The Emptiness of Everything

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The Empti­ness of Every­thing — watch­ing the work­ings of our mind as we invent mean­ings — how doing this gets us into trou­ble, is the point of the Heart Sutra

Last arti­cle I wrote about “life, death and gone.” And I men­tioned that the line I quot­ed was from the Heart Sutra, a key Bud­dhist text.

The Heart Sutra as a guide

Much like many things Bud­dhist, the con­cepts found in the Heart Sutra are tricky and counter-intuitive. 

Rather than get into a line-by-line analy­sis, let me instead toss out some more glob­al interpretations. 

This curi­ous things in this Sutra have to do with

• emptiness, 
• depen­dent ori­gin, and 
• that bod­hi, or enlight­en­ment, has to do with being present, rather than “under­stand­ing.”

I’m writing this a few days after Trump’s 2nd inauguration. You know, fuhrer light and little Elon, he of the nazi salute.

My first go at writ­ing was a bit more judg­men­tal. For exam­ple I wrote, “… the nut-bar giv­ing his nazi salute.” The nut-bar part is the impo­si­tion of me on the sit­u­a­tion. Which is what the Heart Sutra addresses. 

Because we are so proud of our reasoning abilities, we take it as gospel that we can non-judgmentally understand, or make sense out of, that which is before us.

It’s not like this is the first time through this top­ic for us, but here goes. 

The first line of the Heart Sutra is usually translated, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” 

The first time I came across this, way back in a world reli­gion class at Elmhurst Uni­ver­si­ty, cir­ca 1968, I know I was puz­zled. And being who I appeared to be back then, (as far as any­one is any­thing…) being a white, 17-year-old lib­er­al Chris­t­ian, my “belief” was, “Yikes! Those Bud­dhists were kin­da dumb. No won­der their reli­gion isn’t as good as my reli­gion.” Sigh.

It took me a cou­ple of decades to take anoth­er run at Bud­dhism in gen­er­al and Zen in par­tic­u­lar. The sto­ry I tell myself is that I final­ly was ready to un-bury my head and have a real­ly look.

Here’s today’s ver­sion of that.

Emptiness goes with dependent origin

The idea being pre­sent­ed is that noth­ing has a pure essence. Noth­ing has a mean­ing. One way of say­ing that is,

“Every­thing is relat­ed to some­thing else, so there­fore one can­not attribute a fixed mean­ing to anything.”

Emptiness means that things do not have fixed, clear, precise “meanings.”

Illus­tra­tions abound. Take size. You look at a van, and say “big vehi­cle!” But com­pared to what? A Prius? A Hum­mer? Clear­ly, the size of the van is rel­a­tive to some­thing else.

This is the depen­dent ori­gin part. The van’s size, for exam­ple is not a fixed quan­ti­ty; it’s not “big, small,” etc. As we can say is, “That van cer­tain­ly is!” Or, “That spe­cif­ic van is big­ger than a Prius and small­er than a Hummer.”

The Buddha’s great insight about all of this was developed as he studied the workings of his mind. Let me describe it this way:

We come into the world as tab­u­la rasa (blank slates.) Over the years, we are taught… well… every­thing. And we are ini­tial­ly taught to label. Which is handy.

• Know­ing which mush­room to eat is a good thing. 
• Know­ing my name is Wayne is a good thing, espe­cial­ly when being called for dinner. 
• Know­ing that I am an indi­vid­ual and not an undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed mass is helpful. 

And labelling–evaluating–being able to place our van in between a Prius and a Hum­mer as regards size–is nec­es­sary to do sci­ence, for example. 

The issue is not “labelling” per se. The problem comes when we add judgements to labels.

• All (fill in the blank — FITB) are bad.
• Peo­ple with (FITB) can’t be trusted.
• Women who (FITB) are heartless.

Stereo­types are taught to us. We don’t devel­op them nat­u­ral­ly. Depend­ing upon how you were brought up, you either hold them gen­tly, or rigidly. 

