Wisdom And Emptiness In Buddhism
Category: Buddhist Path | Recent Meditation Posts
In Mahayana Buddhism, wisdom is synonymous with the understanding of emptiness. Learn how wisdom and emptiness are connected, and what it means to be wise in Buddhism.
- What is wisdom in Buddhism?
- What is the Buddhist concept of emptiness?
- What is non-duality in Buddhism?
- What are common misunderstandings of emptiness?
- What is the heart of the Buddha’s teaching?
Buddhism and Wisdom
In Mahayana Buddhism, to be wise is to see things as they actually exist. Typically, our view of the world, everyone and everything in it, is colored by our past experience and habitual biases, or in other words, our karma. By applying ourselves to the three-fold Buddhist path of ethics, meditation and wisdom we purify our karma. This allows us to see more clearly, freeing us from misunderstanding how things truly exist.
Becoming genuinely wise is not something that happens overnight, we pass through numerous stages along the way. The 5 practice paths to liberation are just one way of mapping the path to wisdom. We catch glimpses of wisdom as we accumulate teachings, practice self-discipline and train the mind in meditation. With practice, our wise view stabilizes and we reach the path of no more learning.
Buddhism and Emptiness
The Buddhist concept of emptiness describes how all conditioned things appear but fundamentally do not exist in the way that we think they do. Everything is empty of existing permanently, which would imply an unchanging essence. Anything that arises in our field of perception, which includes our minds, dissipates. This is the truth of impermanence. What’s more, everything we perceive depends on our participation as the perceiver. This is the truth of interdependence.
Emptiness does not mean that things are empty of existing. Things do exist, they appear and they function on the relative level. However, they do not exist as we typically believe they do. At first, we understand emptiness as merely a logical concept. Our comprehension of emptiness evolves as we contemplate it in meditation. As our practice opens our hearts and minds, our understanding of emptiness transcends cognition and becomes a lived experience.
Buddhism and Non-Dualism
The concept of nondualism is found not only in Buddhism, but in many of the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions. The theory of nonduality describes existence not as a collection of discreet, separate things, but as unified and interconnected. We habitually try to make sense of the world by separating me from you, this from that, yes from no, and so on. Nondualism invites us to dissolve these barriers for a more holistic, wise view of reality.
As we contemplate reality in our awareness meditation practice, we ultimately experience nondualism first hand. Subject and object become one as the felt sense of a separateness between ‘me’ and ‘the meditation’ dissolves. No longer an experiencer and a thing experienced, there is only the experience.
Misunderstanding Emptiness
Embracing the theory of nondualism can help us avoid the extremes we may fall into when we misunderstand emptiness. These extremes were aptly described by Nagarjuna, the great Indian Buddhist master and philosopher. The two most common misunderstandings are that things exist permanently in just one way (eternalism) or that they do not exist at all (nihilism). As we move beyond the first two extremes, the next logical question is whether things exist in both ways or neither.
However, both and neither are dualistic concepts, just as either-or is. Things are empty of both existing and not-existing at the same time, and they are empty of neither existing or not-existing. This brain teaser invites us to simply relax and let go, especially in meditation. The experiential understanding of emptiness is not something we could ever use language to describe. Naturally, unconditional truth goes beyond concept and rational thought.
The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
Listening to descriptions of reality in the twilight language of poems and songs can also help us let go and relax into understanding. The Heart Sutra, an abbreviated form of the Prajnaparamita Sutra, expresses the essence of emptiness experientially. This brief text describes the wisdom at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching. All things, including the teachings themselves, are empty of an unchanging, independent self-existence.
The Heart Sutra describes the nondual relationship between form and emptiness and famously reminds us of the four extreme misunderstandings. It includes a joyful mantra of realization, that to live with the wise understanding of ultimate reality is akin to complete freedom from suffering.
Buddhism and Reality
For Buddhists, a wise view of reality is freedom. When we know how this world works, not only conceptually, but deep within our hearts, suffering is ended. We develop great compassion for ourselves and for all beings, for we see how all harm arises from misunderstanding. If we could pass along this knowledge by simply telling others, we would. But wisdom, the right view of reality, is something we can only discover for ourselves.
By listening to Buddhist teachings on ultimate reality, reflecting upon those teachings and then meditating, we develop the three types of knowledge that cause wisdom to arise. Accumulating merit also prepares us for the dawning of wisdom, because similarly to form and emptiness, compassion and wisdom cannot be separated.
