COMING AS YOU ARE
This new-old hat is called shunyata, or emptiness, but what it is called is not important. What is important is the new faculty or new lens you are using to see your old hat as a new hat. When you use a new lens or a new microphone to heighten your visual and auditory perceptions, you see or hear things from an entirely different perspective. But then you are fooled again, and once more you become as inaccurate as you have been in the past. So what the Buddha actually asked is that you do not bring along any new eyeglasses, binoculars, microscopes, lenses, hearing aids, microphones, or anything else, but that instead you come as you are.
You might find that inconvenient, embarrassing, or inadequate, because you want to be masked by all of those things. You might like to hide behind all those gadgets, but you could forget those gadgets altogether. You could come as you are. You could simply present yourself to your teacher and to the Buddha. If you think they are going to be embarrassed by your nakedness or your so-called inadequacy, it is your language that says inadequacy. You might bump into a corner, make a mess out of yourself, and knock over a teacup, but they are perfectly happy to accommodate you. It is nice that you have finally decided to make yourself at home, to come as you are.
When the Buddha related with his disciples, some disciples who came to hear him came with what they were not. They came along with their particular cultures, their particular traditions and inheritances, their particular lenses, their particular masks, microphones, and hearing aids. When the Buddha uttered his teaching on shunyata, such people found that they could not use their gadgets to hear him. In fact, their gadgets fell apart and they panicked. They had heart attacks and died on the spot. The reason that happened is because they liked their culture, their habits, and their tradition of individual salvation. They had managed to crack down on one portion of ego, but a certain amount was left behind, and they took shelter and security in that leftover portion of ego. That remaining portion of ego was their security—and with the teachings of shunyata, the rug was pulled from under their feet for the first time. More likely, their zafus, or meditation cushions, were pulled from under their bottoms, so they had nowhere to meditate and their security was gone. But the teaching of shunyata is not actually all that outrageous; it is very simple and ordinary.
GAPS OF UNKNOWING
In order to understand the bodhisattva path, we need to refine our understanding of shunyata as much as we can. We need to look at shunyata in terms of absolute and relative truth and in relationship to tathagatagarbha, or buddha nature. Mahayana provides an immense sense of freedom: freedom to think, freedom to react, and freedom to practice. Freedom to think means that we can work with the essence of buddha mind, with prajna and compassion. It means that we are free to use our insight, our basic existence, what we fundamentally are. Freedom to react is that we can go along with the emotionality of the practice of compassion. Freedom to accomplish is that we can practice in accordance with the disciplines of the first two types of freedom. That provides us with the ground to work on our understanding of shunyata.
Freedom is connected with the notion of basic sanity. In order to gain, to achieve, or to understand the meaning of basic sanity, we have to know how it operates. Basic sanity usually comes through when we are going about our everyday life; otherwise, such sanity would be purely theoretical. Basic sanity operates and can be worked with properly and thoroughly in our ordinary world—the world of kitchen sinks, the world of bread and butter, the world of dollars and pounds.
In the ordinary world, we operate in terms of our reactions to things. If we want to make a business deal with somebody, we meet with the person and we talk about business. We talk about what terms we can arrive at, and whether it is lucrative for the other person as well as for ourselves. If we are relating with somebody who needs help, we do it in the same style. We begin by making sure that helping this person does not destroy us, and only then do we begin to help them. Let us straightforwardly face the fact that nobody really sacrifices their own interest in relating with the world. We decide to take part in things when we have more to gain than we have to lose. In general, everybody operates in the world of this and that. We operate in a businesslike fashion all the time, and our terms are that whatever we give, we expect to get back in return. So it’s give and get all the time. That world of exchange involves a misunderstanding of reality, definitely and absolutely.
Relating with the current issues in our life raises questions about reality and what that reality is based on. How can we understand this particular reality? How can we actually perceive reality in the proper and fullest sense? How can we make sure that we have understood the basic phenomena of reality? The attempt to understand reality requires a certain attitude of expectation—the expectation to understand things as they are. We are waiting to understand, we are expecting to understand, we are hoping we can understand. That hoping, waiting, and expecting contains a quality of bewilderment. It contains confusion, and quite possibly it also contains a quality of blankness or uncertainty.
If we expected our guests to arrive at our house at five o’clock sharp and they have not turned up, if they are two hours late and usually they are on time, we have all kinds of ideas. Maybe they had an accident on their way or got sick. Quite possibly they did not want to come and visit us. In a more paranoid mood, we might think maybe they are pissed off at us and are making some kind of statement to undermine our existence or our hospitality. But all we really know is that they are late, that they have not arrived when we expected. So between all the flickering of thoughts in regard to that situation and the development of a state of mind regarding the people who haven’t arrived, we experience a gap, space, uncertainty.
You could say that there is nothing very profound about that example. It is just ordinary expectations and waiting, a mundane little thing—nothing comparable to a shunyata experience or anything of that nature. That is quite true. But shunyata experience is not far from that. This example may seem terribly domestic and cheap; it may even seem sacrilegious to say that when a guest doesn’t arrive, it is a glimpse of emptiness. I’m not quite saying that, but there is a possibility of that being true. Actually, shunyata experience takes place in very simple moments of life. At the point when our expectations are fading out and future possibilities have not yet turned up, there is a faint little gap in which there is the possibility of some unknown factor taking place.
