Towards an Understanding of Emptiness
Category: Buddhist Path
Fresh ways of looking at a concept that is often misunderstood
How can we understand the concept of emptiness in Buddhism? Emptiness is an approximate translation of the Sanskrit term shunyata. The key to understanding what is meant by this translation is in the nessโthe ness of emptiness means that emptiness is not empty. This last syllable is crucial. If you just say โempty,โ the meaning is different; it evokes a vacuum of nothingness. This is why some scholars have replaced the term โemptinessโ by โempty ofโ when trying to explain what is meant by shunyata.
In Buddhism, emptiness means that things do not exist as we experience them. Why? Because our perception and interpretation of that perception is a veiled image of reality. Normally if we perceive an object, if we see it, for example, we take that as proof of its existence: โI saw it, therefore itโs real!โ But in the Buddhist view, the understanding is that our perception is veiled, that is, distorted, by subjectivity.
In fact, the act of perceiving something means that a subject apprehends objects through its sense faculties or the mindโmemories, ideas, dreamsโand interprets them. This interplay of subject-action-object is the realm of conventional or relative truth. Any such event depends on the perceiver. You automatically assume that youโve seen something real, but you havenโt. What you have seen is an interpretation: an image or shadow of whatโs truly there.
Conventional truth refers to everyday experiences where you are seeing through a veil. The truth is not what you see: the truth is behind that veil. โEmptinessโ means that the true nature of the experience is behind the subject-object-action interplay; in other words, the true nature of the experience is empty or devoid of what you see and how you interpret it.
If I make a fist, cover my hand with my shawl, and draw your attention to it, you might suppose that Iโm holding something. Maybe itโs just a fist, but it could be more; what you see covers the reality of whatโs really there. This is conventional truth. If I say that what Iโm holding is green, or itโs a stone, a flower, or anything else, you can envision that. But thatโs not realityโunder my shawl is simply my hand. Reality is empty of what is imagined to be there.
The ness in emptiness is indirectly saying that what we perceive is not โempty, end of story.โ It is empty of something. Everything that we can impute about it doesnโt exist as suchโthe appearance, the shape, the feel.
If you undertake a detailed analysis of anything you perceive, you can break it down into parts or components without finding even one single, solid, indivisible thing. You find parts, and parts of the parts, and parts of parts of the parts, and so on. There is not a single thing that serves as the objectโs basis, nor does that heap of things have a starting point. The term โheapโ is a literal translation of the Sanskrit term skandha which is used to refer to the amalgam or disparate elements that constitute a form. In essence, everything is kind of a heap or bundle of other things.
All forms are heaps of forms. And in fact, the term heap implies the existence of a gathered mass of many single things that are its components. The problem is we canโt find even one single, indivisible thingโevery component part can be broken down into more parts; every single element is actually an amalgam of other things. To say that there are many, there have to be many single somethings. And since we donโt have even one single thing, then how could we have many of them?
The conclusion of our investigation of the nature of any object, whether it is what we think of as a โselfโ or what we think of as a โthing,โ is that it is possible to break it down into an infinite number of other things that can, in turn, be broken down again. And this is not only true of what we think of as material objects. Just as things can be broken down into infinite components, the same is true when we look at mind and what it produces, whether we are considering thoughts, concepts, emotions, dreams, or any other form of mental activity. When we try to pinpoint the present moment of mind, each instant reveals itself as divisible and, ultimately, unidentifiable. This too is emptiness.
