by Greg Goode
This list does not exhaust the possibilities. None of these flavors of life is inherently superior to any other. And none of them is logically dictated by the emptiness teachings themselves. There is a good deal of freedom in what you adopt. And in our time, when we confront a diversity of views every day, the choices are not like a marriage partner, where you “forsake all others.” You can combine them and use different flavors at different times. We think a beautiful and timely approach for you as an emptiness student is to gain the flexibility to dance and move freely between a variety of views on conventional reality.
We will return to these and other possibilities in our final chapter.
CHAPTER 7 – SOME QUESTIONS FROM OUR STUDENTS
Open Questions
Our project began as a series of dharma classes at a Tibetan dharma center in Manhattan. We asked: Could Western philosophical resources be helpful to Western dharma students who are studying emptiness at a dharma center?
After all, many typical Buddhist examples given in actual dharma classes are phrased in terms of categories that they might not be able to relate to, after growing up in a modern society. For example, students are taught that the person is made up of five skandhas (heaps or collections of components) such as rupa, vedana, sanna, sankhara, vinnana (i.e., form, sensation, perception, mental formations, discernment or consciousness). Sometimes terms used in the teachings are left untranslated from their original Sanskrit or Tibetan.
There is another aspect of the traditional approach to which modern students might not relate. Sometimes, before being taught the emptiness teachings themselves, students may be taught other Buddhist systems that are considered to be less sophisticated. This is to sharpen the students’ appreciation of the emptiness teachings when the time comes to teach them. But who’s actually heard of Cittamatra (mind-only), or Svatantrika (an approach which doesn’t merely refute others’ arguments, but proposes arguments of its own)? To the modern student these are just more details that have to be learned, only to be abandoned in favor of the Prasangika Madhyamika (consequentialist middle way) teachings, which are presented as the most subtle approach to emptiness. Modern students are more familiar with modern philosophical teachings, such as idealism, relativism and scientific materialism. If a philosophical springboard to Prasangika Madhyamika is needed, then these teachings work just fine.
Modern students enter dharma study with modern concerns and presuppositions. What about the issue of essentializing rules and norms, or reifying ethnicity or gender? What about being bewitched by what has come to be known as the picture theory of language, or feeling that whatever exists must participate in a quasi-Platonic Form (I, Greg, thought this!). What about being tormented by negative self-labeling?
That brought up a series of questions pondered in this book. For some of these questions we don’t have definitive answers:
Q: But isn’t this a lot of reading?
A: It doesn’t have to be. You can begin with a book like Kenneth Gergen’s An Invitation to Social Construction. This book is very accessible, and Gergen’s own enthusiasm is obvious. From this book, you can get an indication of how to find the constructedness of what you previously took to be naturally basic or foundational. This in itself is a realization of emptiness. From there, you can follow the same method, tracing this same line of inquiry in other aspects of life, whether at work, at home or at social occasions. You can be social with it; it doesn’t have to be done only with books. Remain open to the opportunity to talk to others in your circle of friends, in local Buddhist groups or on the Internet.
Q: Still, it seems like a lot of analysis.
A: It can be analytic but doesn’t have to be. Instead of analysis, you can use imagination and invention. There is the well-known Interbeing meditation, which we recount in the chapter entitled “Loosening up Fixed Meaning in Language.” In this wonderful visualization, the whole world is seen to exist in a single sheet of paper. You can do this kind of meditation on anything you encounter, or anything you imagine. Pick an object. Then follow every kind of relationship you can think of from that object, and back to that object. This allows you to have an experiential realization of this object as a network of relations of all kinds, which is a realization of emptiness. You can do this same kind of relationality meditation with subtle objects like thoughts, feelings, mental states, values, standards – anything. Just think of all the ways that the object is related to other things. The more creative and inventive you can be, the richer your realization.
Q: If the world is empty, how can things function?
A: The emptiness of the world doesn’t mean that things don’t exist. It merely means that the existence of things isn’t independent, objective or preordained. The emptiness meditations look very closely for objectivity and independence wherever these things might reside, and fail to find them. Yet things in the world are nevertheless observed to function.
Indeed, it is the emptiness of things that allows them to function. If things were actually objective and independent from each other the way they at first seem, then nothing could change, evolve or develop. The acorn could never become an oak – it would be forever frozen by its inherent acorn-ness. If the self were independent and objective, then it would be fixed in one way only, and life could never improve. It is the very emptiness of things that allows people to become happier.
Q: If everything is empty, how can I defend against moral evil?
