Quote from “The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace: The Essential Life and Teachings”
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."
“We are empty; or rather the matter of which we are composed is empty. But I must emphasize that emptiness does not mean nothingness. Some commentators have been mistaken when they have accused Buddhism of being nihilistic.
We believe that the world in which we live is part of a flux, a stream of events. This does not mean it is nothing. Everything depends on everything else. Nothing exists on its own. On account of all the influences that come to bear upon them, things appear, exist, and disappear, and then reappear again. But they never exist independently.
Form is therefore empty, by which we mean it is not separate and independent. Form depends on a multitude of different factors. And emptiness is form because all forms emerge from emptiness, from this absence of independent existence. Emptiness exists only to give rise to form”.
Motto: “Our day-to-day equivalent to the path to Nirvana is undoubtedly our willingness to love and be loved”
Declaration of intent
There are two kinds of knowing the world: by accumulating knowledge through reasoning and learning of the phenomenal reality and of the mental reality ( the world of karma), which is called conventional wisdom; or by using the insight and become aware of and also experience the ultimate truth (jñana- the emptiness), which is called the ultimate wisdom.
The conventional wisdom is considered dualistic, in the sense that the mind knowledge does not reflect the reality in its full truthfulness, namely the relationship between the mind-world and the matter-world is two-faced, truthful on one hand – the pragmatic truth - and false on the other hand - cognizing emptiness.
The most important thing when living the ultimate truth, even in its impure states of nirvana (samadhy, satori) is that one has the revelation that the whole universe is an infinite harmonious whole in which every particle, every object and every being are interrelated, interconnected and unified in love.
In this ultimate experience the world of the transient ego and consciousness, breaks free from the bondage with the conventional reality and, in a moment of revelation, lose their identity and significance; in such a state the whole being - liberated from delusion, cravings and afflictions - gets unified with the absolute and the permanent world of love. That state of mind – since it is still the mind that sees and builds that world of mirage – has no boundaries and - for what it is worth - is beyond karma.
This is the only true purpose of any meditation on emptiness, to attain enlightenment, to achieve the awareness that the universe is a perfect realm in which virtues like compassion and love are supreme.
That realm is called “realization realm”. In it, the mind unconditioned and unconstrained by karma, freed from attachments that originate desires and sufferings, also freed from impermanence enters the formless space of infinite consciousness.
Motto: “Although emptiness is formless, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form”
Overture before all
Somebody may argue that by saying “emptiness is form” we make emptiness and form mutually dependent, therefore asserting that emptiness does not inherently exist…
The idea that “emptiness is formless” seems to travel a little bit further, though by applying a quality to emptiness we deprive it of its ultimate inherent profoundness as being bases of all… The assumption that emptiness exists is false. It is also false to assume that emptiness does not exist.
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It could be amusing to define the term emptiness and to present the basic principles of the philosophy of emptiness through a short story or a fairy tale.
The reason is that we wouldn’t like to frighten those frail minds and hearts that lack any opinion on their own and, as a result, seem at leisure to use their arrogance to refute everything that they don’t understand.
And so, this is the fairy tale:
“Once upon a time there was a princess named Śūnyatā. From the time when she was born she was invisible.
A sage named Buddha instructed his followers to get into deep meditation so that they could see what Śūnyatā looks like. The sage also told them that once one sees Śūnyatā he gets liberated from suffering and attachments (from the cyclic existence) and becomes omniscient.
Also, it could be said that Śūnyatā had a sister named Nirvana that could help one escape from the cyclic existence of dependent-arising. That is, those that could improve their insight through meditation would attain moments of supreme happiness in which they could see both princesses playing together behind every surrounding phenomenon, like two white shadows dancing behind a flowery bush”.
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The impermanence of phenomena and the emptiness are interrelated. First tenet that could be stated in order to make the following text graspable is that all phenomena are impermanent: they evolve in a close dependency with other phenomena; once they begin to exist they are like trapped in a cycle of change, transformation and decay.
