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emptiness

Aug 04, 2021, 15 min read

Tibetan: tongpa nyitibetan
Sanskrit: Śūnyatā
Pali: suññatā

Shunyata is often compared to space, which is defined in Buddhism as the complete openness, or ‘unobstructedness’, which allows anything to occur. Likewise, because reality is ‘empty’ and not fixed in any way, it is said that anything is possible 1

In Theravāda Buddhism, Pali: suññatā often refers to the non-self (Pāli: anattā, Sanskrit: anātman)[note 1] nature of the five aggregates of experience and the six sense spheres. Pali: Suññatā is also often used to refer to a meditative state or experience.

In Mahāyāna Buddhism, śūnyatā refers to the tenet that “all things are empty of intrinsic existence and nature (svabhava)”,[5] but may also refer to the Buddha-nature teachings and primordial or empty awareness, as in Dzogchen, Shentong, or Chan. 2

Questions

dissolution and the state of emptiness

Visualizing emptiness

As we recite the text for the dissolution, we consider that the one who makes the offering, the offering substances and the recipients of the offering, are all absorbed into the infinite expanse of great primordial purity and timeless freedom, the dharmadhātu in which there is no conceptualization and which is beyond the limitations of ideas. Then, to conclude, we dedicate the sources of our merit towards perfect enlightenment and recite appropriate verses of auspiciousness.

How do we visualize emptiness/dissolution?
In one of the meditations at Tergar there was a line about “dissolving a visualization back into emptiness” → from the Vajrayana section, can’t quite remember what
It strikes me that this is a dualistic thinking about the visualization

Ethics and emptiness

If everything is empty why does anything matter if it goes one way or another? This has yet to really sink in for me, other than, because beings feel pain and it’s unpleasant, so we should minimize it. But even pain, we can’t really find it, pin point it, so is it so bad/unpleasant?

The nature of all things is completely free and unobstructed, anything is possible.

This might have the answer: Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness by Rafal K. Stepien

Resources

Terminology

rather than emptiness I actually prefer to have a hyphenated form of this: “no-thingness.” This is what’s actually being indicated. It’s really saying there is no thing to be found. 3

So, the practical dimension of this teaching is to curb that tendency of craving by saying, actually, that object is empty of what I believe to be there. It’s not nothing. Of course it isn’t. It’s like the chair that’s to the side of me in this room. It’s there and it’s just an everyday object. I don’t have to grasp after it. I can use utilize it. I can even appreciate it, but I don’t have to posit something in it that makes it an object of grasping. That is what Nāgārjuna is doing. He’s trying to get us to drop the notion of there being some thing. It’s not a nothing and it’s not a something. It’s a no-thing.
When one views the world in this way, it becomes a lot more spacious. Instead of constricting around particular objects and particular inherent qualities, experience has a great spaciousness to it. And there is far greater possibility for interaction with those non-objects. Because of this absence of intrinsic existence, there is a realignment of relationship with our world. Instead of moving around the world grasping after phenomena because I consider them to be in this particular way, we drop that. So Nāgārjuna is a practical philosopher. And of course dependent arising is empty itself because it’s dependently arisen. So actually it’s leaving us with a great deal of uncertainty as well.
…
emptiness is the dropping of the sense of the world as something I grasp after. It becomes about the spaciousness of living in that world, in a different kind of relationship.3

So in the Gelugpa School of Tibetan Buddhism of Tsongkhapa, they understand emptiness, and by implication dependent arising, to be the buddhanature. This is what buddhanature is, not some mystical property that you have, not some little hidden Buddha inside you. It’s because you are empty of intrinsic existence, because you emerge out of the conditions that you create in your life, therefore you can transform yourself into a wiser, more caring, more generous, more awake kind of being. So that liberates the individual. You may apply this also to communities and groups. Emptiness is liberating because of the fact that we are dependently arisen, therefore we are in a position to cultivate conditions that will support our becoming wiser and hopefully more ethical people. 4

So emptiness and dependent arising are opening up a space of ethical contact between people where I’m not viewing you in some intrinsic way and you’re not viewing me in some intrinsic way. It’s a space of possibilities. I don’t like the word “emptiness” because what emerges out of the womb of emptiness is ethical behavior: being able to work and move through this world without being manipulated and manipulating.3

Emptiness mantra

”Om Svabhava Shuddha Sarva Dharma Svabhava Shuddho Ham” (the essence of all things is pure, at their deepest nature, all existing phenomena, including you and me, are arising from pure essence). [#](https://insighttimer.com/brendasings/guided-meditations/sunyata-2

From Rigpa Wiki:

oṃ svabhāva-śuddhāḥ sarva-dharmāḥ svabhāva-śuddho ‘ham
”Oṃ, all dharmas are pure by nature; I am pure by nature.”
Note on Pronunciation
The apostrophe in the syllable ‘ham is a transliteration of the Sanskrit symbol avagraha (transliterated as the nya log character in Tibetan), and is not pronounced. The word ‘ham is actually the Sanskrit word aham (meaning the nominative singular pronoun “I”) with the short vowel a elided (i.e. omitted) and replaced with the avagraha. #

