Here's Looking at Who?, Kid
A while back, when I was too fraught to blog, an email from an unknown popped up late at night. I am really quick to smack the delete or junk button at what smells of spam, so I had my hand poised when I saw the subject line: A Buddhist question. That stopped me cold. And this was the message:
"You have asked a huge and complex question that I hope I can answer in a simple and unconfusing way. Buddha’s teachings have come to us in a two-step sequence. They start with what’s called Hinayana or small path, sometimes called Theravada or in America Insight Meditation. These teachings are “small” because they relate only to the individual and are called insight because they are about discovering that there really is no ongoing coherent, solid person inside your body. Your body has changed a lot since you were two years old and will not be the same in another two years. What you know and how you see things keeps changing too, doesn’t it? It keeps changing all the time.
So in the Hinayana, you work with understanding that because everything in your body is in flux and can’t be frozen, there is no real solid ego or self in your body. You do meditation exercises asking yourself: am I my knee? Am I in my heart or my brain? If I lose a finger, do I lose myself? This is to help you understand you are just imagining that you are really there all the time as the one same unchanging hardcore thing. When you think that, you work very hard to protect that one same unchanging hardcore thing, which is what causes you suffering, mainly because it’s changing all the time: you win some, you lose some, you move on. Nothing stays the same. Think of it as a kaleidoscope: can you pinpoint anything solid there in it? When you look for something, you can’t find anything, just movement. The container is empty. In essence, hinayana is about discovering the “emptiness” of your ever shifting body as a container. This liberates you from worrying about a lot of things.
Mahayana means “great vehicle” because its focus is no longer just yourself but all others. And this is where emptiness can take on complex meanings. When it says “all dharmas are emptiness,” it means something like this: dharmas are simply all the phenomenon of the world—all the happenings that happen, that show up, that go on—everything outside yourself. Mahayana teaches you how to relate to all that through this idea of emptiness. And it is basically the same idea you discover in the Hinayana: nothing that happens and nobody else is solid and unchanging and invincible any more than you are. Everything is one big flux, one big kaleidoscopic gyre. Nothing is what it appears to be. Your imagination is just working overtime, making you shadow box with your own projections.
Here are some simple examples, really simple, of how emptiness works. Put four rubber wheels on a steel chassis with four doors and what do you have? An engineer sees the strength of good quality rubber and the benefits of Indian steel and the perfect calibration of horsepower. A salesman sees $3000 commission on that baby. Maybe you see a way to get to school. Somebody else sees a status symbol that makes them look good. So what is the real sum of those parts, the real essence, the one solid thing you can absolutely count on to never deceive you? Nothing! Those parts are in themselves devoid of all ascribed meaning. They are “empty” and it is that very emptiness, that clean slate, that lets you project your particular meaning onto them.
Here’s another example: your mom sees you and sees “my daughter.” your sister or brother sees you coming and sees “my sister.” Your teacher sees you in class as “my student” who is there from 11 to noon. But your best friend sees you as someone to text and go to the movies with on Friday night. So which one are you really? Everyone who sees you assigns to you a different meaning. And you yourself are one minute a daughter, one minute a lover, one minute a student. So who are you really? You are a container that traps a lot of passing ideas but is actually empty of any solid, sure, ongoing meaning.
So the whole world is only what we make up about it every passing moment, and everybody has their own ever changing way of seeing it. Some people see Barack Obama as the devil, some as a Muslim terrorist and some as their savior. Malia just sees him as her father. What actually is he? Just a screen for all those projections. Thus all dharmas are emptiness. It is the great gift of the Mahayana to help us to realize this, for once you begin to do that and relax your grip so that you don’t cling to your own mistaken impressions and suffer as things change or elude your grasp, you begin to notice how others around you make themselves suffer so terribly by not seeing how there is really nothing there that they think is there. This is how compassion spontaneously arises. That is the very heart of Mahayana teachings: compassion for the suffering of others and a will to stop it.
In a recent blog post I talked about selling old clothes and how shocked I was when I took a sweater I had been hoarding for years as so fabulous it would make me appear special to two different consignment shops and had it rejected as “old and baggy and not at all stylish.” So you see how we vest something with our own ideas about it when in truth it is just a bunch of atoms bonding for a moment. That’s emptiness.
P.s.Here is another quick example you can use in your paper. Take the word “flower.” I’m sure you know what that is and you are sure you do. But look closely at that word: does it mean a rose? An orange blossom? A daisy? More to the point, what is the flower? It is petals and a leaves and stem and probably a pod head with seeds. Which part is the real flower? If you take off the leaves or pull off one daisy petal, do you still have a flower? The same flower you had before in your mind? If all the petals fall to the ground, is it still a flower? Is the bud the flower? Is the first shoot the flower? Or perhaps is flower a word we make up to cover this ever changing evolution of energy from a seed to a shoot to a sprout to a bud, to a bloom, to falling petals and rotting smell. What actual meaning does “flower” have? It’s pretty empty, isn’t it?"
The only reason I am telling you all this is because I got a return email. It said: "Thanks so much, you are seriously the nicest person in the world! This information is so helpful, I can't thank you enough."
So perhaps this will be useful to others who wish they could call Buddha 911.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson
"I saw your website in my search to understand the Buddhist concept of emptiness. I am a college student taking a course on Mahayana Buddhism and I am working on a paper right now. Although I thought I understood the material, it turns out that I am completely confused. If you can help me that would be great, but if not I understand."
