In an often-told Zen tale, the parents of a village girl storm the hut of the aging monk Hakuin and thrust on him their daughter’s newborn child. They blame him for fathering the baby, mock his esteemed reputation, and name him a dirty old man. Awkwardly cradling the squalling baby, Hakuin makes a deep bow and responds with equanimity, “Is that so?”

That night, as a chill wind penetrates the hut, he encircles the baby with his own warmth, offering her protection. He nurtures this child as a father would his daughter: stitching her clothes from his monk’s robes, sharing his own meager broth and rice, as well as schooling her in poetry, brush painting, and the wisdom of the dharma.

When the true father is revealed, the village girl’s parents appear once again at Hakuin’s hut, this time to claim the child as their own and to take her away. They praise Hakuin for his generosity, ask forgiveness for tarnishing his image as a monk, and name him a great benefactor. As he releases the beloved child, he makes a deep bow and again with equanimity responds, “Is that so?”

I’ve found myself returning to the Hakuin tale as I’ve reflected on a recent school reunion. A reunion—what better occasion to confront the tight grip of the self image; the exquisite pull, and sometimes pain, of seeing through the lens of reputation, name, and identity?

The first class reunion for my progressive New York City private school was our twenty-fifth. Some of us, including me, had started at the school at age 6, and so we went back a long way together. At the reunion, my fifth-grade teacher told me a story. “At morning circle,” Joan said, “I asked for a volunteer. Before I’d mentioned the errand, you raised your hand and jumped from your seat. You raced out of the room en route to do that errand. Who knows where you went? It was ten minutes before you raced back, empty-handed, confused.” I’ve savored the tale of this small, intense enthusiast, and wondered, “Who was she?”

At our second reunion, our thirty-fifth, my childhood friend Suzy told my 10-year-old daughter about the young me: “Every single day at school your mom would cry.” And who was this? I’ve pondered both of these stories for hints of who I was and, in some ways, who I am now.

Over these many years, I’ve committed much time and effort to meditation practice, to therapy, to qigong or yoga, to countless modalities to train in awareness and equanimity. That’s meant I’ve often taken myself gently by the scruff of the neck—to listen with more care, to contain soaring emotions (not always so benign as enthusiasm or tears), and to pause and consider before I jump. At times I’ve taken pride in my progress; indeed, I’ve relished praise from friends for how I have “changed.”

Of course, in Buddhism we’re taught that pride is based in illusion and, ultimately, causes pain, as does attachment to either blame or praise. Yet how I’ve yearned for you to certify me, to stamp me, to applaud me, to mirror me back to myself as a new and improved self. And who is this “you?” I’ve been in awe of you since I was 6—the Big Shot, the primo-identity!

This past year, I’ve been one of the planners of a third reunion, our forty-seventh. In my kitchen in Berkeley I met with a classmate, Carly. She had been the queen Big Shot. When we were little, I dreaded the Fifth Avenue bus ride home with Carly, who teased me daily about my little-shot ways—a dreamer, a klutz, a teacher’s pet. Often, as we rode downtown, she would knock me down and sit on top of me, crushing my cheek against the seat. With me struggling underneath her weight, my face stinging with tears, we’d ride past my stop at 81st by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all the way to hers at 53rd, almost as far as MoMA. It was a long walk back uptown to my stop.

I still don’t know why she did it or why I stood for it. I do know that at some point I paid a high price to win Carly’s friendship. I also know that we continued a long love-hate history throughout school and beyond; listening to Mozart together, staying up all night talking about our boyfriends, our mothers. We went through her breakdown during college and mine ten years later. Since then, our on-and-off visits have felt strained for reasons that have remained mostly opaque.

At our recent visit, after reunion planning, we exchanged news of family and work. I picked up a booklet of photos from the past month’s meeting of the Berkeley City Council, where in their tradition of naming days in honor of local artists, my birthday for that year was named “Barbara Gates Day.” The cover photo featured a group shot of my crew, arrayed in jeans and shawls, running shoes and silver boots—family, the staff of Inquiring Mind, neighborhood kids—precious strands of my life that had come together to celebrate. But as soon as I opened the booklet, something felt off. I hurried through to the final shot of me at a podium, eyebrows raised, nostrils flared, gesturing with dramatic flourish. “Whoa!” Carly shook her head with a snort. “Same old Barbara!” She scowled, narrowed her eyes, and, as if to someone across the room, added, “Nope, hasn’t changed a bit!” I felt it like a wallop. A whole lot of words followed that I couldn’t take in, that I could barely hear, but three that I thought I did were: “Full of yourself.”

Where did that come from? I had the urge to grab her by the shoulders, to escort her out the front door, and, with an imperceptible shove at the landing, to knock her down the steep sixteen steps. Tongue-tied, I sat there raging. Once again I was pinned under Carly on the Fifth Avenue bus headed past my home stop. Again, I felt crushed into some diminished picture of my “self.”

But what if instead, like the Zen monk Hakuin, I had responded with a gracious nod, “Is that so?” What if I had let her comment breeze through our exchange?

Not so easy. I try to imagine our monk by the doorway to his hut clasping the dazed baby to his fast-beating heart, blamed, called dirty old man. Or years later, releasing this child, whose tender life felt inseparable from his own, now praised with the lofty great benefactor. When his world as he knew it was overturned and he was presented with opposing identities, what a feat to hold steady in himself, to be unshakable. For me, pulled as I am by enthusiasm, by hurt, or by thirst for validation, such freedom from the addiction to identity doesn’t come easily.

This visit with Carly touched off memories. So many memories from childhood were of the powerlessness of us little shots and the clout of the Big Shots—whom I feared, hated, and secretly craved to impress.

What if I had let her comment breeze through our exchange?

Who were the little shots? They were dreamers, artists, tellers of tales: Ariana, with her tender cheeks and spun-sugar halo of hair, a painter, even at 9 capturing the nuance of seasons; Plum, with her silky braids and embroidered tops, a book lover who wrote endless tales of mystery and imagination; and me, a fervent story-maker, rapt in the child’s worlds of dress-up and dolls.

And the Big Shots? They were the tough girls. Each and every one could throw a mean pitch in baseball or Soak ’Em—the scourge of little shots like me. In a Soak ’Em game, sometimes dubbed Dodge Ball or Murder Ball, the Big Shots seemed all powerful. When two teams faced off in the gym, the team with more Big Shots always inevitably won. When one of them got the ball, we knew they would slam it at one of us little shots and knock us out of the game. A sidearm throw aimed at the face could blacken an eye or bloody a nose, or aimed at the feet could send us flying–smack–against the gym floor. And for me, the choosing of teams was the most excruciating part. Big Shot captains took turns picking, and my friends and I were always chosen last. Talk about a diminished identity.

After two years of planning, when the forty-seventh reunion finally happened, our gatherings included a visit to a building overlooking Central Park that for many years housed our school. In a bizarre juxtaposition with our freedom-loving progressive institution, this building now housed a minimum-security prison. A bright-eyed, gray-haired, and balding group of us was graciously ushered around the site. As we toured the lobby (now complete with metal detectors and a gun arsenal) and the former classrooms (now dorm units with tight tiers of bunks), I had an eerie vision of the sacred chambers of our childhood illuminated in the background. Glowing behind a large, dimly lit room rose our school gym. A Soak ’Em game was in full swing, Carly in a blue mesh pinnie spinning a mean ball, sending me sprawling.

As I descended the stairs from the cafeteria and peered down the corridors of locked doors, a memory blossomed into consciousness:

With a passel of children, I skitter down the steps, laughing and shoving, dash left through the fifth-floor hallway, almost to the end, and throw open the door. It’s Fred Shultz’s fifth-grade math class. Fred is late, so someone seizes the boxes of fresh chalk and starts throwing. It’s like a multi-ball Soak ’Em assault, two Big Shot girls in alliance with the boys against the little shots—Ariana, Plum, and me. We recoil at the far end of the table and duck a barrage of flying chalk while flinging handfuls of broken pieces back at our tormentors. Suddenly, the Big Shot girls, armed with new packs of ammunition, jump up on their chairs and, towering above the rest of us, focus their full attack on Ariana.

Through the cloud of chalk dust, I stagger up onto a chair. In a sudden reversal, I turn on Ariana, pummeling her with chalk. Ariana, with her spun-sugar hair; Ariana, who has been my dearest friend. When I’ve used up the last of the chalk shards, I search wildly for more. That’s when I grab the eraser from the tray along the blackboard. With all of the force I hadn’t been able to muster in hundreds of failed Soak ’Em games, I hurl that eraser. When the speeding missile hits Ariana’s eye, she shrieks in pain.

Did Fred finally arrive and make us stop? Did Ariana leave in an ambulance? I can’t remember. I do remember that Ariana was out for the rest of the week while rumors spread that she might lose her eye. It was June already, almost time for summer vacation, and as the year drew to a close, she stayed home, and, in fact, the following year she never came back.

As we alumni headed out of what once was our school and into Central Park, I grappled with the karmic consequences of this chalk fight. By hitting Ariana with that eraser I ended our friendship and was catapulted into the ranks of the Big Shots. Heady with the pheromones of betrayal and victory, I was now allied with Carly and her pals. Secretly, I harbored the anguish of loss mixed with a stinking dirty sense of shame. And now, more than five decades later, despite the fact that Ariana’s eye healed quickly and that she and I reconciled during college, I have continued to feel the pain of that betrayal. Now, sitting on a park bench, I came back into contact with its burn. I lost Ariana. I lost my way.