This cycle is not under control of phenomena; the fact that phenomena are lodged in a cycle that is not under their control means that they are not independent, they don’t have a self-control gear; for this reason they are considered empty of “self”.
This is what we could define mildly as “emptiness”. We’d have to emphasize that this is just a philosophical hypothesis about matter and phenomena delivered by the meditation on the unknown and permanence.
This hypothesis doesn’t have anything to do with our valid cognition of phenomena through perception and their certification through mental representation as truthful reality.
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We need to clarify as best as we can all the main concepts that are used in this book in order to avoid misreading and censored approach to the emptiness subject matter.
Emptiness is not a negative concept per se. Also emptiness is neither a vacuum medium nor nothingness. Meditating on a vacuum space or on nothingness would help one go nowhere.
Also meditating on “one” or on “aum” would not help. A different outcome could result though from “solving” a koan riddle; even in that case the so called nirvana is a short lived and amount to an “impure” experience.
The only meditation that results in true enlightenment is the meditation on emptiness.
To meditate on emptiness one has to know that emptiness is not an object or a phenomenon. It is rather the highest (ultimate, basic and profound) quality of any phenomenon, or object - existent or mentally represented.
Don’t expect your analytical consciousness to lead you there. The meditation on emptiness is a long process in which the mind learns to remove gradually the interpretation and analysis – that lead to attachment – and allow the insight instead to take the lead and bring about the direct perception of reality as a non-dualistic “suchness”.
That moment could result in direct cognition of emptiness as the bases of all and produce a profound enlightenment.
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First and foremost any assertion (mental knowledge) of any kind doesn’t have inherent existence as any other phenomenon.
That means that if I try to define emptiness by saying what emptiness is or what emptiness is not I get caught in a logical game in which I make an impermanent assertion about what I want to define as permanent.
To escape from such a logical trap I would have to affirm that a true description of emptiness should come from a revelation of truth not from a mind-consciousness experience.
If I suggest that Buddha approached that divine mental state in which he saw the ultimate truth - that he defined as emptiness - I also put forward the idea that we should “believe and have faith” into his revelation; Isn’t it much better to submit this concept (emptiness) to analysis or even better make it the purpose of our meditation on our way towards enlightenment?
It is very clichéd to say that emptiness has nothing to do with what we know thorough our feelings, perception, representation consciously grasped and mentally absorbed knowledge.
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As a matter of fact a word applied to an object is so fundamentally deprived of providing the truth about that object that it is quiet clear that no word would ever be able to make us apprehend the truth of the object named by it.
The word that defines an object doesn’t say anything about how the object appears or about the actual nature (suchness) of that object.
If we try to exhaust all that could be said about an object we find that there are infinite paths we could use to describe it and that it is impossible to settle on a definitive and total knowledge about it.
The ultimate existence of an object cannot be apprehended in words. Though those words are used by thoughts to assert an object they don’t include all the varieties and modes of existence of an object.
We arrive at the conclusion that the words and thoughts cannot give us any way to know the “truly existent” object.
It ensue that the thought cannot create the object and also that the object exists independently of thought and thinking and mind.
How then mind could undermine the existence of an object (phenomenon) as reality and replace its reality with emptiness?
Isn’t it true that mind could have invented this “fundamental delusion” that reality is empty of true existence and also that - when realization comes into place -the Buddhas like could see that reality exists indeed as suchness?
Let’s say that we accept the idea that the designation of an object is not the object itself. But we can say also that any and every world - real or imagined - is created by words (concepts) and thoughts. It cannot be otherwise.
Reality, as we see it remains unchanged for people that have a sane mind. The view of it could be changed and metamorphosised only through ingestion of drugs (like peyote, LSD, mescaline, nitrous oxide, etc.) or mental illness (like schizophrenia).
Meditation on emptiness to obtain nirvana works differently than the induced “nirvana” through drugs though both of them could be seen as “altered states of mind”.
Nirvana obtained through meditation needs patience and years of devotion, trust, dedication and perseverance until eventually it gets apprehended.