Lama Yeshe on Shunyata Mantra

LamaYesheTeaching.pdf

Stages of understanding

Examples of three aspects:

Source: Joy of Living 3 with Kell and Kunsang

we have three layers of the mind: the cognitive level, the emotional or feeling or experiential level, and the habitual level, the unconscious or subconscious mind. We have these three. ==The view works with the intellectual mind, the meditation works with the feeling or experiential mind, and the application works with the subconscious, habitual mind, or the unconscious mind.== Without these three, we cannot transform.
Source: View, Meditation, Application, and Fruition

Quotes

“The bad news is that you are falling through the air, there is nothing to hang onto, and you have no parachute. The good news is that there is no ground.” ~Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Mattieu Ricard on rainbows:

A rainbow is formed by the play of a shaft of sunlight falling on a cloud of raindrops. It appears, but it’s intangible. As soon as one of the factors contributing to it is missing, the phenomenon disappears. So, the ‘rainbow’ has no apparent nature of its own, and you can’t speak of the dissolution, or annihilation of something that didn’t exist in the first place. That ‘something’ only owed its illusory appearance to a transitory coming together of elements which aren’t intrinsically existing entities themselves, either… Therefore all phenomena are the result of a combination of transitory factors.

This is the way enlightened beings relate to everything. Their world is made of rainbows. Everything briefly appears, then gradually or suddenly disappears.  Imagine how your relationship to the world would change if you realized it is all made of rainbows.  You are sitting on a rainbow.  You are holding a rainbow in your hands.  You go to sleep on a rainbow bed, and cover yourself with a rainbow blanket.  You eat and drink rainbows. You put rainbow clothes on a rainbow body, and you make love to a rainbow mate. When your rainbow house disappears it is no big deal, that’s just what rainbows do.

That is the key: through understanding emptiness one is able to overcome attachment, clinging, and grasping. The Bodhisattva seeks to overcome attachment, not so as to become detached or indifferent to the world, but in order to get even more involved with the world. There is no longer that duality existing between the Bodhisattva and others—between the self and the world—because the self and the world both have the same nature, which is emptiness. Therefore, Bodhisattvas are able to execute their compassionate activities in a much more beneficial and far-ranging manner. As this particular sutra makes clear, even if we are doing the right thing according to moral principles, without wisdom we are not able to gain the full benefit.
—Traleg Rinpoche

Emptiness is not a void, a blank space where nothing is happening. The whole point is that discovering basic goodness—discovering the awakeness, the is-ness, the nowness of things—doesn’t happen by transcending ordinary reality. It comes from appreciating simple experiences free of story line. When we see a red car with a dented door; when we feel heat or cold, softness or hardness; when we taste a plum or smell rotting leaves, these simple, direct experiences are our contact with basic wakefulness, with basic goodness, with sacred world. It’s only by fully touching our relative experience that we discover the fresh, timeless, ultimate nature of our world.
– Excerpted from: Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön, page 93–94

Everything depends on supportive conditions for its existence. A tree depends on sunshine, rain, and nutrients in the soil, for example. This is true for our personalities and habitual tendencies, too. They have been shaped by conditions. If conditions change, that which they support will also change, or disappear. Everything is “empty” of a permanent, distinct self.
—Embracing Impermanence and Imperfection course

→ It seems like if we emphasized the conditionality of self more than the emptiness of self this would be quite evident to people and less of a mysterious notion. But is something lost if we shift focus away from the “empty” nature? Conditionality does convey a sense of groundlessness through the constantly shifting plates underneath, within, inside “us”—nothing to hold or grasp on to.

→ What is the essence of the shaving foam? Mostly air, but there is some structure holding it all in place, holding that air in a particular form. What is the mechanism by which appearances appear?dharma
Is this an unknowable question?

three times

The mind of the past is exhausted and gone. It has ceased. It has transformed. It does not exist in any object or in any location. Thus, it cannot be designated. The mind of the future has not yet come. It is unborn and unarisen. It has not occurred; it has not come to exist; it is free of marks; it has not happened. Therefore, it also cannot be designated. The mind of the present does not remain; it arises, ceases, and dissipates; it does not aggregate or gather. It cannot be designated as going or coming.