Our school had espoused freedom; mostly, it was the opposite of a prison with metal grids and an arsenal. But indeed, we were human beings suffering from the same imprisoning habits as the rest of our species. How locked in we were by our fixed images of each other—Big Shot, little shot, crybaby, enthusiast, athlete, artist—and our images of ourselves—in my case, so rigid that I sacrificed what I loved most just to end up in a different cell.

Sitting on the bench, my thoughts steeped in the chalk fight, I returned to the grown-up event with Carly. In my Berkeley kitchen when I had felt accused, I jumped to anger so fast. Yet I hadn’t known my raw heartache underneath—of feeling somehow unseen and unappreciated. Now, I let that heartache seep through me. It then came to me, Carly may well feel that way too. Why would the pain that drove me to switch sides and assault a friend somehow be different from what drives Carly or anyone else to bully?

And I returned to “Is that so?” Is anything ever really “so?” I questioned the pictures I hold of myself or Carly, of little shots or Big Shots. Without those, what is left? Not me. Not her. Not us. Not them. Right there a glimpse of emptiness. And out of that, a taste of equanimity.

⧫

This piece has been adapted from the Fall 2010 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 27, No. 1). Text © 2010 Barbara Gates.

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

• “Happiness Beyond Worldly Measures”
• “Gabe and the Medicine Buddha”
• “The Buddha as a Parent”
• “Reunion on the Path of No Speech”

The post Who Was She? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I’d like to talk about emptiness as a way of perceiving. The writer Gay Watson explores a translation of sunyata—first offered by T. Stcherbatsky—that is far richer than the mere lack that “emptiness” connotes: relativity. All phenomena arise in dependence, or relative to, conditions; or, per one interpretation of quantum theory, they exist solely in relation to being observed. Since, according to this interpretation, our act of perceiving is fundamental to the fabrication of our constructed reality, I wonder, could this be one reason the Buddha included perceiving (samjna) in the five aggregates as an essential constituent of our conscious experience?

The word emptiness tends to bring up an image of a dark abyss, a black hole, and people think, “There’s nothing! It’s all empty.” Or worse yet, “Nothing matters.” But relativity, as this translation suggests, means that what we perceive is relative and relies on our framework of recognition (e.g., biological, evolutionary, cognitive, psychological, and sociocultural). It also depends on all the causes and conditions that have supported its existence.

For example, given dissimilar sociocultural conditioning, a member of the East African Maasai tribe would have a different perceived reality in front of a laptop on Zoom than a Silicon Valley engineer would. More radically, different sentient beings have distinct umwelts, or experiential worlds, where their understanding of reality is shaped by their specific biological and cognitive characteristics. The perceptual world of a dog consists of an exceptionally complex landscape of smells and high-frequency sounds, all of which are absent from our subjective reality. Furthermore, whatever is perceived in these disparate umwelts is not independently existing but codependently arising based on many causes and conditions. The creation of a sound requires a vibrating source with the appropriate properties, a medium through which sound travels, energy to create the vibration…just to name a few. Underscoring the immense scale of interdependence, the astronomer Carl Sagan famously said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Therefore, what we perceive as reality is neither real—reified, fixed, independently existent—nor nonreal. Just as a dream is neither real nor nonreal, so is life. Everything is a dream, but it’s not just a dream—a dismissive stance that veers into nihilism. Life is a dream, and it’s not a dream. In this practice, we neither take an ontological stance that things are rigid as we perceive them to be nor do we deny their existence—neither of the extremes is helpful. The Middle Way of sunyata is to honor relativity and avoid the extremes of independent, reified existence on one end and nihilism on the other.

The late great teacher Rob Burbea talked about life as theater. Imagine you have a front row seat at an engaging play and are fully immersed in the story. You feel the pain, joy, and frustration of the actors. And yet, you realize that it’s theater. Each actor has a role to play. It’s not real! But if we think it’s just theater, we demean the value, the beauty, the grace of the art form. Life is theater in its most beautiful and sacred sense. We can engage with life—this theater-like dream—knowing that we are playing a character in relation to all other characters. The script is not fixed. It has infinite possibilities, albeit each with varying probabilities. And we have an incredible gift: the freedom to choose our perspective, the way we see.

While our minds might crave certainty, relativity invites us to open up to a whole range of possibilities. In this openness, different perceptions can be explored. We’re always looking in a particular way, after all, never putting our lenses down. For example, we can become aware of how we are perceiving, fabricating our reality, starting with moment-to-moment subtle recognitions of arisings in the body-mind and expanding to the stories we concoct about ourselves, others, and the world. Paying attention with interest and curiosity often naturally shifts our perspective. Or, we can intentionally try on (but not force) perceiving from the spacious vantage point of love and letting go, which is the opposite of contraction, clinging, and separation—aka selfing.

Selfing is clinging to negative self-preoccupation. However, developing a healthy sense of self that has integrity and is upright, confident, and beloved is necessary for this path of awakening. It’s often said that you must first know and love the self—“this being who is me,” with all its conditioning, neuroses, and particularities—before you can let it go. If we try to relinquish this self before developing a sense of confidence and care, our practice becomes mired in spiritual bypass. Using sunyata as a hammer to squash and get rid of the self, as some well-intentioned practitioners subconsciously attempt, is painful. Let’s remember the Middle Way. There is this dear being who navigates life, suffers, loves, loses. And yet this is not the whole view. There are more dimensions. Instead of fixating on the perception of my self and my life through a straw—“This is me, this is what I want, this is what I hate, this is me, me, me”—can we expand our perspective to see with love and humor, 360° internally and externally, not taking this self-sense too darn seriously? Remember life as sacred theater.

While navigating different perspectives, it’s also important to maintain flexibility. If I see a friend, it’s not helpful to say “Numerous causes and conditions are giving rise to an image of you being recognized and delight being experienced” instead of “I’m glad to see you!”

On the other hand, if I’m feeling annoyed, it might be helpful to access other ways of looking. I can see that this friend, just like me, experiences causes and conditions responsible for creating the person that they are. I can recognize their narrative. I could have been born as them and they could have been born as me. In some ways, I am them. We are entangled as we codependently arise in this mess together. We’re not separate. It’s not me versus them. It’s us.

We are entangled as we codependently arise in this mess together.

I notice the impermanent and dreamlike nature of our interaction, and in that moment, my heart opens to tenderness for both of us. We are co-creating and living this mysterious dream together. Or, in the words of Nagarjuna: “Whenever there’s a belief that things are real, desire and hatred spring up unendingly; unwholesome views are entertained, from which all disputes come. Indeed, this is the source of every view; without it, no defilement can occur. Thus, when this is understood, all views and all afflictions vanish entirely. But how may this be known? It is said that when one sees that all things are dependently produced, one sees that all such things are free from birth.”

In Pali, the term yathabhuta nanadassana is often translated as “seeing things as they are.” But this translation posits an ultimate, correct way of seeing things, whereas a more appropriate translation is “seeing things as they have come to be” or as they have come to be seen. Bhuta is the past participle of the verb “to be.” So instead we could say, come and see things as they have come to be perceived, as they have dependently coarisen in our seeing. And when we see in this way, there’s an opening. Emaho! Marvelous! This way of seeing makes life even more mysterious, precious, sublime. It expands the heart in the beauty and generosity of letting go rather than clinging to rigid assumptions and presumptions.

Ultimately, emptiness—as a non-fixed, nonfabricated way of looking—and love and compassion are intertwined. One leads to the other. Love and compassion are particular ways of looking. When we look with kindness and benevolence at ourselves, others, and the world; when we cultivate the way of seeing that is metta, love with no strings attached, we loosen the sense of self and tune our ability to see its fabricated nature. The arrows of love and emptiness fly both ways.

Some years ago, I dedicated a year of my life to the practices of the heart, in particular to metta and compassion. It was a wonderful practice period that gave rise to many insights, including one that I rarely talk about because it’s hard for me to put into words. It was an opening into a perspective that may be described as a glimpse into the “mind of grace.” It was a perspective of complete love and unconditional compassion for everything beyond time and space. No separation, no boundaries, no self—love infused with emptiness, emptiness infused with love. I humbly offer an invitation for you to explore the interchangeable nature of love and emptiness for yourself.

It is said that awakening is an accident, and when we keep practicing, we become more accident-prone. So keep practicing, so that different perceptions pop up when you least expect them and they gradually become readily accessible. Keep relaxing the habitual patterns of perception, and try to see, without forcing, through the eyes of love and nonseparation. You might then notice that you’re looking at every human being as if they are your kin—sibling, mother—and you want to be of service, to help, to heal. But know that you can never go back, because there’s now a crack in self-preoccupation, and the crack is where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen beautifully said.

Trust your own ability to see—because you can. The Buddha said that if it weren’t possible to awaken, he wouldn’t have shared the teachings. So take heart. Borrow trust—from a friend or teacher who’s further on the path, if you need it—and then verify for yourself how love and emptiness are intertwined.

