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Emptiness
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Source:
http://world.std.com/~metta/lib/modern/emptiness.html
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