Exam­ple: Cos­ta Ricans, in gen­er­al, have a stereo­type — most have dim views of Nicaraguans. They’re not bla­tant­ly racist, but many have neg­a­tive judge­ments. While con­sid­ered one of the safest coun­tries in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, many think that the coun­try is over­run with ladrons (thieves.)

I just presented a stereotype about an entire country, or class of people.

It may or may not be true, but it is prevalent. 

How­ev­er… We’ve spent sev­er­al weeks in Nicaragua, and I can say, (from per­son­al expe­ri­ence,) that every Nicaraguan we met was kind.. and inter­est­ing… and we did­n’t get robbed even once. 😉 

I hold the stereo­type in my head; we used it to make a deci­sion to take a cab after dark. I can use it with­out tar­ring even one Nicaraguan with the stereotype.

Because stereotypes aren’t true. They’re just mental constructs.

The Bud­dha want­ed us to watch our­selves as we cre­ate such games in our head. He want­ed us to notice our labels, and then how we rush to judge (to ascribe mean­ing,) and espe­cial­ly our rush to demonize. 

He want­ed us to under­stand that not one thing, includ­ing us, can be per­ma­nent­ly defined and there­fore noth­ing can be con­sid­ered to be a fixed entity. 

This is dif­fi­cult, because one of the great­est stereo­types of all is that we can actu­al­ly fig­ure things out. 

That our brains are so pow­er­ful, and our instincts so acute, that we know the truth of things.

We don’t. Because without a huge effort, we are mostly the sum of our prejudices.

The game starts when we decide that some­thing “isn’t right.” Rather than stop right there and exam­ine our belief (“Why am I choos­ing to upset myself over this?”) we move to “wrong,” and then look for some­one to blame. 

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

The sit­u­a­tion (the form) is just what is in front of us. It may be hard to accept, but the sit­u­a­tion is emp­ty of mean­ing. The mean­ing is pro­vid­ed by us, and us alone. 

Even in a crowd or mob, there is no con­sen­sus, oth­er than the deci­sion to remain and par­tic­i­pate. Each per­son in a crowd is there for their own, unique reasons. 

If we remember this insight, we would never be in conflict over meaning. 

We would see that every sit­u­a­tion is unique, and how I respond is all I have con­trol over. 

Some find this a pes­simistic view–an exis­ten­tial, mean­ing­less uni­verse view. It isn’t — because no mat­ter what, I can choose my next move. 

But I can nev­er under­stand. I can get a han­dle on the process I go through to decide, but I’ll nev­er real­ly under­stand why I chose as I did. 

And as to under­stand­ing others…

A Few Stories

1) I once coun­selled a guy just after his broth­er com­mit­ted sui­cide. He start­ed ther­a­py with, “I have to under­stand why he did it.” 

I spent 10 min­utes explain­ing the impos­si­bil­i­ty of that task. 

• First, as the broth­er was dead, all we could do is guess at his motives. And since he was­n’t there, our guess­es would have every­thing to do with me and with my client–and noth­ing to do with the brother. 
• Next, we’d have to be able to enter the broth­er’s mind to under­stand; in a sense, we’d have to have lived his life, in order to even begin to under­stand. And of course that’s impossible. 
• Last, even my client could mirac­u­lous­ly describe his broth­er’s think­ing, all he would be describ­ing is the sto­ry his broth­er was telling in that moment. Not why he did it back then–why, lat­er on, he thought he did it. 

2) A friend wrote that she want­ed her ex to “do what’s best for our daugh­ters.” I chal­lenged her on this. How would she know what is best for her daugh­ters? By what they tell her? If so, do they ever change their minds? (Hint: of course they do, as do we all. We make each deci­sion based upon what we want in the moment, and have no clue if what we want is “best” in the long run. We only under­stand “best” retroactively.) 

What my friend actu­al­ly means by her sen­tence is: “I want my ex to do what I’ve decid­ed is best for our daugh­ters.” Or, pre­cise­ly, “I want my ex to do what I want him to do, when I want him to do it, and I want him to agree that it’s in the best inter­est of our daughters.”

I chal­lenged her on her think­ing.
Remark­ably 😉 she nev­er responded.