It is not all that fantastic or profound to experience shunyata. Throughout our life, there are possibilities of encountering gaps in our expectations. Usually we think in terms of hope and fear, but something beyond hope and fear is possible: emptiness is also taking place. Whether we call it hope or fear, behind the whole thing there is a feeling of not knowing exactly what to do or what kind of input we can present to the situation. Seemingly, the experience of not knowing what to do is based on confusion and ignorance, but not knowing what to do is not necessarily ignorance. It could be that we have run out of new games, new gimmicks, and new concepts to fill in the gap. We may have run out of ammo, so to speak. Usually we are extraordinarily resourceful in providing convenient ammo of all kinds, but we sometimes run out of possibilities and we are completely unarmed. This not finding—not finding new possibilities, not finding new tactics, not finding new techniques, or not finding new plans—is shunyata. With shunyata, it is not possible to come up with anything.
1. Since prajnaparamita, or the perfection of wisdom, is said to lead to the realization of emptiness, it is a central focus of many mahayana scriptures. There is an extensive body of prajnaparamita teachings, one example being the Heart Sutra, a short text that is chanted, studied, and revered throughout the Buddhist world. Prajnaparamita is regarded as the mother of all the buddhas.
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Emptiness and the Middle Way
Shunyata is not regarded as a religious experience, nor is it regarded as a nontheistic mystical experience. Shunyata is neither religious nor secular. I
t is not particularly sacred; neither is it profane. It is what it is. However, it covers a lot of ground. It is the first clear thinking and conclusion about reality in the history of the human mind.
NAGARJUNA AND THE MIDDLE WAY
We could approach the mahayana in two ways: we could approach it from the viewpoint of the teachings of madhyamaka, or the middle way, or we could approach it from the viewpoint of shunyata, or emptiness. Madhyamaka is the name of the philosophy that developed at the height of the growth of mahayana Buddhism. It is said to have been developed by the great second-century Indian teacher Nagarjuna.
Nagarjuna wasn’t just a professor or a scholar, although he knew a lot. Since Nagarjuna was a great practitioner, any arguments Nagarjuna presented could be regarded as the voice of experience. Nagarjuna was somebody who presented his experience very simply and directly to his friends and students. He was not simply a professor or an absentminded scholar. I am sure that he could make a cup of tea very beautifully, cook his own meals, and do his own laundry. Nagarjuna was also one of the tantric mahasiddhas. Maha means “great,” and siddha means “power”; so mahasiddhas are “realized beings known for their great spiritual powers.” So Nagarjuna led an extended life rather than burying himself in books.
Western scholars tend to misinterpret the nature of Buddhist philosophical traditions and logical systems such as madhyamaka and yogachara. But madhyamaka is not a philosophical school in the Western sense, so it is a disservice to say that Nagarjuna was the founder of a particular school, as if he were the Carl Jung or the Karl Marx of the Buddhist era. Buddhist philosophical traditions are not “founded” in the same way Jung and Freud founded their particular schools, and they are not regarded as established institutions or philosophical schools. They are just forms of truth that people happened to discover and present. This is a very important point. I am sure that in the time of Nagarjuna, or even after the time of Nagarjuna, none of the traditional Buddhist universities developed departments specializing in the study of Nagarjuna’s thought. In fact, there were no departments of any kind. Learning Buddhism was approached as one organic whole. So it would be good to drop the concept of philosophical schools, and view madhyamaka not as a philosophical school but as a system of thinking.1 A philosophical school develops arguments to protect its own concepts and ideas, while a system of thinking is a process of presenting a certain viewpoint very harmoniously and systematically to people’s minds.
NEITHER ETERNALISM NOR NIHILISM
The reason madhyamaka was known as the middle way is that madhyamakans were neither eternalists nor nihilists. Eternalists believe that life exists eternally, in spite of birth and death. They think that because our karma continues, we can still hang on to our life, that we can continue to exist and attain everlasting life. Nihilists believe that everything comes and goes in the midst of unconditional space, so there is room to make mistakes, room to correct things. There is also room to indulge, room to expand our ego. We are on our own, whatever we do—and since everything is in our hands, we can do whatever we want. So we should stop hassling with our life; we should forget about chaos, practicality, and earth-boundness. Instead, we should just enjoy and celebrate in this nothingness or emptiness.
According to madhyamaka, neither the eternalistic nor the nihilistic approach is particularly safe or right. Eternalism is as confused as nihilism. The traditional analogy is that as long as you fall off the horse, it doesn’t matter whether you fall off the right side or the left side—you just fall off the horse. Similarly, whether you are a nihilist or an eternalist, you are making a wrong judgment about reality. Seemingly, those two traditions do not have any sense of heritage, and if they did, it was lost a long time ago. They both seem to be a kind of free ride, an expressionistic approach to the spiritual journey. The madhyamakans do not follow the concepts of either the eternalists or the nihilists. They incorporate the essence of eternalism or nihilism, but without the neurosis. That is how the middle path, or madhyamaka, came into being.