None of this is heady or meant to be figured out by analysis. It’s meant to be practiced, to be known experientially, firsthand. Find out what happens when you widen your view, consider the causes and conditions of your or someone else’s perspective, or intentionally infuse generosity of spirit into your way of seeing. Maybe the heart releases into more freedom, more care. We can know for ourselves that compassion is the natural response of the heart to suffering. When we’re not entangled in selfing, we want to alleviate pain, to help, to be of service. Ehipassiko. Come and see for yourself.

♦

This article is adapted from a dharma talk given in April 2021 titled “Emptiness: The Womb of Love and Service.”

The post Dreaming Together appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I was at Eiheiji monastery in Japan, everyone was just doing what he should do. That is all. It is the same as waking up in the morning; we have to get up. At Eiheiji monastery, when we had to sit, we sat; when we had to bow to Buddha, we bowed to Buddha. That is all. And when we were practicing, we did not feel anything special. We did not even feel that we were leading a monastic life. For us, the monastic life was the usual life, and the people who came from the city were unusual people. When we saw them we felt, “Oh, some unusual people have come!”

But once I had left Eiheiji and been away for some time, coming back was different. I heard the various sounds of practice—the bells and the monks reciting the sutra—and I had a deep feeling. There were tears flowing out of my eyes, nose, and mouth! It is the people who are outside of the monastery who feel its atmosphere. Those who are practicing actually do not feel anything. I think this is true for everything. When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all that they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.

So to feel something about Buddhism is not the main point. Whether that feeling is good or bad is out of the question. We do not mind, whatever it is. Buddhism is not good or bad. We are doing what we should do. That is Buddhism. Of course some encouragement is necessary, but that encouragement is just encouragement. It is not the true purpose of practice. It is just medicine. When we become discouraged we want some medicine. When we are in good spirits we do not need any medicine. You should not mistake medicine for food. Sometimes medicine is necessary, but it should not become our food.

When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all that they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.

So, of Rinzai’s four ways of practice, the perfect one is not to give a student any interpretation of himself, nor to give him any encouragement. If we think of ourselves as our bodies, the teaching then may be our clothing. Sometimes we talk about our clothing; sometimes we talk about our body. But neither body nor clothing is actually we ourselves. We ourselves are the big activity. We are just expressing the smallest particle of the big activity, that is all. So it is all right to talk about ourselves, but actually there is no need to do so. Before we open our mouths, we are already expressing the big existence, including ourselves. So the purpose of talking about ourselves is to correct the misunderstanding we have when we are attached to any particular temporal form or color of the big activity. It is necessary to talk about what our body is and what our activity is so that we may not make any mistake about them. So to talk about ourselves is actually to forget about ourselves.

Dogen-zenji said, “To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.” When you become attached to a temporal expression of your true nature, it is necessary to talk about Buddhism, or else you will think the temporal expression is it. But this particular expression of it is not it. And yet at the same time it is it! For a while this is it; for the smallest particle of time, this is it. But it is not always so: the very next instant it is not so, thus this is not it. So that you will realize this fact, it is necessary to study Buddhism. But the purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and to forget ourselves. When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of the big existence, or reality itself. When we realize this fact, there is no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. The purpose of our practice is to be aware of this fact.

♦

From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki © 1970 by John Weatherhill, Inc. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com.

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In The Dharma of Poetry, author and poet John Brehm likens meditation to poetry, as both allow us to shift out of our habits of mind and experience a moment of spaciousness. He suggests that a poet can be defined “as one who stops.” The poet steps out of the ongoing flow of experience, looks at it, and helps us do the same. With his latest book of poetry, Dharma Talk, Brehm invites us to do just that: pause and contemplate the dharma of our everyday lives. 

Published by Wisdom in September, this collection of poems explores life’s paradoxes with a blend of warmth and wit. Brehm raises questions about emptiness, consciousness, and the difference between everything and nothing, but he does not pretend to have the answers (“Infinite causes and conditions brought me / to this moment, who can untangle them?”). Instead, he allows the questions to hang in the air, inviting readers to rest in the not-knowing. 

Below is a selection of poems from the collection:

***

Dharma Talk

He said changing nothing changes
everything, which if you change

the words around also suggests
that changing everything

changes nothing,
which further implies

that nothing and everything
are interchangeable, are

in fact the same thing, or
the same non-thing, having

no fixed, unchanging nature,
or a nature that is in constant

change, if change can be said
to be constant, and is therefore

a kind of emptiness about
which it is better to speak

only in the negative, of
what it is not, or not

to speak at all.

Emptiness Is Not Enough

“Emptiness is not enough,” you said,
and we all laughed at that, filling the air
with an ancient human sound.
Funny how we never think
of hunter-gatherers laughing,
but they must have, all that time
lying around singing and fucking,
there must have been laughter, too—
monkey business, Paleolithic slapstick.
Has anyone studied the evolution
of laughter, of humor? Probably.
Is there anything we haven’t studied,
haven’t dragged into the realm of
human comprehension? Even
emptiness: whole books on it,
many talks, six-week online courses,
nine-day retreats. Not that we will
ever know all there is to know
about the empty knowing that pervades
all things. Some neuroscientists
now believe the only way to solve
“the hard problem of consciousness,”
how we get from unconscious matter
to subjective awareness, is by positing
that all matter is, to one degree or another,
conscious, and that human consciousness
is just a scaling up (in some cases
a scaling down) of the consciousness
that’s already present in trees and grass, ants
and antelope. Panpsychism is what such
a philosophical position is called, a modern
version of what our distant ancestors
knew to be true, that everything is alive
with spirit, intelligence, sacredness.
Still, one might ask why matter is conscious,
why is there consciousness at all?
An unanswerable question, also known
as a mystery. But why am I saying all this,
suddenly giving a little lecture on a subject
I can just barely pretend to almost understand?
Infinite causes and conditions brought me
to this moment, who can untangle them?
Last night, just before sleep, I prayed
for inspiration, for a poem to be given to me,
and this is what has arisen from the emptiness,
the shape my wish has taken. That would be
one way to explain it. The other ways
are beyond me.

Something and Nothing

There’s something to be said
for having nothing to say,

though I don’t know what
that is, or isn’t, just as

there’s something to be
known about not-knowing,

which I would tell you
if I could. There must be

something to be gained
by losing, a seed of victory

buried in every failure,
else I would not be here.

Clearly, there’s something
to be desired about being

beyond desire, as the sages
never tire of telling us,

and nothing more fulfilling
than emptying yourself out—

no ground beneath your feet,
nothing to hold onto, no handrail,

no belief, only this bright,
self-sustaining air, and a falling

that feels like floating.

Metta 

The book I’m reading suggests we send
lovingkindness to everyone we see,
silently addressing them thus:
“May you be well, may you be safe, 
may you be happy.” And I do this
for a while, sitting inside a cafe,
watching the foot traffic go by.
It feels good—generous, 
loving, kind. But after a time
I start modifying the blessing:
“May you be well, may you be safe,
may you be happy … and maybe also
lose the frowning-into-the-phone
facial expression I get so tired
of seeing everywhere I go.”
It’s the shadow side of lovingkindness
sticking its nose in, having its say,
and I can’t seem to shut it up.
Someone else walks by and I offer:
“May you be well, may you be safe,
may you be happy … and while you’re at it,
how about some nicer clothes?
It wouldn’t kill you to dress
with a bit more panache, would it?”
I keep on in this way, dishing out 
blessings with a side of helpful advice,
until I notice across the room two young women
sitting side by side, talking quietly,
in no need of either my good wishes
or my corrective commentary.
But then I see that one of them is crying,
nodding her head when her friend
says something, wiping tears
from her cheeks with the palms
of her hands. She pulls it together
for awhile, but then her face clenches
and she gives in, until her friend
lays a hand on her shoulder
and she can talk again—a gentle
rhythm of crying and talking,
waves rising and falling.
It doesn’t look like she’s been
visited by tragedy, a sudden death
or shattering diagnosis.
Ordinary heartbreak would be
my guess, the shock of betrayal,
some painful reversal in the endless
cycle of loss and gain, and now
a new emptiness spreads out before her
and she doesn’t know what to do. 
But what kills me is when she tucks her hair
behind her ear and tries not to cry,
and fails, overcome by this sadness,
so that I feel it, too, a great swell lifts 
and carries me and almost pulls me under—
and then I’m in the thick of it,
wishing her to be well, to be safe,
to be happy, as if my life 
depended on it. 

⧫

© 2023 John Brehm, “Dharma Talk,” “Emptiness Is Not Enough,” “Something and Nothing,” and “Metta” from Dharma Talk. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications, Inc., wisdomexperience.org.

The post Resting in the Not-Knowing appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Every one of us entering this world does so without knowing our identity. When we’re born, we’re ignorant of our name, nationality, or social class, for example. Yet we’re fully alive. We come into the world in our most vulnerable, pure, and natural state—but it doesn’t last long, because entering life is like being invited to a masquerade, and to join in, we must get a mask to wear. But, being babies, we can’t make our own mask, so those close to us—usually our parents or other relatives—start crafting it, and then they put it on us. The initial components of this mask include a name, gender, nationality, and in many cases, a religion. As we grow older and continue to dance along, new elements are added, slowly building up our identity. But we ourselves don’t realize that we’re wearing a mask or that it’s being made. From the outset, we’re told that our name and so on are who we are, as if these elements constituted an absolute, solid, separate, and permanent essence with which we’d come into this world. We don’t recognize them as products of our environment, which could have been very different in different circumstances. 

