Emptiness

[niveQ]

I admit, I don't feel that I understand emptiness fully.

 

My practices include fasting, qi gong, yoga and meditation. But, I haven't really read through any texts ther than Alan Watts. I seek the truth, but in don't feel it is necessary to read any texts.

 

My current feeling is that I am just part of some organism that seems infinite and what I am doing and will do is just the same as what anyone else has done or will do in this process that is happening as we speak.

 

I can't claim to know anything for a fact. I feel that if I get a grasp on what emptiness is, I will come to a realization that will help me do more good in this life.

 

How can I go about understanding this better? Do I already understand it? Can someone explain?

 

I appreciate everything you've done for me. This forum has helped me in numerous facets of life.

[Apech]

There are two approaches to sunya (emptiness). One is through thinking about how everything is inter-related and that the things you perceive (including yourself) only arise in dependence on other things as causes. Anything you can think of is made of parts, ephemeral and does not exist independently and autonomously. try to think of something that might exist out side of this and you can't really. So the conclusion is that every thing lacks a 'self' ... that is lacks a separate, individual, eternal, autonomous core or essence. From this you can get the idea that reality comprises a chain of causality where things appear to arise and cease in a state of mutual interdependence.

 

Beyond this is the realisation of emptiness. This is the non-dual realisation sometimes called ultimate bodhicitta (awakened mind). Reality here is compared to a dream or a magical display, your perceptions on examination are found to lack solidity and the true nature of mind (as being empty) is revealed. This is beyond words really so it is hard to say more than this. But thinking about interdependence of things helps give you the right view to support access to this realisation.

Edited February 8, 2015 by Apech

[Seeker of Wisdom]

I think it's important to really understand first that emptiness isn't a state, or a ground of being, or a nothingness that everything rests in, or a nothingness that gave rise to everything. I think pretty much everyone assumes these kinds of things at first because we're so used to thinking in these terms - I know I did.

 

Emptiness is pointing at how things lack 'inherent existence', meaning they don't have a substantial identity or existence independent from other things. Instead, they exist in an interdependent way as Apech says ^^^. If you take anything and look closely at it, the thing itself is insubstantial and nothing apart from the things that caused it. In a nutshell, I think it really helps to say that 'things are verbs, not nouns'.

 

You cannot peel the light and heat away from a fire, for example. The light and heat are empty, because they have their basis in interdependence on the fire. The fire itself is empty because it needed an initial input of heat, and it needs fuel and oxygen. Absolutely everything - matter, energy, time, space, mental processes, consciousness... is empty in nature.

 

There are a bunch of ways to look at emptiness. One is to look at things and their parts, like in the analogy of the chariot or Chandrakirti's sevenfold reasoning, until you find that the thing isn't identical with the parts or separate from them.

 

Another is to see how things are meaningless without each other. E.g. consciousness is meaningless without other things for it to be aware of, which in turn are meaningless if they cannot be experienced - 'if a tree falls in the forest...'.

 

Another is to look at cause and effect, showing how things couldn't come to exist if they were inherently existent/substantial, as in Nagarjuna's fourfold negation. Substantial things couldn't arise from themselves, because they would have to have existed before arising, which makes no sense. They couldn't arise from other things, because their properties would be the effects of those things, so they wouldn't be inherently existent. They couldn't arise from both, because this still involves the problems of arising from both. And they couldn't arise from neither, because then stuff would just happen randomly. But things do exist - look around. Therefore, things are empty, not inherently existent.

 

In this thread in my PPF are some articles on emptiness you might find helpful - not that I'm an expert or teacher, I wrote that stuff to try to straighten it in my own mind as much as anything.

[Michael Sternbach]

As has been stated on this thread before, there are a couple of different, yet interrelated ways to look at emptiness. One that I find personally useful is the idea that it has a non-manifest as well as a manifest side to it. This is something that especially Daoism elaborates on (the concept of emptiness is not unique to Buddhism - how could it be, if it is universal - this kind of universality allowing aforesaid Alan Watts to blend different approaches freely throughout his works).

 

Here you have at first Wu chi or "non-beginning", symbolized by an empty circle. Mathematically, this equals zero, cosmologically the (non-)state before the Big Bang. From Wu chi emerges Tai chi or the "great beginning" which is (in most fundamental terms) a division of the original state into two opposite forces - Yin and Yang - which can be mathematically understood as +1 and -1, or manifest entities which balance each other out whereas their sum remains zero. Again, there is an interesting parallel to be found in a cosmological theory according to which the expanding force of electromagnetism and the contracting force of gravity are exactly equal so that the energy in the Universe remains zero overall.

 

A more specifically Buddhist perspective on emptiness, especially as it relates to interconnectedness, is represented by Indra's Net, a concept whose various aspects this website explains nicely:

 

http://www.heartspace.org/misc/IndraNet.html

Edited February 8, 2015 by Michael Sternbach

[C T]

 

In attempting to gain a deeper understanding of Emptiness, there has to be some groundwork done on finding out the true nature or basis of mind first. Once that is done, then raising awareness around the principle of Shunyata becomes quite smooth, otherwise there will be quite a few hurdles to cross. It has to be ascertained whether the mind is something substantial or not, and also, one needs to find out if everything that is perceived or captured by the senses arise from and subside back into mind, or is there any other source from which things arise and subsequently apprehended by the perceiver, independent of mind. If perception is not independent of mind, and mind essence is formless and ungraspable, then what does that say about phenomena apprehended by this same thing called 'mind'? This would be one of the few methods which can be utilised to further one's enquiry into Emptiness/Form <=> Form/Emptiness.

Edited February 8, 2015 by C T

[rex]

Presently I see emptiness as limitless potential and the non-inherent existence of phenomena arising through interdependence and karma.

[3bob]

NiveQ, There is this saying form the historic Buddha that you may have read? : Udana 8.3

 

"There is, bhikkhus, a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned. If, bhikkhus, there were no not-born, not-brought-to-being, not-made, not-conditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned. But since there is a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned, therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned".

 

...one of the things the Buddha also said about this was that in this sense (per the mahaparinirvana sutra) there is the self, which btw may sound counter to all the talk on "emptiness". (and which can then blow the "mind" with mind being of problematic definition depending upon its usage or meaning)

[Jetsun]

I found it interesting that Chunyi Lin says in his autobiography that he gained his greatest understanding of emptiness growing up in China during the period of the Cultural Revolution. As a child in the beginning everything had a certain solidity but after the revolution everything completely fell apart and mass psychosis took over the country, everything was destroyed and replaced, many of those people who were considered respectable and trustworthy showed themselves to be snakes, while many of those people who were socially shunned or he was previously afraid of were the people who most helped his family even risking their own lives to do so. The impermanent and unpredictable nature of life was revealed to him in the most direct way.