Prajna as Emptiness - January 14,2021
We finish the exploration ofprajnawith this longer passage on Emptiness by
Norman Fischer from his book "The World Could Be Otherwise":Understanding in
Mahayana Buddhism means, specifically, understanding the empty nature of all
phenomena… The word usually translated as “emptiness” is sunyata in Sanskrit. It
comes from a root word suggesting swelling, something puffed up and hollow, with
nothing inside, like a balloon. Emptiness implies a kind of deception. Beings,
all things, thoughts, ideas, feelings—these are all deceptive. They seem to be
something big and full, like a balloon, but when you prick them, they pop,
Wizard of Oz–like. Like the Wizard, they are empty, completely lacking the
substantiality they appear to have.
Over the centuries, Buddhists have put it like this: Things don’t actually
exist. To say they do is an exaggeration, an overstatement of the case.Existence
is an illusion. But to say things don’t exist isn’t right either. How could it
be, when throughout our whole life we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and feel
the world? Being is a paradox. The middle way, Mahayana Buddhists have said,
isn’t, as originally conceived, a path of moderation between asceticism and
sensuality; it’s the middle ground between the two extremes of existence and
nonexistence. It’s the way things really are, neither existing nor not existing:
empty, ungraspable, ineffable. As concluded in another of the perfection of
understanding sutras, the Diamond Sutra, being is like a dream, a phantom, a
flash of lightning, a magic show, a bubble, a dewdrop.
A balloon is empty of things but full of air. An empty glass is empty of liquid
but also full of air. If being is empty, what is it empty of? And what is it
full of?
The technical answer to the first question is that beings are empty of svabhava,
own-being... To be empty of own-being is to lack independent substantial
being—such as a soul or an essential consciousness—that can be isolated and
grasped… Our mistaken notion of svabhava, or own-being, is what ties
feeling-sensation in a painful knot. Without knowing we are doing it, we
viscerally impute to things a deeply, almost physically held sense that they are
there in a way they actually aren’t. If we truly appreciated that things are not
there in the way we think they are, that they are there in some completely
different way, we would not react to them in the way we normally do. Our pain
would disentangle from its false support.
What about the second question? Like the empty balloon and the empty glass, if
beings are empty of own-being, what are they full of? They are full of
connection; they are full of one another; they are so radically interdependent
they cannot exist in their own right as separately existent entities. There are,
in fact, no things: there is only the endless ebb and flow of being,
Avalokiteshvara’s compassionate ocean.
*
Today’s talk comes from a year-long exploration of the paramitas, the perfecting
qualities that lead to liberation, offered by HaiAn during the Thursday
Meditations. [https://www.dharmapathways.org/dropinmeditation]Email
haian@dharmapathways [haian@dharmapathways]for the link to join these sessions
on Zoom.
This session explores aspects of the sixth paramita, prajna or wisdom. If you’re
unfamiliar with the paramitas, Chapter 25 in Thich Nhat Hanh’s “The Heart fo the
Buddha’s Teaching” offers an introduction and Norman Fischer’s “The World Could
be Otherwise” gives a deeper dive. The paramitas are related to the parami, in
Pali, for the Theravada tradition.
We are happy to offer these teachings to you. If you would like to support us to
continue to make these teachings available, go to
https://www.dharmapathways.org/donate [http://www.dharmapathways.org/donate]