Think for a moment about who you would be if your parents had different beliefs, education, and resources—if you had grown up with different siblings or were born in a place where another language was spoken. What we call “I” has never been and can never be a separate and independent entity; it’s deeply and inevitably intertwined with its surroundings, without exception. 

As the dance continues, our mask continues to evolve, becoming more complex and refined. It begins to include new elements, such as specific roles: we become daughters, brothers, friends, boyfriends, or girlfriends. To these roles we add careers: we call ourselves engineers, artists, or spiritual teachers. Other subtler elements include our habits, opinions, reactions, fears, hopes, and preferences. But all the things we unknowingly overidentify with when we say “This is who I am,” are not really ourselves. The person we believe ourselves to be is not who we really are but a “persona” we’ve built—a role we’ve developed and learned to play with others. 

The word “person” comes from the Latin term persona, which means mask.

The problem with masks is that none of them are perfect. Their crafting process inevitably creates cracks, scratches, and flaws—those aspects of ourselves that we’re told as we’re growing up are “bad” or “wrong.” Eventually, we become ashamed of these parts of ourselves, doing all we can to prevent others, and even ourselves, from seeing them. Further, since we’re convinced that this mask, or persona, is our true identity, we cling to it with all our might, trying to make it presentable and permanent. This is reflected in countless ways, such as in our need to meet social standards, in the expectations we impose on ourselves or that others impose on us, and in the constructs we weave with our minds. But maintaining our persona leaves us exhausted, because no matter what we do or accomplish, it’s never enough. Who we are, it seems, is never enough. 

So we might approach this situation from a different perspective: instead of trying to polish our mask until it becomes perfect, we can start looking for the one who’s wearing it. This looking brings us to the realm of contemplative practice, where we dedicate our efforts to observing the self as it is, free from prejudices and preconceived ideas, with what Zen calls “beginner’s mind.” 

As we look closer, it becomes increasingly clear that all the elements that make up our mask are in constant flux. Even those as fundamental as our name, gender, nationality, and religion can change—not to mention our roles, professions, opinions, habits, and preferences. Without exception, all these elements are arising and disappearing in a constant flow. Noticing this, something within us begins to see that clinging to our persona, which is impermanent, is actually the root of our suffering.  

When we don’t see reality clearly, when we believe ourselves to be something we’re not, this distortion leads us to act in ways that harm us and others. When someone does or says something that threatens our persona—if they say: “You’re such a ____________,” for example—we feel attacked. We take it personally and maybe try to retaliate. But as we begin to see more clearly, we might sense that there must be something beyond our persona, something that was there before the mask was crafted: an original nature, a true self that we are now being pulled to discover. 

There’s a Zen koan that asks “What is your original face, the one you had before your parents were born?” The problem is that we can’t find this original nature by thinking about it. Since it’s prior to thought, it’s unknowable by it. Therefore, we can only surrender to the unknown and observe. Some practices do this receptively, by encouraging us to simply watch how everything arises and passes. An example of this is what some forms of Zen call shikantaza, which is sitting without a goal, or “just sitting.” Others do it more actively, like some Zen koans that encourage us to find the true nature of the self. 

But what if there’s no one behind the mask? As we continue on this path, we might feel fear—which, for some of us, may be mild, and, for others, intense. All our lives we’ve tried to be someone, to be something. What if, in essence, who we are is impossible to pin down? What if behind the mask, there’s only a timeless, genderless, colorless, shapeless emptiness? 

At that moment, we have no choice but to let the mask dissolve into this emptiness and discover that this is what we truly are. 

The fear of being nothing is a gateway to our true identity.

Realizing ourselves as this emptiness is discovering that which permeates and saturates everything. It’s awakening to the very nature of the mind, which is always present, whether we realize it or not. We believed we were the mask, but the moment we see through it, we recognize that we are what’s behind it: awakened consciousness without form, without boundaries, and without time. And although this may seem like the end of the journey, in many ways, it’s only the beginning. Our task now is to live from the realization of this fundamental identity within the masquerade. We understand that our “mask,” or persona, is not our true self but a relative identity, one that was initially put on us by others, but as we grew up became a co-creation. Recognizing this interdependence of the persona allows us to fully be part of a bright, mysterious, and wonderful dance—the dance of life. 

Seeing the mask—our persona—as an expression of a deeper truth, we no longer believe in its solidity or permanence. Instead, it becomes a fluid and adaptable identity that arises according to the moment. And those cracks and flaws we once felt ashamed of are now precious opportunities for transformation and growth, allowing us to dance wholeheartedly with others in a deeper expression of wisdom and compassion. 

The post Waking Up Is Letting the Mask Fall appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“We’re moving to America,” my father said with finality.

She took the news silently, my grandmother. We were gathered around her in the living room of our Taipei apartment. She wore her customary beige cheongsam dress, her hair neatly gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck as she sat in an armchair. Slowly she nodded, as a glimmer started collecting at the edge of one downcast eye, a welling repository of the unspoken.

We were leaving her.

For the first nine years of my life, my parents, sister, and I lived with my grandparents. The flavors of childhood made a deep impression. Every week, I went hand in hand with my grandmother to the street market to pick up vegetables and visit local food stalls for snacks like youtiao—long strips of dough, fried to an airy crispiness—the light greasy layers crackling into a shower of golden salty fragments as you bit into them and dunked them into a bowl of steaming sweet soy milk. Then there was the oyster thread soup at the night market and my first taste of cilantro—what a shock to the taste buds. The piquant grassiness collided with the saltiness of the glass noodles, and the contrast dumbfounded me for hours. My grandmother often cooked comfort foods: steamed minced pork patty, which crumbled into savory morsels atop fluffy rice, and a whole chicken stewed in the big metal rice cooker with so much wine that my face flushed red when I sipped a bowl of the hot broth.

We lived on the third floor of an apartment complex. My grandparents’ room was dark and cool, smelling of antique wood. I knew that in the tall dark dresser in the corner they kept a jar of spare change, from which I would occasionally fish out a few coins when no one was looking. I would then buy preserved plum patties from the local snack shop, sucking on the little sour and sweet discs on my way home from school. 

It was in the living room where my father first broke the news of our departure for the United States. She did not argue or fight with my parents. It was a foregone conclusion. They had made up their minds that they were going to go. They were simply telling her what was going to happen. I watched as a big glassy tear rolled slowly down the soft folds of her cheek. 

And so, we moved to southern California. We stayed with my mother’s college friend at her home in the San Gabriel Valley, a suburb about thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Her family lived in a one-story ranch-style house framed by big leafy palms, nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac. 

Every day brought interesting lessons about our new home. The spacious kitchen held particular fascination, with its strange electric stoves that lit up mesmerizingly red. Despite warnings, I couldn’t resist touching the glowing coil, only to draw my hand back in pain, papery white blisters welling up on my fingertips. Exploring the refrigerator, I discovered some orange squares stacked neatly in a side compartment, each one wrapped in cellophane. What were these crayon-colored flaps doing in the refrigerator? Can you eat them? I had never seen anything so mysterious. I gingerly unwrapped one of the squares. It was soft and pliant in my hand. Slowly I held it up to my lips and took a nibble. My face immediately bunched up. It was the strangest taste I had ever encountered—waxy, curdled, and artificial like rubber. I spit it out. This was my first introduction to American food.

The immigrant acclimation process entails constant trial and error, making mistakes and absorbing the results, then shape-shifting. We quickly picked up the ways of our new home and adapted to life in suburban southern California in the eighties—every day there was something to figure out: how to pronounce l’s and r’s, hit the tetherball higher than your opponent’s head, strike that magical balance on a bicycle without falling into thorny bushes, roller-skate backwards on asphalt, and choose your favorite Charlie’s Angel. 

When my parents had saved up enough to buy a house, we moved into a ranch-style one-story house right up the hill from the Puente Hills Mall (where they filmed Back to the Future). Weekdays after school were spent either at my Latina gal pal’s house down the street, listening to Journey in her garage, or loitering at the mall, where we got our ears pierced while sipping on an Orange Julius. Who wants to eat Chinese food when you can have a quarter pounder, with that gooey melted American cheese? 

By the time I saw my grandmother again, five years later, I was a full-fledged American teenager.

After my grandfather passed away, she came to America to live with us. She still wore her customary cheongsam dresses and styled her hair in a bun. She still watched Chinese opera on TV and used an abacus to calculate. 

I was in junior high, trying to fit into a world of which she had no understanding. Daily battles with mean girls at school filled me with dread. Whenever I went to my locker, they would be there. They pushed me against my locker door so that the rusty metal edges pressed into my skin as I tried to switch out my books, causing little pink welts on my arm that disappeared soon enough, but left indelible impressions on my young mind.  

I now stood eye to eye with my grandmother, and no longer understood her heavy Fukinese-accented Chinese. Time and distant shores had created a divide—we were foreigners to each other. The loss of culture and basic communication was painfully evident, and there was no hiding from the shame that I felt. To avoid the awkwardness, I kept talking to a minimum, and we lived side by side, falling into the family routine. School, dinner, church on Sundays, repeat.  

Two years of relative calm passed.

