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Buddhism: Its Essence and Development

by Edward Conze, Pages 131-135

Emptiness
Two things, the Sutra tells us, are most needful to the Bodhisattva, and to his practice of wisdom : " Never to abandon all beings and to see into the truth that all things are empty. " We must now make an effort to understand this all-important idea of Emptiness. Here again the sanskrit root helps. It shows how easily the word empty could become a synonym for Not-Self. What we call emptiness in English is sunyata in sanskrit. The sanskrit word sunya is derived from the root SVI, to swell. Sunya means literally: relating to the swollen. In the remote past, our ancestors, with a fine instinct for the dialectical nature of reality, frequently used the same verbal root to denote the two opposite aspects of a situation. They were as distinctly aware of the unity of opposites, as of their opposition. Thus the root SVI, Greek KY, seems to have expressed the idea that something which looks swollen from the outside is 'hollow' inside. This is easily shown by the facts of comparative philology. You have the meaning swollen in such words as Latin cumulus (pile, heap) and caulis (stalk). You have the meaning hollow, from the same root, in Greek koilos, Latin cavus. Thus our personality is swollen in so far as constituted by the five skandhas, but it is also hollow inside, because devoid of a central self. Furthermore swollen may mean 'filled with something foreign.' When a woman is swollen in pregnancy - and here again the Greeks use the same root kyo - she is full of a foreign body, of something not herself. Similarly in this view, the personality contains nothing that really belongs to it. It is swollen with foreign matter. Like the child the foreign body must be expelled. It is a great pity that these connotations of the word sunyata are lost when we speak of emptiness. The door is opened to innumerable misunderstandings. Particularly to the uninitiated, this emptiness will appear as a mere nothingness, just as Nirvana did. Although in Buddhist art emptiness is usually symbolized by an empty circle, one must not regard the Buddhist emptiness as a mere nought, or a blank. It is a term for the absence of self, or for self-effacement. In Buddhist thought some ideas belong together which we do not usually associate. I set them out here in a diagram: Wisdom--Abhidharma--Dharmas--Own Being l Not Self l Empty l Perfection of Wisdom--Emptiness Bodhidharma, an Indian or Persian, who went to China about 500 A.D. expressed the meaning of the term con cisely when he said : " All things are empty, and there is nothing desirable or to be sought after. " Used as technical terms, the words empty and emptiness express in Buddhist tradition the complete negation of this world by the exercise of wisdom. The central idea is the complete denial and renunciation of, the complete withdrawal and liberation from the world around us, in all its aspects and along its entire breadth. The Abhidharmists knew the term empty, but used it very sparingly. In the Pali Canon it occurs only on a few occasions. The New Wisdom School treats the term as the sesame which opens all doors, and Nagarjuna worked out its epistemological implications. Emptiness here means the identity of yes and no. In this system of thought the gentle art of undoing with one hand what one has done with the other is considered as the very quintessence of fruitful living. The Buddhist sage is depicted as a kind of faithful Penelope, patiently waiting for the coming of the Ulysses of enlightenment. He should really never commit himself to either yes or no on anything. But, if he once says yes, he must also say no. And when he says no, he must also say yes, to the same. Emptiness is that which stands right in the middle between affirmation and negation, existence and non-existence, eternity and annihilation. The germ of this idea is found in an early saying, which the scriptures of all schools have transmitted. The Buddha says to Katyayana that the world usually bases its views on two things, existence and non-existence. It is, is one extreme; it is not is another. Between those two limits the world is imprisoned. The holy men transcend this limitation. Avoiding both extremes, the Tathagata teaches a Dharma in the middle between them, where alone the truth can be found. This Dharma is now called emptiness. The Absolute is emptiness and all things also are empty. In their emptiness Nirvana and this world coincide, they are no longer different but the same. The Anatta doctrine openly disagrees with commonsense. The doctors of the Old Wisdom School had admitted the conflict as irreducible by distinguishing two kinds of truth : Ultimate truth consists of statements about

dharmas, conventional truth speaks of persons and things. The ultimate events of this school have very much the same function as atoms, cells and similar entities, also normally ignored in daily life, to which the propositions of modern science properly refer. The New Wisdom School takes the concept of Ultimate Truth a step further. It is now found exclusively in relation to the one ultimate reality, which is the Absolute in its emptiness. Ultimate truth means no longer scientific but mystical truth. It is obvious that in this sense anything we may say is ultimately untrue. Emptiness cannot be the object of a definite belief. We cannot get at it, and even if we could, we would not recognize it, since it has no distinctive marks. All doctrines, even the Four Holy Truths, are ultimately false, evidence of ignorance. Theories cover up the Ineffable Light of the One, and they are only conventionally true, in the sense that they conform to peoples' varying capacities for under standing spiritual experiences. In accordance with the inclinations and gifts of beings the teaching can, and must, be varied indefinitely. The doctrine of emptiness is frequently expressed by way of simile. The Old Wisdom School had already compared this world around us to a mass of foam, a bubble, a mirage, a dream, a magical show. The similes had the purpose of bringing home the insight that the world is relatively unimportant, worthless, deceptive and unsubstantial. Poets in the West have often used the same similes with a similar intention : But what are men who grasp at praise sublime But bubbles on the rapid stream of time, That rise and fall and swell and are no more Born and forgot, ten thousand in an hour. Or, the more famous : The world is but a fleeting show For man's illusion given ; The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow ` There's nothing true but Heaven. When the New Wisdom School, in its turn, compares all Dharmas to a dream, an echo, a reflected image, a mirage, or a magical show, it does so in a more technical sense. The Absolute alone is not dependent on anything else; it is ultimately real. Any relative thing is functionally dependent on other things, and can exist, and be conceived, only in and through its relations with other things. By itself it is nothing, it has no separate inward reality. " A borrowed sum is not one's own capital, " as Candrakirti puts it. But if each and every thing is " devoid of an own being, " and does not really exist, like " the daughter of a barren virgin carved in stone, " how is it that we can see, hear and feel the things around us which are really just emptiness? The similes of a dream, etc., are intended to answer that question. One sees a magical show, or a mirage, one hears an echo, one dreams a dream, and yet we all know that the magical appearance is merely deceptive, that there is no real water in the mirage, that the echo does not come from a man's voice and that an echo is not someone speaking, and that the objects one loved, hated and feared in one's dream did not really exist. Many misunderstandings of the Madhyamika conception of emptiness would have been avoided if full weight had been given to the terms which are used as synonymous with it. One of the most frequent synonyms is Non-duality. In the perfect gnosis, all dualities are abolished, the object does not differ from the subject, Nirvana is not distinguished from the world, existence is no longer something apart from non-existence. Discrimination and multiplicity are the hall-marks of ignorance. From another point of view emptiness is called Suchness, because one takes reality such as it is, without superimposing any ideas upon it. The statements which the Mahayana philosophers make about true knowledge cease to be paradoxical and absurd when one realizes that they attempt to describe the Universe as it appears on the level of complete self-extinction, or from the point of view of the Absolute. If it is a meaningful and rational undertaking to describe this world as it appears to God, then the sutras of the Mahayana are full of meaning and rationality. Master Eckhart and Hegel attempted a similar task. Their writings also suggest that God's mean ing is not always easily understood.

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