Emptiness
By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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 worldviews. And from the perspective
of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or
worldview 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 worldviews 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.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu