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Emptiness
I'm looking for help with understanding the concept of emptiness. Thanks so much!
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so for example my body is empty because it is constantly changing. i get sick. i am healthy. i am this age. i die. etc.
since all things change in nature. they lack this inherent, permanent existence.
if you observe everything, you can see this clearly.
i can call you a jerk. this is just a label projected onto you from me.
you are empty. thus you aren't inherently a jerk. i can prove this by asking someone else if they think you are a jerk. they may think you are a nice person. that is what they project onto you.
you aren't inherently anything. thus you empty. but at the same time that means you are infinite potential as well.
if you were inherently a jerk then you would always be a jerk. lol.
good thing people are empty. thus people have the potential to be good and bad.
and reality since it is empty....is a PROJECTION from us AND not AT us.
lol good luck.
We come now to the quality of emptiness. First, it is of some significance to note that although the adjectival noun suññata (Sanskrit: sunyata), or “emptiness,” is used in the Theravada scriptures, it is far outweighed by its humble cousin, the adjective suñña, “empty.”
In later, Northern Buddhist traditions, sunyata took on not only a central position in the teachings on liberation (for example in the Prajña Paramita Sutras, the Heart Sutra, and the Vajra Sutra) and the Middle Way (as in Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy, uniting emptiness and causality), but it also took on the attributes of some kind of quasi-mystical substance or realm—not intentionally or doctrinally even, but more through a subtle and unconscious reification. It became something that is a nothing, that then was worshiped and deified as a universal panacea.
This is not to say that all such teachings on emptiness are false or useless—not at all. It is just to say that, like any verbal formulation of Dhamma, if grasped incorrectly they can obstruct rather than aid progress on the path. If the concept of emptiness is understood and used as a skillful means, it is clear that it could not be any kind of thing-in-itself. Any tendency to incline the attitude in that direction would thus be seen as falling wide of the mark.
continued at link:
http://www.abhayagiri.org/main/article/2148/
The Buddha taught emptiness is 'empty of self and anything belonging to self'
The things we take in life to be "ours", such as "our computer", are not really ours. Why? Because one day our computer will fall apart. It is not really "ours". We are just borrowing it for a time.
Or the things we take to be "ourself" are not really "us". For example, our legs. We might have an accident and lose our legs. Our we may have a brain injury and forget who & what we are.
Our life is full of things our mind takes to be "us" or "belongs to us". But according to the Buddha, all of these things are just natural phenomena or elements.
For example, once we were a clot of blood in our mother's womb. But because our mother ate physical food, like vegetables, bananas, apples, rice, bread, etc, our body & mind developed in our mother's womb.
Then we were born and we continued to eat physical food, like vegetables, bananas, apples, rice, bread, etc, so our body & mind continued to grow.
But if we did not eat this food, our life would have died. Our body & mind are made of this physical food, like vegetables, bananas, apples, rice, bread, etc, but we take this boyd & mind to be "me".
We do not see our life is just natural elements, what the Buddha summarised as earth, wind, fire, water, space & mind. Thus we do not see emptiness. Instead, we see these things as "me" and "belonging to me".
For example, most of us have never seen or touched our kidneys or liver but we still regard it as "mine", even though we did not create it.
Regards
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http://viewonbuddhism.org/resources/bodhisattva_vows.html
11. Teaching emptiness to the untrained. ("Minister vow")
If you teach the profound subject of emptiness to those who are not able to interpret it properly, or perhaps do not wish to practise it anyway, you will break this root vow. The danger is that some may misinterpret emptiness to mean nothingness, or non-existence, and fall to the nihilist extreme denying the relationship of cause and effect. The true meaning of the emptiness of inherent existence of self and phenomena is very profound and difficult to understand. Many believe that the great Acharya Nagarjuna, who strongly propagated this system, was a nihilist, but this was because they missed the brilliant subtlety of his thought. You should therefore only teach the final view of the nature of phenomenon to those who are ripe to understand it.
Please note this response from Nawang Gehlek Rinpoche during an interview with Dave Benn (19th April 2002):
"Question: It states in Buddhist scriptures that one must never teach emptiness (Sunyata) to a person who is not ready to receive these teachings. What do you do when you wish to share such a wonderful experiential jewel?
Rinpoche: True. But it is easier to teach an educated Western person emptiness than someone for example from China or South East Asia, even to some extent Tibetans. This is particularly so if the Western happens to be a scientist, a physicist who has studied Einstein's 'Theory of Relativity'. They are half way there! It is definitely much easier to talk about emptiness to an educated Westerner than to traditionally Buddhist people."
I don't want to give a wrong understanding though, so realize this is just my own personal interpretation.
See: http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-anatta-emptiness-and-spontaneous.html
Go down the track of science. In an atom you will find electrons travel in certain trajectories in between these paths nothing exists. if you go down to sub atomic particles or quantum mechanism, will find emptiness. Basically every thing is made out of these particles which has nothing inside. Our body is like a sieve. Only problem is that we cannot see or capture this phenomena. Try to put x-ray eyes then you will see the world differently.You will see me as a skeleton. We are a process (non-self)created by all these "empty" particles.
I think at the end this is what Buddha said.
Our understanding of emptiness is empty too.
emptiness is one of the simplest and most mundane of the dharmic concepts, but it it also one of the most important. Lot's of others have given explanations here, there are many ways to explain it. Mine is probably the least "deep".
Reality is made of only points in connection. It doesn't matter what these points are, only that that is all there are.
If you accept this view (Which is very easy to do if you think about it) then you can see that any point is connected to all points. Points are always changing their connections but they are always interconnected.
This interconnectivity is emptiness, it is exactly the same truth of all points.
Anything you can think of, a car, a planet, your eyeball and your experiences, is made up just of points in change. There is nothing there but points. No things. This is emptiness.
Anatman can be seen as the interconnectivity, emptiness and interdependence of all points and changes of points.
Another way you can think of emptiness is to see it as interconnectivity from an inwards perspective and interconnectivity is external.
have fun
1) Ignorance. (Not knowing and understanding the four noble truths).
2) Mental formations. (Stories and concepts formulated in our mind in the medium of thoughts).
3) Mind (Basic awareness)
4) Name and Form (You as a being with a name and a body)
5) Six Sense Base ( Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Body, Mind)
6) Sensory Contact (Light meets eye, eye consciousness is produced)
7) Feeling (Pleasant feeling, Painful feeling, neither painful-nor pleasant feeling)
8) Craving (Your mind tightening down around an object because it likes it or doesn't like it)
9) Clinging (Thinking about why you like it or don't like it)
10) Habitual Tendency (Every time I feel like this I act in this way)
11) Birth (Being born again)
12) Suffering, decay, and death.
This is the process of dependent origination. It takes place internally and externally. It's the process that runs from our body to our mind, to our body again. We are connected to it via the five aggregates, or the five parts of this process that make us up. What are those five aggregates? Bodily form, feelings, perception (your minds capacity to recognize things with labels, after sensory contact your mind will say "book," "car," or "table."), volitional formations (thoughts and stories about why you like/ dislike said object), and consciousness. As I understand it, when in Buddhism we are taught emptiness, we are really being taught that I am really just a collection of separate, interacting components, and logically I don't really have any basis for identifying with them, and performing actions based on the identification with. Our body is just a body, our feelings are just feelings, our minds are just minds, and our thoughts are just thoughts. They are not permanent, then are not independent, they are essentially nothing. Effectively, if you want to learn and understand emptiness, you should learn what exactly it is that's trying to be declared 'empty,' and that's the five aggregates in terms of dependent origination (as I understand the Dhamma taught by the blessed one). I hope that might have cleared a little up for you. Good luck.
if consciousness (mind) arises then there is 'hearing' (Passa)
because one has no mindfulness of this 'conditioned arising', one thinks 'a child is screaming or laughing or whatever'
now this 'child or whatever' is not a thing or a person but a Perception which also arises in the mind
(check whether this statement is true during the meditation)
because one has no mindfulness about the impermanent/non-self nature of perception one continue to think over (sankhara/volitional activities) it
if the hearing is a 'screaming' there is unpleasant feeling or if the hearing is a 'laughing' there is pleasant feeling
(check whether this statement is true during the meditation)
because one has no mindfulness about the impermanent/non-self nature of feeling one continue to think over (sankhara) it
if one grasp the perception and think over it
or
if one grasp the feeling and think over it
that means,
consciousness has something to land and continue arising and falling
(if one practice this one can check the emptiness of five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, volitional activities and consciousness) or 'I'
Emptiness of phenomena: Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch and mental objects. These are dependent on our 6 senses, namely eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind. Our world is created by our senses and is dependent on contact between the six sense objects and six sense organs. This created world is neither existent nor non existent but is dependently coarisen.
When scientists tell us that solid objects are mostly empty space, our senses tell us otherwise. The way things appear is not the way they actually are. Some people only live in the past. That is their reality but is it true? Does a falling tree make a sound when there is no one to hear this?
Quote:
" . . . . . . . Suppose, monks, a magician or a magician's apprentice
should hold a magic-show at the four cross-roads; and a keen-sighted
man should see it, ponder over it and reflect on it radically. Even as
he sees it, ponders over it and reflects on it radically, he would find it
empty; he would find it hollow; he would find it void of essence.
What essence, monks, could there be in a magic show?
http://newbuddhist.com/discussion/10020/a-reflection-on-impermanence-unsatisfactoriness-and-soullessness/p1
I would suggest you find a commentary on the heart sutra (which is the core of the emptiness teaching) by Thich Nhat Hanh. He has some inexpensive books on the subject. He explains it really well and it will probably give you more insights than this discussion here could do.
Emptiness is happiness I would say for now. It is what makes everything possible.
With metta,
Sabre
In the tradition that I follow emptiness is meant to be directly experienced over time by having a correct understanding of our minds in combination with meditative practise. In this way practitioners first experience the emptiness of their minds and later experience the emptiness of phenomena. In this context emptiness is often said to be similar to space from a subjective point of view.
Its a very brief commentary on the Heart Sutra, in which emptiness is really the central theme ("Emptiness is form, form is emptiness."). The book is cheap and its just over 50 pages. It is one of the most clear and concise books on the topic, a great introduction to a very complex subject. In addition, it just might blow your mind.
You can get it at Amazon cheap:
http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Understanding-Commentaries-Prajnaparamita-Sutra/product-reviews/1888375922/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#ROLC1XAZI345A
Emptiness means all things are empty of any self-inherent existence. Nothing exists independently from other things-- even though this is how we commonly perceive the world.
The following segment below is From TNH's The Heart of Understanding ("interbeing" is also TNH's way of describing co-dependent origination, which you could think of as the photo negative image of emptiness):
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we ha vea new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And wesee the wheat. We now the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.
nothing is permanent,
it changes like our planet for example....
As it states in the Diamond Sutra 'True Form has no form',it also says,'There is no absolute phenomena,all form and all phenomena are empty'.
As it states in the Diamond Sutra 'True Form has no form',it also says,'There is no absolute phenomena,all form and all phenomena are empty'.