In the Emptiness of Self
Buddhism and The West | Page 4
Roger Gunter-Jones
Admittedly, all the higher religions have acknowledged the truth of Emptiness to the extent of teaching that self-interest and self-assertion are the cause of every kind of vice, and that only by losing one's self will one find one's true life. But none has tackled the problem of selfishness in so radical a fashion as Buddhism. In its essential teaching Buddhism makes no concessions; even Nirvana, the goal, is impersonal. In terms of the Buddhist logic of the four-cornered negation, it cannot be said of one who has realised Nirvana "that he is or is not, that he both is and is not, or that he neither is nor is not." Such a one leaves no trace. In Buddhism there is no salvation for one's self; so long as any feeling of selfhood remains there will be a self that suffers. It is said not merely that the self is subject to suffering, but that all the constituents of body and mind (the "khandhas") are themselves the very substance of suffering. Anyone, therefore, who retains even a vague feeling of identification or association with all, or with any, of these constituents will be a sufferer. As stated in The Cloud of Unknowing, "He suffers who thinks and feels that he is." Only when one no longer feels that one is, when "there is suffering but none that suffers," is the problem of suffering solved.
It should be explained here that it is just as wrong to hold the opinion that one has no self as to hold the contrary opinion that one has a self; the first opinion leads to the error of annihilationism, and the second to the error of eternalism; the "middle way" once again lies between, or rather transcends, the extremes. Both opinions arise from the false idea "I AM." It is this vague feeling "I AM" that creates the idea of self which corresponds to nothing in reality. The importance and difficulty of eliminating this "I AM" feeling is illustrated by a story in the Samyutta-nikaya about a "bhikkhu" (monk) called Khemaka. Khemaka admitted, to the evident distress of his interrogators, that although he could clearly see that within all the constituents of mind and body there was no self or anything pertaining to a self, nevertheless he still had a vague feeling "I AM" (as indeed most people do) and that he must not therefore be regarded as an Arahant (saint or sage). He said this feeling was hard to pin down; it was like the smell of a flower, not easily attributable to any particular part of the flower, but was there in the flower as a whole. However, the discussion proved successful and the story had a happy ending; Khemaka got rid of his feeling "I AM" and became an Arahant, and so incidentally did all his interrogators.
This emphasis on the subject of self has led some Westerners to remark on the paradox that a Buddhist is unusually obsessed with the very thing he says does not exist. But the logic of this emphasis is well summarised by Dogen, the founder of the Japanese Soto Zen school:—
"To study Buddhism is to learn the self; to learn the self is to forget the
self; to forget the self is to be at one with all existence; to be at one with
all existence is to be thoroughly enlightened." According to Buddhist theory, ignorance of Emptiness is at the root of the "I AM" feeling and thus the prime cause of selfishness; it leads to what the West calls "sin," for it sunders us from the source of our being and from others and from the infinite life that surrounds us. Ignorance in this sense is existential rather than intellectual; mere understanding will not overcome it; our thinking, our feeling, and our willing must all be freed from its influence. In practice, therefore, the whole of Buddhism may be regarded as a methodology aimed at the removal of ignorance. The Buddhist way is sometimes summarised in these three short axioms:—
Cease to do evil; Learn to do good; Purify the mind.
In the removal of ignorance, the last of these three axioms is the chief operative factor in relation to which the others stand first of all as necessary auxiliaries and then as natural effects.
The purification of the mind is effected by means of "bhavana" — mental culture, or discipline — which is an aspect of the "eightfold path" that is receiving particular attention in the West from both clergy and laymen. The detailed programme of mental culture has been evolved from the Buddhist analysis of the human predicament and takes into account psychological differences in the individual, such as whether his character is dominated by greed, hatred, or delusion, and so on. Here we can only give the briefest indication of the nature of this programme.
Mental culture is not educational in the accepted sense; its ultimate aim is to bring the mind to the full realisation of Emptiness. The chief means employed are "sati" — mindfulness, or attention, and meditation which is a term used in the West to describe formal periods of sitting in a prescribed posture and in a state of constant and intense awareness. The most typically Buddhist forms of meditation are based on mindfulness and serve two main purposes: first to calm down the psycho-somatic system, and then to develop insight. On the way to the realisation of Emptiness, insight leads to knowledge of our own nature at all levels. This helps to harmonise the different sides of our nature — the mind and the heart, and the inward and the outward. The need for such harmony has long been known in the West but not until recently has much attention been paid to it. It was, for example, for help in achieving this kind of integration that Socrates prayed:—
"Beloved Pan, and all you other Gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the inner and the outer man be at one."
Mindfulness is also to be practisedin everyday life. A Buddhist should at all times be fully aware of what he is thinking, feeling, intending, and doing in the present; regrets about the past, daydreams about the future, and doing one thing while thinking about something else, are all to be avoided. Absent-mindedness and forgetfulness are no excuse for ill-manners and accidents; if you step back thoughtlessly and knock someone under a 'bus,this is not an unfortunate accident butacase of culpable unmindfulness.