〜 Toh 216: Eliminating Ajātaśatru’s Remorse, [1.330]

Potential

Whatever happens to you, to me, to anyone, is either the beginning of liberation or the means to attain liberation, or the means to deepen confusion. Anything that happens to us has that absolute, wide-open, co-emergent potential to either deepen the confusion or to liberate us. I think that’s pretty powerful. —Pema Chodron, Change Your Mind, Open Your Heart: An Immersive Online Retreat to Awaken Compassion and Find Freedom through Mind Training

Impermanence vs Emptiness

Question asked Khenpo Kunga:
How is emptiness different from impermanence? All things are impermanent, fluid, changing, thus there is no solid essence to grasp. Is there a further difference to emptiness or can it be conceived as impermanence in this way?

impermanence - 3 types

  1. course impermanence → sense of self, concept of me, something
  2. subtle impermanence → momentary change in everything
  3. extremely subtle? very much connected to emptiness
    you can’t really find what exactly is changing

We engage with course & subtle impermanence with concepts, therefore they connect to the relative level
The extremely subtle impermanence cannot be captured by concepts and therefore it is connected to the ultimate truth, which is emptiness

Two Truths

Translator’s Introduction: Mipham’s Interpretation of Madhyamaka” (pp. 45–56) in Mipham Rinpoche’s The Wisdom Chapter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YuXdTLXLyg&list=PL6-wArQbu9GAL42bDXSS4Urtzq_3hQ-cA

https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Ringu_Tulku_Rinpoche_Shedra_West_2010

“Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” ―William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Concepts and Reality

When we talk about mental labeling and things existing in terms of mental labeling, what we mean is – and I cannot repeat it enough times – its existence is established by mental labeling; it’s not created by mental labeling. The only thing that establishes that there is a dog is that there’s a word for dog and it’s what the word or concept “dog” means. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t dogs existing before somebody comes along and says, “Oh, dog.” What is a dog? A dog is what the word “dog” refers to. source

Dream-like reality

So another near enemy to these practices, that’s a more subtle one is that in our proclamation of reality being a dream, we can bring our reifying tendencies back into play, and somewhat paradoxically, start to reify the dream.

And by this, what I mean is that the best analogy is never the real thing. Stating that reality is a dream holds this subtle danger that we reify things into then being a dream. The idea here is that reality, irreducibly is not a dream. It’s fundamentally ineffable. Whatever we say about it, it isn’t. As the great semanticist Korzybski once said, “whatever you can say about it [anything], it isn’t.” So in other words, emptiness is the antidote to a reified reality. But emptiness yet itself is also empty. This is referred to as the emptiness of emptiness.
This can be doubly frustrating for the ego because it means you can’t even hang your hat on emptiness. The classic exhortation in the Mahayana teachings is “self liberate even the antidote.” So, emptiness is an antidote to a reified reality. But then you have to realize that emptiness itself is also empty.

As the Bon master Khenpo Tenpa Yungdrung once said, “Always remember that illusion itself is an illusion.”

So reality is dream-like — it’s not a dream. Reality is not an illusion, it’s illusory. Seeing reality as dreamlike is a big step on this kind of progressive stages of meditation on reality, but if we reify anything, we’re still missing the point. —Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga Tricycle course

Conceptual examples of emptiness?

From Neil Degrasse Tyson - Starry Messenger

Book Notes
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

boiling water, colors, and gender

If you keep lowering the air pressure, water’s boiling point will eventually be lower than its freezing point. In other words, it will boil below zero degrees centigrade. This is called the triple point because water in this state is simultaneously a solid, a liquid, and a gas. Since large parts of Mars’s surface satisfy these conditions, a Martian cook has a simple answer to the question whether water is solid, liquid, or gaseous: “Yes.”

There’s that cosmic perspective again. Seen through these lenses, something as seemingly intuitive as water’s boiling point becomes confoundingly ambiguous. Scientists accept such ambiguity; they are trained, after all, to question commonsensical conceptual boundaries. It’s a different matter when it comes to politics and culture. Think of hotly contested questions around sex and gender. Can you be both male and female, or neither? Can you move fluidly between being a man and a woman? Is sexual preference fluid, too? It’s not surprising that some people struggle with these questions – we’re all embedded in cultures which for centuries saw only rigid categories where many today see points on a continuum. 

For astrophysicists, though, continuums are everywhere. Take color, for instance. We usually talk about the seven colors of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. That, though, is a cultural convention. If we looked more closely, or took the time to develop a more sophisticated color vocabulary, we could easily identify thousands of colors. Or we could simply do away with conventional color terms and instead refer to specific wavelengths of light to describe an object’s color.
…
The point is, when you strip out easy-to-read social cues, humans are remarkably androgynous. Gender, Tyson realized as he surveyed those faces, is an ongoing investment

Positive and Negative Emptiness

It seems like there are flavors of emptiness understanding, at least along the way—a “positive” and a “negative” or apophatic & cataphatic, perhaps.

Shentong could be an example of a cataphatic view/description of ultimate reality, whereas rangtong is more of an apophatic.

Footnotes

  1. https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Emptiness ↩

  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 ↩

  3. John Peacock, Dependent Arising course ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Stephen Batchelor, Dependent Arising course ↩

What links here?

Graph View