Her daugh­ters, her self, her ex, all are emp­ty. There is no “best.” There is only, “The sto­ry I am telling myself.” The only way to deter­mine “best” would be if we could see into the future, and we can’t. 

We don’t want to believe this. We want to think that the way we see and then inter­pret things is “true, right, and best.” We pre­tend that we can know all of this because erro­neous­ly believe that we have seen through to the essence of the sub­ject or object. 

But… but… the object or sub­ject is emp­ty of meaning. 

3) A while back, our love­ly niece was get­ting mar­ried, and Dar­bel­la and I were asked to MC. She wrote to ask for sug­ges­tions, stat­ing, “I don’t have a clue about recep­tions.” She then sent a pre­lim­i­nary sched­ule of events. 

I noticed that the first dance and the cake cut­ting were sched­uled right after the entrance of the wed­ding par­ty. Tak­ing her line about being “clue­less” as a guide, I texted and sug­gest­ed that the cake cut­ting belonged around dessert time, and that the first dance imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ed… well… dancing. 

I got back a, “Well, that’s how it’s being done these days” response. 

My back went up a tad. 

I thought, “I spent 10 years pho­tograph­ing wed­dings, and 20 years con­duct­ing them! I know how this should go!” 

I almost texted her, but then had a breath. I noticed how I was react­ing to being chal­lenged, an old pat­tern for me. Noticed how I was try­ing to lump her behav­iour into a “niece stereotype.” 

Instead of react­ing, I got curi­ous. I Googled it. 

Sure enough, some wed­dings fol­lowed this “procedure;“thinking:” they fig­ure the b & g are walk­ing in to cheers (real­ly??) and might as go dance (more cheers, appar­ent­ly) and then whack the cake. 

Oth­er wed­ding sched­ules I found had the order of events as I remem­bered them. 

Now, what’s “right?”

Wed­ding recep­tions are emp­ty of mean­ing, and there­fore emp­ty of “cor­rect,” or “right.” They are what­ev­er they are. 

In any event, since the recep­tion (and our niece) were emp­ty of “right and wrong,” and it was her day, we did it the way she want­ed. Even though it made absolute­ly no sense to me. How could it? I’m not her.

But remember, I almost pissed myself off about it!

This is not to say that I was or am wrong to have thoughts about the things I con­front. It’s to say that my thoughts are just thoughts. 

I want to remem­ber to ask myself: are my thoughts con­ducive to my goals? If I seek peace, calm­ness, and pres­ence, well… hav­ing judge­ments all over the place, and act­ing on them, might not be helpful. 

Instead, I might become more awake just watch­ing myself hav­ing the judge­ments, and then have a laugh when I try to go fur­ther and start to make oth­ers “evil” for hav­ing judge­ments that do not match my own. 

Because whatever we are judging has no true reality or meaning about it. 

My judge­ment is just that: mine. My sit­u­a­tion is just that: mine. 

I actu­al­ly have no prob­lem with peo­ple who have strong opin­ions. I rel­ish a good debate. The only time I get into trou­ble is when I start judg­ing the oth­er per­son to be “wrong… then mali­cious… then evil.”

As we watch the world fall apart (a sto­ry or judge­ment I tell myslef) I can hate… despise… the things I see hap­pen­ing, and vow nev­er to engage thus­ly. (Of course, I won’t know what I’ll actu­al­ly do until I am in that situation…) 

But to self-righteously hold myself up as better than “those people” is to perpetuate the game that caused the conflict in the first place.

I don’t need to end­less­ly declare myself to be “right” or “bet­ter.” I can choose to stay present, and act in accor­dance with my beliefs.

In the end, beliefs are just that. Not worth much. No, what mat­ters Is what I do, how I engage. 

Who I am, always, is what I do, and nothing else.

Exam­ine your beliefs and cer­tain­ties, and see if you can hold them a bit lighter. Think about how you “be” in the world, and work toward consistency.

And remem­ber, it’s all just what it is. Emp­ty, and yet, some­how, right there, look­ing back at you. It is you. All of it.

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