One afternoon after school, I heard a cry from the next room. There was no one else at home, and I walked into my grandmother’s room to find her shaking violently on the bed. I stood rigid at the edge of the bed, frozen in shock. Her whole body quaked uncontrollably, from head to toe. She lifted up one trembling hand. What should I do? What shouldn’t I do? She was trying to say something between the clattering of her teeth. “Bu…,” she said—“no,” in Chinese. She’s saying no? She continued, “Bu…bu…bu…yao…yao”—the second word means want. She doesn’t want…? “Bu…yao…pa.” The last word completed the sentence. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Bu…yao…pa.” She was addressing me and telling me not to be afraid! 

She gestured to the dressing table, I ran and grabbed a bottle of medicine and opened it, and put some small pills in her quaking palm. She shakily brought them to her mouth and swallowed them. She closed her eyes, and laid her head down on the pillows, exhausted, her tremors slowly calming down. I silently returned to my room, shaken to the core. I don’t remember anything that happened immediately after that, whether I called my parents, how she entered the hospital, how she got her diagnosis of colon cancer. 

We visited her in the hospital. We hugged her and told her we loved her. And a few months later, she was gone.

For decades, I was haunted by that moment in her room. Why hadn’t I been stronger? Why hadn’t I comforted her? Why hadn’t I crawled into the bed with her and held her until the shaking stopped? There must be something wrong with me. My heart is not big enough. It was the culmination of the guilt over the loss of our closeness. The shame burned through the years, my inability to act my albatross. No matter how much I achieved as an adult, I could never get away from that one failure seared into my heart.

It took a life crisis in my 30s to reset this deeply ingrained narrative. My marriage was falling apart, and with no spiritual practice, I was floundering. A friend started meditating at the Los Angeles Compassionate Heart Sangha, and I tagged along out of pure curiosity. Even though I spent the entire first meditation focused on not sneezing, I somehow felt relieved to be there. I began attending every Sunday. I sat and breathed with others who became a second family. We breathed together through my divorce as life crumbled around me, and we breathed together as I slowly rebuilt my life, healing and emerging on the other side of the tunnel, softer and with more self-knowledge.

One ordinary day during the pandemic lockdown, I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a post by Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg. By this time, I had been meditating for years. The post said:  

As we construct our identities, we tend to reinforce certain interpretations of our experiences, such as, “No one was there for me, so I must be unlovable.” These interpretations become ingrained in our minds and validated by the heated reactions of our bodies. And so they begin to define us. We forget that we’re constantly changing and that we have the power to make and remake the story of who we are. But when we do remember, the results can be dramatic and turn our lives around.

Suddenly, in a flash, coming out of nowhere and without trying, the memory of me as a 14-year-old frozen in fear in front of my grandmother on the bed played out before me. Only this time, I was an adult observer, watching the scene as though it was a movie flashing on the screen. And it came to me. The real story. “Bu yao pa—don’t be afraid.” The real meaning to come out of this moment, which was overshadowed by my shame, was that my grandmother loved me. She loved me so much that even though she was in severe physical pain, even though she didn’t know what was happening to her body, what she thought about first was me, her granddaughter, who was just a terrified kid who had never encountered sickness and death before. And her first instinct, despite the violent illness that was shaking her body from the inside out, was to try to calm me down. 

That is the beautiful heart of the story, the vast love of a grandmother, beyond physical pain, that bridged the gap between two shores. This realization out of the blue broke down the ramparts and the tears fell freely and completely, dissolving the knot inside of me, flooding out the shame and replacing it with a new understanding. 

Buddhist teacher Tara Brach says, “The more we bring tenderness to the life right here, the more the sense of the self actually starts dissolving.” Meditation practice helped me to observe my inner dialogue and how harsh it was. Only when I became kinder to myself was I able to loosen the grip around the identity I had built up. With each breath, the lid slowly came off the pressure valve, allowing me to free up space inside and see the world anew, as it really was. 

Sometimes our beliefs about ourselves get so ingrained that they block us from seeing anything else that’s there, and we spend years trying to get away from it. The real story is much bigger than we know. How can we bring tenderness to that story, and start dissolving the false stories we’re telling ourselves? 

What stories in your life need to be retold, with tenderness? 

I recently planted cilantro in my garden. I add it to the minced steamed pork and stewed chicken broth that I make to recapture my childhood. I add it to salsa and guacamole, to chimichurri, to tart green salads, even to burgers in the multicultural milieu that is my life in America. I love all of the fragments coming together, all that’s here, the luster and the shadow, the gladness and the suffering of the world and in me, and, ultimately, the peace that comes from the grandmother in my heart who says: 

Bu yao pa. 

Don’t be afraid.

The post The Piquantness of Cilantro and the Retelling of Half-Truths appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Understanding emptiness is crucial to study and training for any dedicated Buddhist practitioner. In this talk, Adele Tomlin gives an overview of two views of emptiness, “empty-of-other” (Tib. zhentong) and “empty of self” (rangtong), with the former considered the “higher” ultimate view of reality, or the buddhanature. Tomlin outlines the key differences between the two views, developed by Tibetan Buddhist scholars and masters, and how they connect with the definitive and provisional meaning of Buddha’s teachings. She then explains the importance of understanding these two views of emptiness for meditative practice. Tomlin explains that the method (thab) of practice without the correct view is being like a bird with only one wing. One cannot really get off the ground, let alone fly.

Adele Tomlin is an independent scholar-translator, writer, and practitioner within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. She has postgraduate degrees in Tibetan Buddhism and Western Philosophy. Since 2006, she has been studying the Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy in Europe, India, and Nepal. Her publications include a study and translation of Tāranātha’s Commentary on the Heart Sūtra and The Chariot that Transports to the Four Kāyas by Bamda Gelek Gyatso. She is also the founder and director of the first female-founded dharma research and translations website, Dakini Translations and Publications.

The post A Bird With Two Wings: Flying with the Correct View of Emptiness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It seems to me that all those who enter a spiritual path have very similar goals, though these goals may not always be articulated. These might be described, in the broadest strokes, as love, as peace, as freedom from suffering—that is, as a happiness that is fulfilling in the most complete sense. This is, I think, a universal aspiration.

The question, then, that follows from this is: What are those forces that keep us from experiencing this kind of happiness? In Buddhism, these forces are called the defilements of mind, the afflictive emotions such as fear, greed, jealousy, and hatred, which are all rooted in ignorance and delusion. Although various paths speak of the afflictive emotions in their own distinct ways, all share the understanding that we need some means to purify the heart and free the mind. While it may be addressed differently in different traditions, on the spiritual path there is really only one issue: extricating ourselves from those forces in the mind by which we are bound. This is not esoteric; it’s not mysterious. It’s simply the challenge of our everyday experience.

In Buddhism, our particular way of addressing these matters is to say that the root of the problem is the delusion of selfhood. Because we are living in this delusion, this prison of self, we identify with the afflictive emotions, thereby feeding and encouraging them. And whether we practice as householders engaged with family and work or as monks in the forest, the question is the same: Does what we do strengthen the sense of self through those habits of mind—fixation, contraction, identification—that prevent our aspiration for the highest happiness from being fulfilled, or does it work to purify the heart and free the mind from those qualities? This is the only question that really matters.

Debates about the relative merits of different approaches to the spiritual life are often framed in a way that is misleading. To speak, for example, of one approach as being life-affirming and another as life-denying misses the point, because the path is not about affirming life or denying it—it’s about emerging from delusion. If one’s practice as a householder comes from a place of self, a place of attachment, desire, and identification, then that is not a path of liberation. Similarly, if one’s monastic practice is done from a place of fear or aversion, then that also is not the way. The reference point for examining our lives and the choices we make is the quality of heart and mind out of which they come. Skillful choices about the best circumstances and styles of practice will naturally vary according to the needs and the situation at particular times in people’s lives.

For example, one traditional Buddhist practice that Westerners sometimes find troubling is the contemplation of the non-beautiful aspects of the body. The problem is partly one of translation. The Pali word asuba is generally translated as “loathsome,” “repulsive,” or “disgusting.” But the actual meaning of the word is simply “not beautiful,” a term with far fewer negative associations. But even when the language is cleaned up, for many the problem remains. Meditating on decaying corpses or on the “non-beautiful” aspects of our living bodies seems weird or out of balance. It seems to go against the belief that we should be learning to respect and honor the beauty of the body. It is crucial to understand that such objections miss the point of these practices, which is to release the mind from identification with the body. This is one of our most deeply rooted attachments and the cause of tremendous suffering.

So asuba practice has nothing to do with denying life or hating the body. It is simply one means to free ourselves from the delusion that takes the body to be the self. For some, these techniques will work well; perhaps for others contemplating the impermanent, insubstantial nature of beauty will be the path of freedom. How well any technique works depends on how it is taught and the particular conditioning of the individual who undertakes it. But we err when we extrapolate from a particular method a general characterization of an entire tradition. In all methods, we must understand that which is essential about the transformative process of liberation.

Of course, it is not only the body with which we identify. We are continually ensnared by the workings of the mind—its moods, emotions, concepts, opinions, judgments, and so forth. Caught up as we are in the mind’s busyness, it is only in rare moments that we touch that space of open, free awareness that is its true nature. One of the things I love about being on retreat is that it reveals so clearly that so much of the time the mind is in some state—sometimes obvious, sometimes extremely subtle—of attachment or aversion. Trungpa Rinpoche spoke of the meditative path as being one insult after another. This is important to understand because it points to the level of attentiveness we need to cultivate in our lives if we want to fulfill that aspiration for peace, for love, for freedom.