“Nirvana” induced by drugs or Mexican mushrooms is based on a sudden alteration of senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching). The result is the “awakening” of subconscious mystical awareness; the ego gets diluted and eventually dropped; after that happens the feeling of the whole world coming together in harmony and love, and also the awareness of self-transcendence, become overwhelming.
The experience produces happiness, an inflated peace of mind and the illusion of a metaphysical accomplishment.
This shows clearly that drugs could alter the mind into states similar to nirvana obtained through meditation.
In that view we’d have to explain what are the differences between the two types of nirvana?
“Nirvana” obtained through drugs is coarser and lacks spiritual support. It is, if you wish, like a feeling that is not self-powered; a state of mind that is not able to ascertain anything profound about existence; a temporary experience that would go away without a substantial effect on the experiencer’s life.
Nirvana obtained through meditation is a long, difficult and tiresome process. We could mention similar spiritual practices used to produce enlightenment like Christian monks reciting their never-ending prayer, or Zen “koan” monks looking into the metaphysical realm of a koan, or Buddhist monks searching the essence of the world projected through a mantra, etc.
All those practices need self-discipline, virtuous actions and truth-seeking, qualities that create right and proper conditions for the mind to catch sight of the spiritual world of emptiness and permanence.
Such meditations produce the most sophisticated spiritual realization. Also they rely on a very strong philosophical background that can be initially explored through reasoning and accepted or rejected with no further consequences.
The important point is that there is no common measure for the two types of “awakening”. Maybe we should give to the drug induced “awakening” a proper name in order not to offend the true Nirvana followers.
Aldus Huxley, who was a promoter of drug induced “awakening” didn’t care too much about such distinction. For him to induce an awakening experience through drugs was part of his life pragmatics.
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The repetition of an effect as a result of a cause is a condition of building conventional truth. On this regard the truth is both external and so positioned outside the mind – or objective – and internal, that is mind conceived – or subjective.
The two sides of the truth are both relevant as long as there is a suitable relation between them. The objective side and the subjective side put together create a duality, hence the dual characteristic of conventional knowledge.
We also could have a mind-only-constructed-truth that is in no need of a relation with an external object like for instance the innate math or the abstract logic.
The two kinds of knowledge are enough for a human being to understand and resolve empirical situations, to create adequate contexts for living and derive rules and solutions to common problems in life.
One simple inference is that reality in its most edifying appearance is truly mirrored by the mind so that one can be sure that what is resolved as being perceived (seen, felt) corresponds to what the objects reveal.
That process of mirroring is sanctioned by every moment of living and all those processes, by repetition, become part of the knowing and knowledge in the common sense.
The emptiness is like a fox watching a fish caught while swimming in a green thicket. If emptiness would not exist the fox would be a frozen shadow and the fish would be able to free itself from the trap. In a conventional world the fox and the fish watch each other (that says something about the dependency between phenomena). To assume that the fox would let the fish go is an avenue of falsity. A gentle thinking is needed to let the whole flock of fish (phenomena) swim away unchecked…
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Dogmas, religions and ideologies are products of ignorance. Don’t follow them.
Instead, you should learn what reality provides you with in order to live in happiness while giving in return to the world your compassion and love. Big words you could say. Though it should be emphasized that staring at a wall while in meditation and trying to become aware of what emptiness is made of, is nothing else but spiritual ignorance.
Looking at emptiness in a serene and detached manner, far from any ambition to become a Buddha, is a faultless endeavor. An intellectual point of view is faultless also.
Attachment to things and desires, including emptiness, is unproductive. Generating attachment to things means to use “your will” whenever you want to satisfy “a wish”. Attachments are craving for “goods” that fit the “self imposed needs”. When a wish gets into view “I” would order the “will” to act and get it. The attachment is “mine” but “I” is going to do the action.
Is the “I” going to be punished by Karma because of its action or is the “I’ going to be punished because of his/her attachments to things?
Dreadful things originate from attachments. One of them is hatred that comes from the annulled reasoning, from intolerance, prejudice, bigotry, envy, jealousy, greed and avarice.