Mindfulness, in fact, is the heart of the whole Buddhist system and its importance in combination with other factors, such as energy and investigation, cannot be exaggerated. In the Dhammapada it is said: "Vigilance is the abode of eternal life, thoughtlessness is the abode of death. Those who are vigilant do not die. The thoughtless are as if dead already."
The realisation of Emptiness, which is the chief aim of mental culture, solves not only the problem of suffering, the problem that first motivated the Buddha's search, but also satisfies man's religious needs and provides in its most valid form that positive element without which, as Dr. Radhakrishnan pointed out, the teaching would have had no mandate for a religious revival in ancient India, and we may presume that it would similarly have none today in the West. If Buddhism only solved the problem of suffering it would be a boon but hardly a religion, for among man's legitimate and indeed proper aspirations is the desire to satisfy metaphysical curiosity. As Bernard Shaw put it:— "There is no surer symptom of a sordid and fundamentally stupid mind, however powerful it may be in many practical activities, than a contempt for metaphysics. A person may be supremely able as a mathematician, engineer, parliamentary tactician, or racing bookmaker; but if a person has contemplated the universe all through life without ever asking 'What the devil does it all mean?' he (or she) is one of those people for whom Calvin accounted by placing them in his category of the pre-destinately damned."
In the present context we are relating religion and metaphysics through their mutual concern for our true relationship with the source of our being and with the infinite life that surrounds us. The religious significance of Emptiness can therefore be indicated in philosophical terms.
Buddhist philosophy is mainly concerned with the interpretation of meditational experience, and the interpretations given to the experience of Emptiness are very wide indeed. For example, scholars have found no less than thirty-three different kinds of "emptiness." But before considering what Emptiness is, let us note what it is not. It is not mere absence in the sense that a hare has no horns (using the Buddhist simile); nor is it the extinction of anything in the sense of cessation, as when a fire has gone
out; and finally, it is not just empty space in the sense that a room is said to be empty when all the furniture has been removed. Buddhist Emptiness transcends all such relationships.
The history of the philosophy of Emptiness begins with "egolessness." Early Buddhist philosophy interpreted the experience of egolessness in terms of elements of existence (dhammas) which were apparently given materialistic status. This interpretation is something of an aberration, for it conflicts with the actual experience of Emptiness, which shows, on the contrary, that the universe is not composite; there is only the One (empty, of course, like everything else!) and its infinite variety of self-expression at all points of experience; and each point, as can be realised within oneself, is the centre of the whole of Being at every level of Being, not separated from It and not other than It. But in thus realising that here is the void centre of the One, there is no support for egocentricity, for here is indeed void; here is clearly seen to be empty; yet it is not a mere absence or vacant space, for it is also a plenitude. Nor Is this experience pantheistic or monistic, terms much bandied around with regard to Buddhism, especially Zen, but which do not meet the case, as scholars like Dr. Suzuki have frequently pointed out. (Attempts to define Zen or compare it with something else are particularly futile.) Our essential nature is natureless and therefore infinitely versatile. It is also eternal because timeless, and immeasurable because without location. On the whole it is perhaps easier to experience Emptiness than to comprehend it intellectually, if indeed it is possible to comprehend it at all, for in order to do that we must first define it, that is, limit it, and Emptiness has no limitations.
The real importance of the doctrine of Emptiness lies in its practical aim which is the achievement of spiritual freedom through direct personal experience. The doctrine works by demonstrating that everything which is not absolute spirit is unreal. That is to say, it reveals the spirit by removing what obscures it and thus liberating us from change, impermanence and hankering. It is all too seldom remembered, or even understood in the first place, that Emptiness is introduced into Buddhism not as a form of reality but only as a means of realising the nature of reality, for reality is not a thing. It is for this reason that one of the forms of Emptiness is said to be "the emptiness of Emptiness."
In far too many presentations of Buddhism, both traditional and modern, it is too readily assumed that ordinary intelligent adults cannot easily have existential experience of Emptiness. But there is a modern approach which is having results that contradict this assumption. Many Westerners today, through the writings and teachings of Douglas Harding'5 and others with similar views, are discovering that the experience of the emptiness that lies at the centre of our world is not difficult to achieve, and that it brings with it the experience of Emptiness in the larger sense. However, it should perhaps be noted that this modern approach differs from the traditional path in one important respect; it by-passes the various levels of consciousness. It is therefore, as Douglas Harding puts it, only a down payment that ensures instant delivery of the goods which must nevertheless be paid for in full by instalments later. As a matter of fact, for most people, the fully effective realisation of Emptiness in thinking, feeling, willing, and acting, may take as long to accomplish by the modern as by the traditional way. All the same, by the modern way we do at least get delivery of Emptiness now, instead of only a promise of it, and many immediate benefits follow from the ability to experience Emptiness at will.
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