by Greg Goode
Explore!
Go through the suggested readings. Scour their own bibliographies and lists of references. Think as broadly as you can about how things can’t have a fixed, independent nature. If you can get a taste, savor how this leaves you and everything free, open and flexible. Feel your heart expand as the realization becomes clearer and clearer. Let your heart and sense of free association be your guide. There are no limits.
If something strikes you as absolute, really true, or fixed and permanent (even change itself), then try to find it. Look very closely to try to put your finger on just what it is and where it is. It’s claiming to really be there, and to stand on its own. It may make this claim in a very loud and intense way, just as intense pain seems more objective simply because it is more intense. Instead of being convinced by the intensity of the claim, try to put your finger on the really-ness that you feel is there. When you look very closely, can you find it?
Talk to others about this. Use Google and look for teachings, seminars, classes, books, movies, poetry, art exhibits and other people who are interested in the same things. Read and explore everything you can get your hands on. Create an online group to discuss these things. The material in the book might seem theoretical only, but you know the secret: you are free to engage it in a deeply personal way!
You just might grab a taste of the joy of emptiness!
CHAPTER 4 – HOW DO I GO ABOUT STUDYING EMPTINESS?
Studying Buddhist emptiness is usually done as a part of practicing Buddhism itself. This includes attending temples or dharma centers, adopting a teacher, performing meditations, and reading books and religious texts.
Studying emptiness from Western sources has much less support. In fact, the very material you are reading this minute could be considered a call for participation, an attempted beginning.
Engaging in the study of emptiness guided by the Western dialectical tradition does not find much support on the ground. In fact, it is difficult to find any Western philosophical resources engaged soteriologically. Most often, the Western approach to philosophy is theoretical.
This is slowly changing. There are recent movements in practical philosophy and philosophical counseling. People are looking back in Western and Eastern history more readily these days, and rediscovering the relevance of ancient wisdom for modern times.
This burgeoning of practical philosophy is a good sign. People seem to be more open to considering philosophy to be helpful to address the important concerns of life. But it is still not easy to find a context or venue in which someone may study emptiness using Western sources.
Possibilities
What else can you do if you are interested in studying emptiness? Here are some ideas:
You may study emptiness through a Buddhist dharma center, and augment the study with Western resources as needed or desired.
A very few hardy individuals will be able to read, contemplate and meditate on their own. Most, however, will need help from someone familiar with the terrain. The help could come from a book very much like this one, which could give pointers on how to engage a philosophical text soteriologically, even when the text itself gives very few “how-to” clues.
You may follow the very rich lead given by Jeff Humphries in Reading Emptiness. You can read widely, and literarily and reflectively, as this sensitizes us to how perception and conceptuality are interdependent, as well as to how their objects are not independent of the means of apprehending them. This advice can be applied not only to literature, but to any art that you pursue whole-heartedly and reflectively.
You may study within other fields that reflect on the making and articulation of meaning. These fields may include history, psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, literary or art criticism, or the philosophy of esthetics.
You may take Jay Garfield’s passionate advice in Empty Words seriously, and engage in the intense and fruitful arena of cross-cultural interpretation. Even if the subject matter at hand is not emptiness itself, engaging in a serious and prolonged dialogue across cultures diminishes fixity to your own ways and views. Because you are expanding your horizons to other people, at the same time you confront various kinds of hermeneutic circles; cross-cultural interpretation enhances your compassion as well as your knowledge of the relatedness of things.
CHAPTER 5 – THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN EMPTINESS, COMPASSION AND HAPPINESS
Wherever you encounter the Buddhist emptiness teachings, you also hear a lot about compassion. Compassion and emptiness are intimately related and reinforce each other. This section explains why. We will also give you some practical meditation techniques to cultivate compassion in connection with your emptiness practice.
Buddhism understands compassion as the wish for others to be free from suffering. The ideal practitioner of Mahayana Buddhism, where emptiness is taught in full strength, vows to liberate all sentient beings from suffering. And not just in this lifetime, but in all future lives as well. This is a truly vast aspiration! Many people find this great vision enormously inspiring. But is it for everyone?
We haven’t met anyone yet who thinks compassion is bad per se. However, we have met a number of people who are hesitant in making compassion the guiding principle of their spiritual life. Accordingly, we do not want to assume that all readers of this book have a strong Buddhist background or sympathies. We need to address compassion carefully in our Western, pluralistic approach to emptiness.
Here are some critical opinions we have encountered in discussing compassion in the context of the emptiness teachings. Some people feel that a focus on compassion is a distraction from what they regard as the “real” insights into emptiness and non-duality. Some feel that compassion means “feeling with,” and they recommend something that is more than just a feeling. Others perceive the emphasis on compassion to be moralistic, as if someone is trying to control them and push them around.