One of the dangers I see among Western practitioners is the enticement to say, “Well, everything I do is my practice,” as if no special effort is required. Theoretically this is a valid point, but is it really true in how we actually live? Staying awake does not come easily. It requires tremendous energy, commitment, and courage. Just look to the examples of the great figures in any spiritual tradition—to the intensity, exertion, and renunciation manifest in their practice. Meditation is very humbling in that it reflects back to us the depth of our attachments and the inspiration and commitment needed to get free of them. Sustained meditation practice makes it more difficult to fool ourselves.

Although renunciation may express itself in outward forms, its essence is the letting go of the mind’s habits of delusion. Even just a moment of such release is powerful, because it provides a reference point, an alternative to the false sense of self we ordinarily experience. The more we taste of this experience of emptiness, the more we can truly make our life our practice, rather than simply holding “life as practice” as a nice idea.

The profound stillness in which the mind’s intrinsic, radiant emptiness is realized is not something apart from spiritual activity in the world. It is its foundation. Each of us acts and abides within a unique set of karmic conditions, which localize us in the specifics of place, social and familial relationships, and all the other circumstances that make up our unfolding life. But these very circumstances are themselves empty. Emptiness and specificity are not in contradiction; they constitute a union. While we accept, open to, and even honor the specifics of our lives, without the recognition of their essential emptiness, we will easily fall into attachment. The fullness of the spiritual path is the understanding that love, that compassion, is the expression of emptiness. These are not two separate things; one is an attribute of the other.

In my own practice, this understanding has been greatly enriched by some of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. For many years, the bodhisattva vow of Mahayana Buddhism—to practice in order to save all beings—made little sense to me. How in the world would I, or anyone, be able to enlighten all beings? It seemed like a beautiful idea, but an impossibility. What gave the vow meaning to me was the teaching of absolute and relative bodhicitta, or “awakened mind.” Relative bodhicitta is compassion; absolute bodhicitta is emptiness. The compassionate activity expressed by the vow is the manifestation of the realization of emptiness. The energy to save all beings arises in precisely that consciousness that knows that there is no one to save and no one to do the saving. It is here that the spiritual path finds its completeness.

 ⧫ 

From the Fall 1997 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 14, No. 1) Text © 1997-2020 by Joseph Goldstein and Inquiring Mind

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

• “The Incredible Exploding Self: An Interview with Joanna Macy”
  
• “Who’s Asking the Questions Here? A Non-Interview with Hari Lal Poonja”
• “The Flavors of Anatta: Reflections from a Theravada Perspective”

The post Love as the Expression of Emptiness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When people think of Buddhism, they tend to picture meditative practices. But what many tend to forget is that Buddhism has a tremendously rigorous philosophical tradition, and its thinkers have contributed immensely to philosophy across history. Of these Buddhist philosophers, few—perhaps none—have been as influential as the 3rd-century logician Nagarjuna.

Sometimes considered the “Second Buddha,” Nagarjuna presented a novel approach to the core Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, or shunyata, that would become central to the development of Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, his most famous work, the Mulamadhyamakakarika (“Root Verses on the Middle Way”), was so influential that a new school of thought within Mahayana Buddhism appeared around his teachings—the Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way,” school.

To this day, emptiness is one of the most recognizable Buddhist concepts for practitioners and nonpractitioners alike. But a lot of people also tend to misunderstand it or have trouble grasping what it really means. Is it a kind of existential nihilism, claiming that nothing in reality exists? Or is it more complicated than that?

The idea of emptiness is part of a discussion primarily involving two key Buddhist concepts: the doctrine of no-self, or anatta, and the doctrine of dependent arising.

In a way, Nagarjuna’s teaching on emptiness is exactly what it sounds like: it states that all things in the world are empty—that is, they are empty of intrinsic nature or existence. The idea of emptiness is part of a discussion primarily involving two key Buddhist concepts: the doctrine of no-self, or anatta, and the doctrine of dependent arising. The Buddha taught that there is no self—that the thing we think is ourselves, the thing we refer to when we say “I,” is actually an illusion. There is no enduring core or self in any human being but rather a collection of different skandhas, or aggregates, such as consciousness, mental formations, and sensations, which we put together into this idea of a unified “self” that isn’t actually there. This is a very important feature of Buddhism that essentially all schools agree on, and realizing it is considered to be a central factor in reaching enlightenment and nirvana.

Connected to this is the concept of dependent arising: that all things in the world are dependent in their existence on other things. In other words, everything is temporary and exists only in dependence on everything else. The late Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh explained it beautifully using the example of a flower: You may look at a flower and think that it exists in itself independently, but this is not true. Try to think of that flower without the soil from which it grows, without the sunlight that helps it grow and illuminates it, without the very space in which it stands, or without the particular time in which it is there. Suddenly you no longer have a flower at all.

This is true of all things in the world. There is nothing that exists independently. Even the parts that make up a specific thing are in themselves dependent on other things, and so are the parts of those parts. This leads to the conclusion that there aren’t really any things at all, because all “things” are merely collections of various other things that appear a certain way at a particular time, and it is we who falsely conceptualize them as “things.”

One particular Buddhist story, King Milinda’s Questions, contains a thought experiment that explains this concept perfectly. In this story, King Milinda is having a discussion with a Buddhist sage named Nagasena. The king asks the sage how the doctrine of no-self can be true when possessing a self seems like such an apparent reality. Nagasena points to a chariot and asks, “What is the chariot? Is the chariot in the wheels?” The king answers no. “Is the chariot in the axles?” Again, he answers no. “Is it in the reins?” Still no. “Is it in the seat?” No again.

The king answers no to all of the sage’s questions regarding the parts of the chariot, and eventually answers no when asked if the chariot is simply the combination of all parts. “Well,” the Buddhist sage says, “if the chariot cannot be found in any of the parts, then there is no chariot.”

The designation “chariot” is dependent on all of its various parts, but in reality, “chariot” is only a concept, a name that is applied to something that doesn’t actually have an independent existence of its own. The self is the same way. We say that there is a self, and we talk about our selves using words like “I” because they are convenient and useful in the everyday world. Even the Buddha did so. But in reality, there is no such thing—“I” is only a name that we give to a collection of temporary aggregates.

Basically, all Buddhists agree on the basics of these teachings, but some schools disagree on certain details in their interpretations. For example, how deep does the teaching of no-self go? Does this simply mean that there is no self and basic things in the world have no existence as such, or is it even more radical than that?

During Nagarjuna’s time, Buddhist scholars were developing abhidharma—highly specific systematizations of the earliest Buddhist teachings. Abhidharma texts were essentially commentaries; using philosophical speculation, they attempted to answer metaphysical questions not originally addressed in detail by the Buddha. Understanding abhidharma is important not only for the general history of Buddhist thought but also for contextualizing Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka school. The abhidharma method of breaking down and interpreting Buddhist teachings had become mainstream in northern India, where Nagarjuna was from, and the majority of the Mulamadhyamakakarika, his most central work, is spent refuting these ideas.

The abhidharma schools are varied and can hold different ideas, but in general, they agree on the fundamental teachings that there is no enduring self and that reality is characterized by impermanence and dependent arising. The everyday reality that we experience, consisting of things and events, is only a conventional construction and not ultimately real. There is no chariot, just as there is no individual self. Anything that we experience is only a conceptual construct of a variety of factors and temporary happenings, and none of these constructs are actually real.

But according to abhidharma texts, there are things called dharmas that are real. Dharmas (not to be confused with the dharma that refers to the Buddha’s teachings) are often translated as “factors” or “phenomena.” This is quite a complicated topic, and many abhidharma thinkers set their sole focus on defining and categorizing these dharmas (in fact, abhidharma itself can be translated as “higher dharma”). But in short, dharmas can be described as momentary objects of consciousness that serve as the fundamental, irreducible building blocks of our perceived reality. The five aggregates, for example, are considered to be dharmas.

What is most important here is that abhidharma thinkers defined dharmas as having svabhava—“self-nature” or “inherent existence”—which qualified them as “real.” And these real dharmas, when interacting with one another, supposedly create the temporary happenings that make up our samsaric world.

Here’s an example: think about drinking a cup of hot coffee. The “cup of coffee” lacks its own intrinsic identity and is therefore not “real,” but the moment-to-moment experiences that arise while drinking it—perceiving “hotness” or “bitterness,” “hardness” of the mug in your hand—these are dharmas, and these are real.

However, these dharmas were also qualified as “conditioned”—that is, they are dependent on one another. They are not experienced as individual things but arise only as fluctuations—we just mistakenly conceptualize these momentarily arising phenomena as individual, independent things, like the “self,” the “chariot,” or the “cup of coffee.”

Separate from these conditioned dharmas was the unconditioned dharma of nirvana. According to abhidharmists, it existed independently from other dharmas, exempt from the standard laws of impermanence or dependent arising. In other words, from the abhidharmic perspective, nirvana was a self-contained “thing,” completely detached from samsara.

