, and you wonder why there's any point in
practicing virtue at all. If, on the other hand, you see emptiness as the ground of being
to which we're all going to return, then what need is there to train the mind in
concentration and discernment, since we're all going to get there anyway? And even if we
need training to get back to our ground of being, what's to keep us from coming out of it
and suffering all over again? So in all these scenarios, the whole idea of training the
mind seems futile and pointless. By focusing on the question of whether or not there
really is something behind experience, they entangle the mind in issues that keep it from
getting into the present mode.
Now, stories and world views do serve a purpose. The
Buddha employed them when teaching people, but he never used the word emptiness
when speaking in these modes. He recounted the stories of people's lives to show how
suffering comes from the unskillful perceptions behind their actions, and how freedom from
suffering can come from being more perceptive. And he described the basic principles that
underlie the round of rebirth to show how bad intentional actions lead to pain within that
round, good ones lead to pleasure, while really skillful actions can take you beyond the
round altogether. In all these cases, these teachings were aimed at getting people to
focus on the quality of the perceptions and intentions in their minds in the present -- in
other words, to get them into the emptiness mode. Once there, they can use the teachings
on emptiness for their intended purpose: to loosen all attachments to views, stories, and
assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all greed, anger, and delusion, and thus empty of
suffering and stress. And when you come right down to it, that's the emptiness that really
counts.
Source:
http://world.std.com/~metta/lib/modern/emptiness.html