DISCOVERING SHUNYATA WITH THE TOOL OF PRAJNA
The idea of shunyata or emptiness is discovered by prajna. Shunyata is not quite the same as the existentialist concept of nothingness, and it is not made into a concept, put into a box, and catalogued. In the Uttaratantra of Maitreya, it says that the basic nature is empty of adventitious stains, which are separable, but it is not empty of unsurpassable qualities, which are inseparable.2 That makes a lot of sense. The basic nature, which is empty of dualistic fixations, is regarded as the real supreme dharma. Adventitious stains or dualistic fixations are temporary; they do not actually hamper the basic enlightened state of mind at all. So conceptual mind and mental concepts are not regarded as permanent damage. We realize the temporariness of such experiences, and we are not alarmed by dualistic problems. We recognize that they do not have any kind of ground to stay.
Shunyata is not quite the same as the existentialist concept of nothingness. It is not made into a concept and put into a box and catalogued. Shunyata is what you experience, and prajna is what you use to discover shunyata. Prajna is like a cup that you use to drink water; shunyata can only be contained in prajna, in the same way that water can only be contained in a cup or something with a dented shape, like the hollow of a hand. Prajna is a way to see; it is a kind of radar system that is trying to perceive the phenomenal world in the language of shunyata. Prajna is supreme knowledge; but in this case, knowledge does not refer to something you already know, as when somebody knows how to fix cars. It is not that kind of preconceived knowledge. Prajna is the capability of having knowledge. Knowledge of what? Of nothing. Just knowledge.
One of the problems that comes up with linguistics, particularly in the English language, is that you have to qualify things all the time. You cannot simply say “it.” You think, “It what?” You cannot just have an unconditional “it,” but you have to have somebody or something that is referred to as “it.” But in the case of prajna, knowledge is not knowledge of something—it is just knowledge. Prajna is the faculty to know; it is the ability to know in the fullest sense. Although prajna is supreme or best knowledge, it does not have the connotation of computation or comparison, as when one thing is sharper, and something else is duller. In this case, it is sharp without any question; there is none better.
Shunyata is not regarded as a religious experience, nor is it regarded as a nontheistic mystical experience. Shunyata is neither religious nor secular. It is not particularly sacred; neither is it profane. It is what it is. However, it covers a lot of ground. It is the first clear thinking and conclusion about reality in the history of the human mind. In the god realm, people are caught up in their absorption, and in the hell realm, people are trapped in their own suffering. Likewise, people in the other realms are caught in various ways. So technically the only mind that can perceive true shunyata is in the human realm, the world of opportunity.
EXPERIENCING EMPTINESS
Shunyata is a state of realization of our phenomenal world. We might realize the nature of shunyata while we are preparing a meal or drinking a cup of tea. It is an experience, very much so. That is why an emphasis is made on trying to find out what is reality at the levels of absolute and relative truth.
Shunyata could also be considered a practice or discipline. You look into things as you go about your life—how your curly hairs work, how your socks could be cleaned, what the next good meal will be, and who is going to cook. You look into anything of that nature and how it affects your sense of reality. By looking into such things, you are actually working on how to understand basic reality.
With shunyata, you realize that the emptiness of phenomena and the emptiness of yourself is the same emptiness. You realize that everything is bounded by that totality, that otherwise, there is no totality. You might ask, “Then who is it that does the experiencing?” It is the total experience of emptiness that experiences things as they are. When we talk about emptiness, we are not talking about vacancy, but about the
absence of clinging. Beyond clinging, a greater freedom can be experienced that is not particularly a vacant or a blank state of being, but a much clearer, unpossessed state of being. It is total spaciousness, which you cannot actually label. Once you begin to label it, you lose it. You become nonspacious immediately.
Space or spaciousness means fullness and claustrophobia at the same time. Those two things can work together on one ground. It is very much like my personal life, actually. I have a lot of time to rest and to sleep late, but my time is still completely filled, including my own dreams. That fullness has a positive quality—not positive in the sense of promises but positive in the sense of sanity. There is a difference between promise and sanity. You cannot really do a complete censoring or weeding out of what you want and what you do not want. Everything bombards you, particularly once you decide to become sane. Once you are sane, you are bombarded all the time by all kinds of possibilities.
When shunyata was introduced to hinayana practitioners, the problem was that they did not want to give up their culture, their hinayana tradition. They were threatened by someone saying that everything is arbitrary. They felt that if you presented that particular case to their students or to themselves, they might violate their monastic rules. Their resistance was based on very simple facts like that. I think it would be very difficult to teach shunyata to its full extent in a place like the ancient Nalanda University, where people were very uptight about their own discipline. They had a hard enough time keeping their own tradition of discipline already, so if you presented something beyond that, saying that everything is okay, everything is empty, it would be a terrible thing to say.
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 16