This is the general outlook that Nagarjuna is responding to in the Mulamadhyamakakarika, and he argues very forcefully that this perspective is mistaken and fails to uphold the principles of the Buddha. He instead takes a stand that appears to be quite extreme: he argues that there are no dharmas at all. There is nothing that is “real,” because there is nothing with self-nature—not even those fluctuating basic components. Everything is empty.

By Nagarjuna’s logic, nothing that is dependent on causes and conditions can possess its own self-nature, so say goodbye to those conditioned dharmas. And how could something exist that was unconditioned, as the abhidharmists claimed nirvana was? Nagarjuna deduced that if nirvana really was unconditioned—free from all arising and passing away, free from the causality of samsara—then there would be no way for anyone to get there in the first place! And if nirvana can’t be unconditioned, then it must be conditioned—and if it’s conditioned, then it cannot have self-nature. So all dharmas—conditioned or unconditioned, samsaric or nirvanic—are empty, lacking any inherent nature whatsoever.

Nagarjuna argues for this position very systematically, using logical deduction to tackle the topic from every conceivable angle. According to him, the original teachings of the Buddha, when considered properly, must lead to the conclusion of emptiness. Though it sounds radical, Nagarjuna saw this teaching on emptiness as nothing more than a natural extension of no-self and dependent arising: there is no “self,” no “chariot,” no inherent essence to anything.

As stated earlier, many have taken this to mean that Nagarjuna affirms a kind of existential nihilism. This is not just a modern misconception. Even just a few centuries later, the 8th-century Vedantic scholar-sage Shankara famously critiqued Buddhists for being nihilists. But this is actually a misunderstanding of what Nagarjuna is saying here. He’s not saying that nothing exists at all but rather that nothing exists independently or inherently (with svabhava, or self-nature). All things exist only through their dependence on other things.

In that sense, it’s kind of true that nothing exists because there are no things to exist; there are only constantly changing dependent arisings, which in themselves are empty. But that doesn’t mean that what we experience day-to-day isn’t actually there at all, on an ontological level. It’s not complete nothingness. Emptiness does not mean nothingness. That’s a very important distinction, and one that Nagarjuna argues precisely avoids nihilism.

Nagarjuna made it very clear that one needs to be careful not to consider emptiness itself as “real.” Emptiness is a useful tool to collapse all ideas about objects with inherent natures, but it is not itself the inherent nature of things.

There is no such thing, not even emptiness. Indeed, emptiness itself is empty. After all, for “emptiness” to exist, there would need to be “things” to be deemed empty. But there are no such things to deem empty, because everything is already empty. “Emptiness” is simply another conditioned construct, another by-product of dependent origination lacking its own self-existence, just like everything else:

Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation
Is itself the middle way.

(trans. Jay L. Garfield)

Does your head hurt yet? It’s tricky stuff that can be hard to wrap your head around, but to understand Mahayana Buddhism and all of the later Buddhist movements that built on Nagarjuna’s work, we need to at least somewhat understand what he was trying to say and why it was so impactful—not just from a philosophical standpoint but from a soteriological one, too.

If you are an inquisitive person, you may have started asking yourself questions like “What does this mean for some of the basic concepts of Buddhism—nirvana, for example, or samsara or reincarnation or karma? Are these things empty and not real, too?” The answer is yes, indeed they are. But here it is important to discuss another key feature of Nagarjuna’s thoughts: the doctrine of the two truths.

In simple terms, this is the idea that there are two essential ways of approaching reality. We can look at the world through “conventional truth,” that is, through the concepts that we apply to it: that there are things in the world, that the “chariot” is real, that I am a human being, that there are things like karma and reincarnation. We can also look at the world through “ultimate truth”: that “you,” “me,” “chariot,” and “karma” are not real at all but rather empty constructs, lacking any self-existence. Nagarjuna argued that both truths were necessary for liberation:

Without a foundation in the conventional truth
The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,
Liberation is not achieved.

In a way, conventional and ultimate reality are actually one and the same in that both exist only through their dependent relation to the other. And since the “ultimate truth” of emptiness is itself just as empty as any other conventional truth, both truths can be equally “conventional” and equally “ultimate”:

Everything is real and is not real,
Both real and not real,
Neither real nor not real.
This is Lord Buddha’s teaching.

Nagarjuna applies a similar logic to break down the abhidharmists’ dualistic definition of nirvana and samsara:

Whatever is the limit of nirvana,
That is the limit of cyclic existence.
There is not even the slightest difference between them,
Or even the subtlest thing.

To Nagarjuna, it is in abandonment of all clinging to all views, including emptiness, that nirvana is found—not somewhere else. And it is precisely this nondualistic view of nirvana that Mahayanists have since strived for.  

♦

This article is adapted from a video titled “Are all things empty? — Nagarjuna and the Buddhist Middle Way” on Filip Holm’s YouTube channel, Let’s Talk Religion.

The post Emptiness Explained appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

So opens the account of Creation in the King James Bible, a poetic evocation of the obscure relationship between absence and presence, nothing and everything. This is difficult, slippery territory. In working to understand the nature of this relationship, we are drawn to the very limits of language and conceptual thought.

The Hebrew word tohu—here translated as “without form”—occurs nineteen times in the Bible, rendered in varying contexts as wasteland, wilderness, an empty place, nothingness, vanity, and confusion. Bohu (“void”) appears only three times: once in Genesis 1:2 (above), once again in Isaiah 34:11 (there translated as “emptiness”), and a third time in Jeremiah 4:23, in direct reference to Genesis and so preserving the translation as “void.”

These are rarely used, fearful words. According to a note in the Oxford Annotated Bible, the formless void that somehow precedes or underlies Creation is associated with an ancient belief that the world originated from “a watery chaos, personified as a dragon in the Babylonian creation epic.” This “dragon” is the Leviathan referred to in Job and the Psalms, a fire-spitting, serpentine creature with fangs and claws—a graphic embodiment of our primal terror in the face of an abyss of nothingness undefined by time or space, an impenetrable, ungraspable, fathomless black hole out of which we emerge and into which we inevitably return.

This ancient story of the universe emerging ex nihilo (“from nothing”) resonates with a mythopoetic authority that has captivated the imagination of generations of commentators who struggled to come to terms with their own fears of what cannot, by its nature, be known. Like his Hebrew predecessors, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) found any reference to absolute nothingness troubling. For Aristotle, the problem was not so much poetic or psychological as rational. In his Physics he maintained that matter could have no beginning, as a beginning would itself have to begin, and that second beginning would in turn have to begin, implying an infinite regress and therefore a logical fallacy. One might wonder what exactly is the difference between an endless regress of beginnings and no beginning at all.

Aristotle’s opinion was enormously influential and more or less prevailed for centuries (even though it clearly rejected the biblical account of the creation) until Sa’adiah ben Yosef Gaon (882–942)—a Jewish theologian writing in Arabic—composed his masterwork, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, in which he countered Aristotle’s fear of infinite regress with a rigorous, systematic defense of the idea of creation from nothing. Over time, his arguments were refined by Muslim scholars, who carried them across the Middle East into North Africa and from there into Moorish Spain, where they caught the attention of the 12th-century Sephardic philosopher Maimonides and influenced his efforts to harmonize Aristotelian reason with the teachings of the Bible.

Carried forward by Jewish philosopher-mystics and Christian apophatic theologians, the doctrine of creation from nothing increasingly gained prestige until, at long last, it became respectable for Christian intellectuals to conceive of a nothing out of which everything is born. In 1215, at the fourth Lateran Council, Pope Innocent III certified creatio ex nihilo as the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. After a thousand years the conflict between Aristotle and the Leviathan was resolved. The serpent prevailed.

But how is it that Sa’adiah ben Yosef Gaon’s ideas gained so much traction among European intellectuals, both Jewish and Christian? Even the most creative mind does not operate in a cultural vacuum. Where did he derive the inspiration for his radically new understanding of the relationship between absence and presence? While there may well be no single answer to these questions, history provides some tantalizing clues.

Rabbi Sa’adiah Gaon was born in Egypt, but he lived and worked for eleven years in Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate, during what is often considered the Golden Age of Islam. Arabs had conquered Persia in 651 CE, incorporating it into a vast Islamic empire that stretched from Spain to the frontiers of South Asia. During the 7th and 8th centuries, foreign ideas flowing west out of India into Persia exerted a profound influence on Muslim intellectuals,who in turn passed these ideas along to Europe. Among them was the ten-digit Indian numerical system, incorporating the concept of a number that is, in itself, nothing. This system was described in 825 CE by the Persian mathematician Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 780–850) in a work synthesizing Greek and Indian thought. The Sanskrit name for this mysterious number was shunya. The phonetically similar Arabic word sifr (“empty”) was adopted as a translation for Sanskrit shunya, which was represented by a small, open circle.

By the early 9th century the Moors had conquered Spain and Sicily, bringing with them this revolutionary mathematical concept; al-Khwarizmi’s book was translated into Latin in 1145 and was, for the next four centuries, the principal mathematical textbook in European universities (the English word algorithm is derived from his name). In Italy, sifr became zefiro, zefro, or zevero, corresponding to the French zéro, which—minus the accent—made its way into English.

Though Sa’adiah Gaon was born some thirty years after al-Khwarismi’s death and does not appear to have directly referred in his writing to the concept of zero, it is difficult to believe he would not have been familiar with al-Khwarizmi’s work. In any case, Sa’adiah Gaon’s defense of creation ex nihilo and al-Khwarizmi’s explication of the mathematical concept of zero moved together from Persia through the Middle East, across North Africa and into Moorish Spain, where both were simultaneously diffused into European culture.