The estrangement from the ethical world accompanies it: then the evil follows it, the egocentric insatiability, the gluttony, and its companion, stinginess, cultured in ten thousand years of individual history and un-awareness, wrapped up in a shiny collection of nonsensical needs; they look as if they are protecting the sense of self against its unknown and uncertain fate, and beyond things that concern the whole world!
On top of those, the emptiness introduces the dilemma of the mental knowledge, which – it says - neither should be taken as ultimate truth nor should it be rejected as falsehood, or worse, to be thrown away and abandoned for being a pragmatic truth…
Taking the emptiness as ultimate truth (though, it doesn’t say anything about matter-of-facts, and also implies that the ultimate essence is empty) could be an intellectual challenge.
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Remember though, practicing compassion and love towards thy neighbor - while meditating - is more vital for your karma than pursuing the ultimate mirage. And then also talking in a pragmatic way - as opposed to emptiness - love requires neither intellectual interpretation nor revelation.
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Language has two forms of expression that correspond to mind-reality: one is the imagined or invented reality (mentally created out of knowledge or imagination), the other is the relative reality (dependent arising) which we deal with every moment of our life.
The true nature (suchness) is not part of what can be learned or talked about and so doesn’t have a form of expression. Is this a reason to think that the reality has different meaning as far as the true nature of things is concerned?
What about the laws governing the true nature of things? If one says that external appearance is governed by external laws what are the laws that govern the essence? The essence of things cannot be captured in words, definitions, formulas and laws. To have a perfect insight in the midst of boisterous phenomena is to forget the learned laws that govern the universe.
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The meaning of life is to validate reality, namely to be part of rational human beings that grasp the aspects of conventional existence (actions, objects, agents of thought, mental aspects) as being what it is and to infer that what gets to the senses and mind is what reality is in truth and in fact.
Besides that, there is always something that seems mysterious and independent of senses, something that would remain unknown to the mind and on which mind would have no means to decide upon.
Altering senses by using drugs or some form of intoxication gives one the impression that part of this unknown could be construed by using in a different way what was known to the mind before it got altered.
I wouldn’t say that human mind is not able to get into unknown dimensions of the mind and, naively, reject the “unknown” due to the rarity and limitations of such experience. I just want to emphasize that by altering the perception field, one doesn’t alter the reality.
There is no such a thing as externally possible and internally (mentally) impossible to be grasped (related to).
Though there are things that are “mentally conceivable” but impossible to be found in the external world. To say that what is validated as reality is nothing else but appearances that are empty of “reality and truth” is something difficult to demonstrate.
An example of such an altered truth would be the meditation on selflessness. The other would be the meditation on emptiness.
The self sees that an effect as a cause could be contained in another cause and that that cause could be contained in the effect that follows, etc. The self knows that this production of phenomena is inexhaustible, and that nothing has inherent existence. It is difficult to change its view that cause-and-effect is an universal law when he examines the emptiness as the bases-of-all and the inherent existent realm.
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To approach the emptiness subject in a simplified and also deficient way we’d have to apply a direction of thought that would allow us to connect the emptiness - what we perceive that emptiness is in the ordinary sense – with some characteristic of the existent that is analogues to it. What would be this characteristic? The most obvious one is the dependent-arising of phenomena that allows us to infer that a thing does not have an inherent nature and as such is “empty”. Dependent implies lacking independence; “arising” means appearing or coming into existence. Dependent-arising means coming into existence in dependence of something else like a cause or an aggregate of causes. That is the only thing that could safely introduce the emptiness to our intellectual know-how. Every single point, entity or event is part of a dependent-arising equation. Understood as such it is obvious that emptiness is not void since it is not a negation of perception (life) but an acknowledgement that such perception applies to an impermanent, non inherent, non objective, and non ultimate thing.
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What a phenomenon depends on? Is the
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Texte: Boris Musteata Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bildmaterialien: Boris Musteata
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 06.05.2012
ISBN: 978-3-86479-644-9
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