The material, it turns out, was "emptiness." Whatever did that mean, in Mahayana terms? She'd been reading some college professor's textbook full of didactic descriptions of Buddhism and came away thoroughly baffled. She wondered if the statement: "all dharmas are emptiness" meant the Buddhist teachings were empty. And what did that mean? Maybe it was just a Mahayana thing?
Well...it meant she had a seriously high falutin' teacher parroting a lot of pedantry. And it meant she was getting Dharma from someone with absolutely no experience of it, which is precisely what the Buddha and all the teachers ever since insistently warn us against. And it meant somebody was actually reading my blog. And that amazingly good news meant I had to honor my vows to never let Dharma be perverted and respond to her call for help. So I tried to be a 911 emergency Buddhist responder.
"You have asked a huge and complex question that I hope I can answer in a simple and unconfusing way. Buddha’s teachings have come to us in a two-step sequence. They start with what’s called Hinayana or small path, sometimes called Theravada or in America Insight Meditation. These teachings are “small” because they relate only to the individual and are called insight because they are about discovering that there really is no ongoing coherent, solid person inside your body. Your body has changed a lot since you were two years old and will not be the same in another two years. What you know and how you see things keeps changing too, doesn’t it? It keeps changing all the time.
So in the Hinayana, you work with understanding that because everything in your body is in flux and can’t be frozen, there is no real solid ego or self in your body. You do meditation exercises asking yourself: am I my knee? Am I in my heart or my brain? If I lose a finger, do I lose myself? This is to help you understand you are just imagining that you are really there all the time as the one same unchanging hardcore thing. When you think that, you work very hard to protect that one same unchanging hardcore thing, which is what causes you suffering, mainly because it’s changing all the time: you win some, you lose some, you move on. Nothing stays the same. Think of it as a kaleidoscope: can you pinpoint anything solid there in it? When you look for something, you can’t find anything, just movement. The container is empty. In essence, hinayana is about discovering the “emptiness” of your ever shifting body as a container. This liberates you from worrying about a lot of things.
Mahayana means “great vehicle” because its focus is no longer just yourself but all others. And this is where emptiness can take on complex meanings. When it says “all dharmas are emptiness,” it means something like this: dharmas are simply all the phenomenon of the world—all the happenings that happen, that show up, that go on—everything outside yourself. Mahayana teaches you how to relate to all that through this idea of emptiness. And it is basically the same idea you discover in the Hinayana: nothing that happens and nobody else is solid and unchanging and invincible any more than you are. Everything is one big flux, one big kaleidoscopic gyre. Nothing is what it appears to be. Your imagination is just working overtime, making you shadow box with your own projections.
Here are some simple examples, really simple, of how emptiness works. Put four rubber wheels on a steel chassis with four doors and what do you have? An engineer sees the strength of good quality rubber and the benefits of Indian steel and the perfect calibration of horsepower. A salesman sees $3000 commission on that baby. Maybe you see a way to get to school. Somebody else sees a status symbol that makes them look good. So what is the real sum of those parts, the real essence, the one solid thing you can absolutely count on to never deceive you? Nothing! Those parts are in themselves devoid of all ascribed meaning. They are “empty” and it is that very emptiness, that clean slate, that lets you project your particular meaning onto them.
Here’s another example: your mom sees you and sees “my daughter.” your sister or brother sees you coming and sees “my sister.” Your teacher sees you in class as “my student” who is there from 11 to noon. But your best friend sees you as someone to text and go to the movies with on Friday night. So which one are you really? Everyone who sees you assigns to you a different meaning. And you yourself are one minute a daughter, one minute a lover, one minute a student. So who are you really? You are a container that traps a lot of passing ideas but is actually empty of any solid, sure, ongoing meaning.
So the whole world is only what we make up about it every passing moment, and everybody has their own ever changing way of seeing it. Some people see Barack Obama as the devil, some as a Muslim terrorist and some as their savior. Malia just sees him as her father. What actually is he? Just a screen for all those projections. Thus all dharmas are emptiness. It is the great gift of the Mahayana to help us to realize this, for once you begin to do that and relax your grip so that you don’t cling to your own mistaken impressions and suffer as things change or elude your grasp, you begin to notice how others around you make themselves suffer so terribly by not seeing how there is really nothing there that they think is there. This is how compassion spontaneously arises. That is the very heart of Mahayana teachings: compassion for the suffering of others and a will to stop it.
In a recent blog post I talked about selling old clothes and how shocked I was when I took a sweater I had been hoarding for years as so fabulous it would make me appear special to two different consignment shops and had it rejected as “old and baggy and not at all stylish.” So you see how we vest something with our own ideas about it when in truth it is just a bunch of atoms bonding for a moment. That’s emptiness.
P.s.Here is another quick example you can use in your paper. Take the word “flower.” I’m sure you know what that is and you are sure you do. But look closely at that word: does it mean a rose? An orange blossom? A daisy? More to the point, what is the flower? It is petals and a leaves and stem and probably a pod head with seeds. Which part is the real flower? If you take off the leaves or pull off one daisy petal, do you still have a flower? The same flower you had before in your mind? If all the petals fall to the ground, is it still a flower? Is the bud the flower? Is the first shoot the flower? Or perhaps is flower a word we make up to cover this ever changing evolution of energy from a seed to a shoot to a sprout to a bud, to a bloom, to falling petals and rotting smell. What actual meaning does “flower” have? It’s pretty empty, isn’t it?"
The only reason I am telling you all this is because I got a return email. It said: "Thanks so much, you are seriously the nicest person in the world! This information is so helpful, I can't thank you enough."
So perhaps this will be useful to others who wish they could call Buddha 911.
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
posted by Sandy Garson @ 6:04 PM
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