Zero is the symbol for a number that is at once both nothing and something. In his book The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, Robert Kaplan nicely captures the paradoxical nature of zero: “Names belong to things, but zero belongs to nothing. It counts the totality of what isn’t there.”

Zero as a placeholder—used, for example, in a base ten system to mark the difference between one (1) and ten (10)—was common in the ancient world. But for the ancients a placeholder was not itself a number. Numbers have computational properties: they are used to count things; numbers don’t apply where there’s nothing to count. All of this was turned on its head by Indian mathematicians, who conceived, for the first time, of zero as having computational properties, though admittedly unlike the properties of any other number. First of all, addition and subtraction with zero changes nothing: add zero to any number—including itself—and the sum is that same number; subtract zero from any number and once again the number remains unchanged. But multiplication and division yield even more startling results. Multiply any number by zero and the product is zero; divide by zero and no matter what the dividend the quotient is infinity—which mathematicians still regard not as a number but rather as an exceedingly odd “concept.” As Charles Seife writes in Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, “Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling.” In other words, zero is where nothing meets and mingles not just with some particular thing but with everything. As a mathematical concept, zero locates the interface between absence and presence, and in this respect it defies the law of noncontradiction, which states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. Considered to be one of the “laws of thought” and a cornerstone of reason, the law of noncontradiction finds its classical source in Aristotle’s metaphysics. And so, as Seife has it, “Zero conflicted with the fundamental philosophical beliefs of the West, for contained within zero are two ideas that were poisonous to Western doctrine. Indeed, these concepts would eventually destroy Aristotelian philosophy after its long reign. These dangerous ideas were the void and the infinite.”

No one knows exactly where the idea of “zero” as a placeholder first emerged, but historians agree that regardless of where it originated, India was where zero was transformed from mere placeholder to a legitimate number in its own right. And it was this transformation—a prodigious feat of imagination—that gave zero its mysterious power to absorb and defy all contradictions.

The earliest known reference to mathematical zero appears in the Chandah Shastra, a text on Sanskrit prosody attributed to an otherwise unknown author named Pingala and dated to sometime in the first few centuries BCE. The text unfortunately does not include any example of symbolic notation, but Pingala explicitly uses the Sanskrit word shunya to refer to the result of subtracting a number from itself. The oldest recorded use of symbolic notation for zero as a number is found in a birchbark text known as the Bakhshali manuscript, which has been radiocarbon dated to as early as the 3rd century CE and seems to have been intended for use by merchants as a practical manual on arithmetic. Here zero is indicated by a solid dot.

India was where zero was transformed from mere placeholder to a legitimate number in its own right. And it was this transformation—a prodigious feat of imagination—that gave zero its mysterious power to absorb and defy all contradictions.

By the end of the 5th century the same word shunya appears in another text, the Aryabhatiya, in the context of a fully developed system of decimal place-value notation. In a 7th-century commentary on the Aryabhatiya, the mathematician Bhaskara used a circle to represent shunya, which is the earliest recorded instance of the notation that has now become virtually universal. At that time, however, the circle was perhaps not yet standardized, since a mathematician by the name of Brahmagupta, a contemporary of Bhaskara’s, used the same solid dot that occurs in the Bakhshali manuscript. In his Brahmasphuta Siddhanta, composed around 650 CE, Brahmagupta referred to the dot as shunya or, alternatively, kha—literally a cavity, hollow, or empty space, and by extension, the Sanskrit word for “sky.” Nevertheless, the use of shunya seems at this point to have become more or less fixed. Brahmagupta’s treatise is unprecedented, however, in its meticulous analysis of zero in the context of negative numbers and corresponding algebraic operations. His work leaves no question that by the 7th century, Indian mathematicians had fully conceptualized the role of mathematical zero in the sense familiar to us now.

As it happens, however, this is only half the story of zero’s Indian history. In ancient India, zero was not only a mathematical concept.

The Sanskrit word shunya is routinely used in Mahayana Buddhist texts dating back to the first few centuries BCE; which is to say, its appearance both as a revolutionary mathematical term and as the expression of a profound, intuitive understanding of the nature of reality—the mark of “transcendent, liberating wisdom” (prajna-paramita)—seems to have occurred simultaneously in India. The paradoxical characteristic of mathematical zero—as a nothing that is not only something but everything—features in the Buddhist notion of shunya, but its implications are no longer merely abstract or computational. In the scriptures on perfect wisdom, shunya is presented as a fundamental truth of all existence, a truth fully appreciated by spiritual beings known as bodhisattvas, who have achieved this profound insight only as the result of long study and contemplative practice. The famous Heart Sutra opens by telling us that the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, “moving in the stream of perfect wisdom,” looked down over the world and saw that “zero-ness” (shunya-ta) is the essential nature of every element of experience—everything that makes up our mental and physical reality.

Here… form is zero-ness and zero-ness itself is form; zero-ness does not differ from form, and form does not differ from zero-ness. Whatever is form, that is zero-ness; whatever is zero-ness, that is form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness.

Nor is the ancient notion of zero as a placeholder marginalized in this literature. In the scriptures on perfect wisdom, this characteristic of zero is an integral component of its status as both absence and presence simultaneously. To say that every element of experience—every dharma—is zero is to say that, like zero, the appearance of individual, self-sufficient things is nothing more than appearance; there is no actual “thing,” no individual physical or mental object that truly exists as it appears. The mental or physical object that seems to exist separately from other such things in fact exists only as a placeholder. Which is to say, the individual exists only in relation to what it is not, and what it is not is literally everything else—an infinitude of other apparently individual things. This is the sense in which dharmas are said to be “devoid of essential nature,” which is the same as saying that their essential nature is zero-ness.

And so in the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines—perhaps the oldest surviving text of this genre—we are asked, rhetorically: “To what dharma could I point and say that ‘it exists’ or ‘it doesn’t exist?’”

It is precisely through their essential nature that dharmas are not a thing. Their essential nature is no-nature, and their no-nature is their essential nature. All dharmas have only one characteristic, which is no characteristic at all.

“‘All things are no-things,’ taught the Tathagata [the Buddha], ‘therefore they are things.’” Perfect wisdom, then, is a deep understanding that breaks free of our normal habits of thinking and speaking, habits that compel us to both conceive and perceive individual things literally as either existing or not existing, as either this or that. Rather, as seen through the eye of perfect wisdom, things are not things, and not things are things, which means that they only seem to arise and pass away. This is true, according to the Diamond Sutra, for living beings as well, who merely appear to be self-contained individuals subject to birth and death: “‘Beings, beings’… the Tathagata has taught that they are all no-beings. In this way has he spoken of ‘all living beings.’” Nothing whatsoever is exempted: “This entire universe the Tathagata has taught as no-universe. In this sense it is called a ‘universe.’”

Therefore, Shariputra, in zero-ness there is no form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness; no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no forms, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile objects, or objects of mind.… There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance … no decay and death and no end to decay and death. There is no suffering, no origin, no cessation, no spiritual path. There is nothing to realize, nothing to attain.

“It is on account of this,” explains the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, “that the Tathagata does not fully know the character of any dharma.” What is literal or concrete can be fully known or grasped, its character can—at least in principle—be understood empirically, rationally analyzed and explained; what is metaphorical is “as if,” and “as if” can only be intuited.

Consider, in this context, what Robert Kaplan has to say about zero as the interface of nothing and everything:

It is as if there were a layer behind appearances that had no qualities, but took on the character of its surroundings, accommodating itself to our interpretations, as ambergris acquires and retains fugitive fragrances, giving us perfume. Shunya isn’t so much vacancy, then, as receptivity, a womb-like hollow ready to swell—and indeed it comes from the root shvi, meaning swelling. Its companion kha derives from the verb “to dig,” and so carries the sense of “hole”: something to be filled. . . . This is the zero of the counting board: a column already there, but with no counters yet in it. This is the zero of the place-holder notation, having no value itself but giving value by its presence to other numerals. These same qualities belong to the variable, the unknown: a potential which the different circumstances of the equations it lies in will differently realize. The background shift is from counters taking their value from being in different places, to a single, receptive place whose circumstances will reveal its hidden value.

The concept of shunya evokes the ambiguous, ungraspable nature of what only appears to be literal, concrete truth or reality. The Indian mathematician Bhaskara acknowledges as much when, in a discussion of mathematical zero, he writes: “The arithmetic of known quantity . . . is founded on that of unknown quantity; and . . . questions to be solved can hardly be understood by any, and not at all by such as have dull apprehensions, without the application of unknown quantity.” Perhaps the most eloquent classical passage on this aspect of the zero-ness of things comes from the Diamond Sutra:

A phantom’s mask, a shooting star, a guttering flame.
A sorcerer’s trick, a bubble swept
On a swiftly moving stream.
A flash of lightning among dark clouds.
A drop of dew,
A dream.
So should one view all conditioned things.

♦

This article is adapted from the essay “Absence and Presence” in the posthumous collection What I Don’t Know About Death: Reflections on Buddhism and Mortality by C. W. Huntington Jr., ©2021. Reprinted by permission of Wisdom Publications.

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