A: This is a very important question, and is also covered in the “Refuting Moral Objectivity” chapter. Just because moral facts and principles are empty doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all. Everything that exists, exists conventionally. Moral principles also exist conventionally, by being deeply and organically related to the concerns of humanity and other life forms. Life forms and moral principles depend on each other. This mutual dependence is their emptiness, and it allows them to work together, so to speak. Moral principles don’t exist inherently or objectively. If moral principles did exist in this way, they would exist on their own, totally unrelated to any form of life. They would be felt by everyone as universally binding. They would be unreachable and unable to be linked or applied to concrete cases, because they would be fixed and frozen in their own separate realm. This is what objectivity would mean. But the emptiness meditations look very carefully for moral principles that exist in this inherent and objective way. The meditations fail to find moral principles that are unrelated to the concerns of life, and they fail to find any sense in the claims that moral principles exist inherently.
The good news is that conventional existence is good enough. Moral principles don’t need to be objective in order for one to feel and act with passionate moral commitment. One doesn’t even need to believe that moral principles exist in this way in order to act morally. You can know that your self is empty, that all beings are empty and that moral principles are empty, and be totally willing to lay your own life down for another being.
Some people believe moral principles are objective and others don’t. But just think – moral principles don’t exist objectively even now, and yet plenty of people are already moral.
For the one meditating on emptiness, deep moral commitments are possible. Concern for others is built into the emptiness teachings from the ground up. It is largely your sincere concern for others’ well-being that allows you to realize the emptiness of your self and of others. Life is precious and precarious, and one comes to see how morality is profoundly tied into the maintenance and furtherance of life. Realizing the depth of these ties is part of realizing the emptiness of life and the emptiness of morality.
Q: What you’re talking about sounds a little like relativism or postmodernism. Is that what you are espousing?
A: No, it’s not. Emptiness teachings and relativism or postmodernism can seem similar because they all have similar targets: the conception of inherent existence and their supporting objectivist, essentialist, absolutist schemes of thought. But because empti
ness teachings have a different breadth of application, different purpose and different set of values, they aren’t subject to the same critiques that are leveled against relativism and postmodernism.
Here are a few standard critiques that have been issued against relativism and postmodernism. We can see how they don’t apply to the emptiness teachings:
“The emptiness teachings are nihilistic.”
False. The emptiness teachings value compassion, care and kindness. In fact, these values are emphasized from the very beginning in the presentation of emptiness teachings. Cultivating these values is a pivotal factor in understanding and realizing emptiness. The effects run the other way as well: realizing emptiness promotes a deeper embodiment of these values. The emptiness teachings emphasize that you can care most deeply about the welfare of others when you understand emptiness. It allows you to appreciate how precious it is that beings and things depend on each other.
A typical corollary of the nihilism charge is the charge that without absolute standards, we are left with no standards whatsoever. We would be in the position of “anything goes” or “everything’s equal.” This is a misguided accusation, influenced by the essentialistic idea that if values don’t exist absolutely, objectively or inherently, then they don’t exist at all. But to see values in this essentialistic way is insensitive to the difference between conventional existence (which, according to the emptiness teachings, is how things exist) and the inherent existence (which is how things don’t exist). The emptiness teachings say that standards do exist, just as compassion, people and things exist. The difference is that they don’t exist inherently or objectively.
Unlike some relativist or postmodernist thinkers, you – as a joyful ironist, someone who has realized emptiness – feel free to embrace a grand narrative or a realist or objectivist view if you wish. You don’t have to be on guard all the time, in constant refutational or deconstructive mode. You are free to engage in things in an intense and passionate way. The difference will be that your engagement will be ironic, not metaphysical.
“The emptiness teachings are self-refuting.”
Not so. This accusation is based on a misunderstanding of emptiness. The charge holds that a statement such as:
(T) Truth is empty,
violates the emptiness teachings by itself being non-empty. It seems to land the emptiness proponent in a logical pickle. Either (T) is empty or it’s not. If (T) is empty, then how can it refute the realist? The realist is interested only in truth that is real or objective. But if (T) is not empty, then the emptiness teachings are self-refuting because they depend on a non-empty (realist or objectivist) statement, and the realist has won. On the surface it seems like the liar paradox, in which the statement
(F) This sentence is false,
is false if it’s true, and true if it’s false. But (T) is different from (F). (T) doesn’t claim that truth is false or nonexistent, but only that it is empty. It’s not a denial of truth, it’s just a statement about how truth exists. That is, (T) claims that truth lacks existence on its own in a transcendent, independent way unrelated to other things. So (T) is not self-refuting, and neither are the rest of the emptiness teachings. Of course, the realist might not find the emptiness teachings convincing, but they aren’t self-refuting.
There is another reason why emptiness teachings aren’t self-refuting. The goal of emptiness teachings is pragmatic and soteriological. They are not trying to tell an absolute truth about things as they really are. Rather, they are trying to illustrate the peaceful effects of no longer experiencing things in this way. They are teaching that happiness, kindness, peace and joy come from no longer experiencing the self and the world as though there is an absolute, objective way that they really are.
“If emptiness is empty, then how can it be meaningful?”