Still others feel that a strong emphasis on compassion is condescending. The emphasis seems to assume that people generally suffer, which they find presumptuous. Secondly, the idea that some people know the solution to other people’s suffering appears – to them – to be arrogant. Instead, they may resonate more with an attitude of love that is perceived not to have these other effects. And lastly, many who follow a spiritual path may already feel firmly grounded in their home path’s approach to love and caring, such as the Christian idea of love and charity. They would rather prefer to work with that.
Our approach is this. The emptiness teachings do recommend a way of being with others that is somehow caring, loving, openhearted, benevolent, non-aggressive, inclusive and engaged. As a way of being, it is more than merely a subjective feeling, although feeling is also included. There’s more. There are attitudinal, active and behavioral aspects. It is an entire way of relating. The scope of your caring can include yourself, your loved ones, all beings, the environment and everything that you can conceive of.
But we don’t need to privilege one term over others. The term certainly doesn’t have to be “compassion” and in this book, we will also use the terms love, caring and loving-kindness. There is a wide variety of open-hearted approaches that will serve you as an emptiness student.
So we advise against engaging the emptiness teachings without actively cultivating one of these loving, personally meaningful attitudes. In many Buddhist contexts, a firm grounding in compassion (which is the word used) is considered to be a prerequisite for receiving the radical, potentially earth-shattering emptiness teachings. This is for your own protection. Without a strong basis in an open-hearted way of relating to others, you may be in danger of falling into nihilism. Nihilism is a dreadful state, in which nothing seems to have value or meaning anymore. Buddhism’s antidote to nihilism is the intent to develop a caring orientation. We wish to honor this profound emphasis on compassion, on open-hearted engagement – even though the approach we are presenting here is largely Western.
Let’s explore in more detail how study
ing emptiness and cultivating compassion support each other.
Valuing Compassion Helps You Realize Emptiness
Compassion opens the heart and lightens the mind. This makes the mind and heart more subtle, which makes the often tricky emptiness meditations easier to grasp. It helps you to concentrate and think better.
Compassion is an antidote to nihilism. Compassion keeps you from feeling that there’s no purpose to what you are doing. It keeps you from feeling that nothing exists whatsoever. Compassion fills you with the confidence to go on, and awakens you to the distinction between conventional everyday existence and the kind of existence (inherent existence) you are trying to refute in your emptiness meditations.
Compassion strengthens your motivation – you feel that in studying emptiness, you are not working only for yourself but for many others as well. Think of the surprising strength a person discovers when they are able to lift a car to help free someone caught underneath, or the extra energy you feel when you are working for your family as well as for yourself. Before working with emptiness meditations, it helps to lighten your mind and open your heart with loving-kindness meditations.
Realizing Emptiness Promotes Compassion
The effects go in the other direction as well:
Realizing emptiness leads to valuing compassion. Once you see that you yourself and other beings and things aren’t fixed or independent, your need to occupy center stage diminishes. You no longer feel essentially special or privileged, and understand that you are like other sentient beings in this way. You see that every being is the same in wanting to be free of suffering.
Realizing emptiness upgrades your understanding of compassion. If, for example, you’re giving a gift, you realize that all three, the giver, the receiver and the gift, are empty. In this way you overcome the coarse, dualistic understandings of compassionate activity in which there is a solid helper and someone being helped.
Realizing the ultimate ungroundedness of your own world views makes your mind more pliable and makes it much easier for you to enter the world view of someone else. In that way your compassionate activity can be more effective.
Realizing emptiness makes you fearless and more courageous in acting for the benefit of the world because your self-concern lessens.
Practical Benefits
Below we present a few insights and results from the scientific discipline of positive psychology that speak to the benefits of cultivating an attitude of care and compassion. In a nutshell, it’s good for you in an entirely ordinary sense: it makes you happier.
Regularly meditating on loving-kindness turns out to be a highly effective way to experience more positive emotions throughout your life. Frequently experiencing positive emotions such as joy, love or contentment is an important part of how many people think about happiness. Thus
loving-kindness meditation makes you happier overall.
Positive emotions motivate people to explore their world, to be curious and to be playful. Positive emotions foster creativity. These are all important supporting conditions for entering emptiness meditations.
Positive emotions, as well as emptiness meditations, broaden the mind.
Warmth, loving-kindness and empathy are key to establishing and maintaining positive relationships.
People who act compassionately often receive more happiness from that than the recipient. There tends to be a long lasting glow in our experience after having done something good for others.