This is also based on mistaking the notion of emptiness with something like falsity or utter non-existence. If emptiness meant these things, then it would be hard to find meaning or inspiration in the emptiness teaching. So the emptiness teaching’s reply to the question above is: “Emptiness can be meaningful only if it is empty. What if emptiness were not actually empty? Then it would be the opposite – inherently existent, essential, substantial, non-empty. And since, according to the emptiness teachings, things are empty, then, if emptiness itself were not empty, things would be non-empty too. So if emptiness weren’t empty, then nothing would be empty.”
Emptiness is a mode of existence. It is the way that the self and other things are said to exist. Emptiness is empty because like tables, numbers and thoughts, it is dependent on other things. The emptiness of the table is dependent on the table. The emptiness of the table is also dependent upon being cognized and captured in thought and language. And emptiness was codified and passed down in the Buddhist sutras and commentaries. It is also being written about as something that a similar tradition in the West has been teaching. Emptiness isn’t independent from any of these things. This “not being independent from” is the emptiness of emptiness.
If emptiness were not empty, but a kind of objective essence of some sort, we would have a paradox in the emptiness teachings. We would have an objective sort of emptiness being the mode of existence of things that we say lack objectivity. Their very nonobjectivity would be objective. We would have the result that if things are empty, they would be non-empty!
This unwelcome sort of “liar paradox” would be a severe problem for emptiness teachings if emptiness were not empty. But since emptiness is empty, the paradox vanishes and emptiness is free to be meaningful!
Q: Does philosophy even work for this kind of purpose? Can it address the desire of the Western student to gain happiness, however that is characterized?
A: Yes, it does and it can. From its inception in both the East and the West, philosophy has been successfully used to address the most profound issues of life and living. Since the beginning, both Eastern and Western philosophers have used medical and therapeutic metaphors to describe what they do. There are, of course, other means available as well, including religion, exercise, yoga and physical culture, and practical wisdom.
Philosophy goes about things in a different way, through argument, inference, dialectic and the search for truth. One could even look at certain forms of cognitive and behavioral psychotherapy as philosophical. There are some issues for which philosophy provides more effective therapy than its competitors. These issues include the investigation into the true existence of things, of the difference between being and appearing, and the nature of the well-being for which all these methods strive. Unlike the results of physical exercise, the results of philosophy are in a sense irreversible. Once you realize through inference and deep contemplation that the self lacks metaphysical grounding or ontological essence, you don’t forget it or become rusty!
There is a new movement known as practical philosophy which is becoming increasingly popular these days, with popular books such as Plato, Not Prozac and What Would Aristotle Do? This is a sign that more and more people are interested in how philosophy can enhance happiness and the quality of life.
Q: To the extent we say that studying Western sources is analogous to Buddhist sources, what would Western sources say about the concept of enlightenment? What would be the Western analogue? Outside of psychotherapy and monotheistic teachings, there is no easily-identified Western soteriological culture.
A: We have several thoughts on this. Our first thought is that it isn’t always helpful to essentialize or draw a rigid distinction between East and West. Plenty of Eastern teachings have come to the West, such as martial arts, Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Insight Meditation. These teachings have their way of settling here, thereby softening the East/West distinction, in the same way that curry is now considered a typical British dish.
In 1889, Rudyard Kipling published the poem “The Ballad of East and West.” The first two lines became very well known, and made the gap seem unbridgeable:
Oh, East
is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But like a good emptiness teaching, the very next two lines deconstruct this essentialized difference:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
Western philosophers in the non-essentialist tradition do mention soteriological goals. For Aristotle, it would be eudemonia (happiness as the result of an active life governed by reason). For Sextus Empiricus, ataraxia (unperturbedness). For Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (the state of availability towards what is). For Wittgenstein, perhaps unbewitchment, or being a fly newly freed from the fly-bottle. For Jacques Derrida, a new Enlightenment. For Richard Rorty, liberal ironism.
In ancient Greece, philosophical approaches were fully practical and therapeutic. The ancients would say, “Why even pursue these things if they don’t benefit life?” But for the last several hundred years, these approaches have been discussed mostly in academia, far removed from any soteriological goals. This is starting to change...
New Age teachings are soteriological. For instance, Oprah Winfrey supports empowering teachings of spirituality and self-improvement that are not necessarily connected to monotheism.
Is this enough? There certainly is no current culture of enlightenment associated with the Western philosophies and teachings we talk about here. Do these Western concepts stack up to Buddhist enlightenment? There are deep cross-cultural interpretive issues involved in these questions. We are open to suggestions here as well. One issue is that these questions, as they stand, seem not to be neutral, but to come from a sensibility that is already Buddhist. The questions imply that Buddhist standards are somehow the natural baseline that other approaches have the obligation to match. It seems that you can use these standards, but you don’t have to. Aristotle, Sextus, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Rorty did not use Buddhist standards, and didn’t have the same literal and explicit goals that a Mahayana Buddhist would have, such as freeing the self from cyclical existence or saving all sentient beings from suffering. The answers to these questions of parity or equivalence between teachings seem to depend upon the standards built into the questions themselves. And this itself is an open question.