Research with brain imaging technology on long-term meditators meditating on compassion provides evidence that meditation leads to profound changes in the brain that are associated with well-being. The good news is that, even for newcomers who have only been meditating for a few weeks, some of these positive changes can be detected in their brains.
Emptiness meditations can lead to a sense of interconnected-ness with all that is. Meditators report that this experience often comes with a surge of positive emotions like a feeling of deep, unconditional love, a sense of benevolence, awe or wonder. These emotions don’t just fill the heart of the meditator, but in a way that is deeply meaningful to them, permeate the whole universe.
Perhaps this is at first a bit difficult to understand. How can a star be filled with an emotion? On second thoughts, it is actually quite plausible. Did you notice how your world can look entirely different based on whether you’re in a good or bad mood? A bad (or good) mood colors your whole world in the sense that whatever you encounter is always already tinged with the mood you’re in. These meditations have great transformative power for our lives. Conversely, being able to kindle positive emotions makes it much easier to access these powerful spiritual experiences.
Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina is the leading researcher in the area of positive emotions. Her book Positivity (Fredrickson 2009) provides a lot more detail on the topics only hinted at above. She also writes about other benefits of positive emotions, such as a stronger immune system and reduced stress. There seem to be entirely pragmatic reasons to regularly engage in loving-kindness meditation.
Meditating on loving kindness and compassion has over time reset the feeling tone of my (Tomas’) inner life. It has become a much friendlier, warmer and, I’d say, happier place. As any perfectionist knows, our own internal dialogue can be more scathing than anything anyone else could ever dare say to us.
When you do both – develop insight into emptiness and cultivate compassion – you will find a beautiful way to live and experience life.
The Loving-Kindness Meditation
In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
Sutta Nipata, 1.8
No sentient being wishes to suffer. Metta (loving-kindness) meditation is a Buddhist meditation in which you deeply and sincerely wish that others be well, happy and free from suffering. Metta is very closely related to karuna (compassion). Sometimes in Buddhism, karuna is explained as the desire that others be free of harm and suffering, while metta is the desire that others be well and happy. Karuna wishes to eliminate the negative, while metta wishes to extend the positive. In your meditations, you can mix them together and wish for both!
In this section, we show you how to do a Buddhist-style loving-kindness meditation. You should feel free to adapt it using your own spiritual background as you wish. And of course, you can use the forms of prayer and meditation that you’re already familiar with. As long as it helps you to cultivate a caring, benevolent, non-aggressive, inclusive and engaged attitude with the world, you’ll be just fine.
In Buddhism, all beings (even if only a tiny bit) are thought to benefit from this compassionate energy of yours, and because you are the one generating this metta, you benefit in a tangible way.
You begin with yourself and direct this wish further and further outwards until you are extending this wish to all sentient beings. The wish can go further than this. It can include animal and plants. It can include the environment. It can even include inanimate objects, such as buildings, bridges, rocks, planets, subatomic particles, galaxies, universes and all of existence. The wider the net, the more the barriers between you and the “not-you” will feel softened and dissolved.
There are four types of people to develop loving kindness towards. Your meditation should include people in all of these categories, beginning with those closest to home and heart:
1) Your self.
2) A respected or dearly beloved person. This can include a parent, spiritual teacher, significant other or a close family member or friend.
3) A person you feel neutral towards – somebody you know, but have no special feelings towards, such as a person walking down the street or a person who serves you in a shop.
4) A person you may be having difficulty with.
You can Google metta and find lots of information about this kind of meditation. You can actually fashion a version for yourself. At each step, try to generate a sincere, deeply felt, benevolent wish towards those you a
re thinking about. You can use visualization and imagination as well. The entire meditation can take from five to ten to fifteen minutes. There is no need to be in a hurry.
Here is one possible example:
Meditation – Loving-Kindness (Long Version)
May I be well, happy and free of suffering.
May my family be well, happy and free of suffering.
May my (significant other) be well, happy and free of suffering.
May the people walking down this street just now be well, happy and free of suffering.
May the people on the freeway, bus or subway be well, happy and free of suffering.
May the clerks, shopkeepers and phone center operators I deal with be well, happy and free of suffering.
May my colleagues at work be well, happy and free of suffering.
May my boss and others at work be well, happy and free of suffering.
May those I dislike be well, happy and free of suffering.
May those who dislike me be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all those in this city be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all those in this state be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all those in this country be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all those in this hemisphere be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all those in the world’s trouble spots be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all those in other countries be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all those in places I never think about be well, happy and free of suffering.
May sentient beings of the land, sea and air be well, happy and free of suffering.
May the earth be well, happy and free of suffering.
May all the living things on the earth, such as animals and plants, be well, happy and free of suffering.