On Emptiness: About Nothing

Hello everyone.

In today's talk,

I am going to be engaging with you about something which I find infinitely fascinating.

In fact,

I might go so far as to say it is one of my favorite subjects not only to discuss,

But to pass the hours pondering upon when not doing anything else.

Which,

While maybe somewhat fruitless or counterproductive to the practice of meditation,

Is still a blast when you get really rolling in it.

It is the subject of nothing,

Or no-thing,

And around no-thingness.

The interesting thing about nothing is that it doesn't really sound like much at all.

Yet,

We could fill a library with texts from all of the world's spiritual and philosophical traditions discussing what exactly nothing is,

Or more,

I suppose,

What it isn't.

Even going so far as to discuss how much it isn't anything at all,

No matter the tradition,

It seems that a study of nothing or emptiness has been important.

Whether it is mathematics and the concept of zero,

Spirituality with its idea of void,

Philosophy with all of its whimsical fancies,

Or music,

Where the space between sound is just as important as the sound itself.

Zen master Dogen,

The founder of the Sōtō-zen school of thought,

Wrote,

If you want to travel the way of the Buddhas and Zen masters,

Then expect nothing,

Seek nothing,

And grasp nothing.

Which is absolutely phenomenal advice that reaches far beyond the skill level of most meditators in the West,

Including myself.

We so regularly just try to get in our own way over and over again instead of just sitting,

Just watching,

Not clinging,

Not expecting,

Not wanting.

Coming to practice of meditation with absolutely nothing,

Which in a way we always do,

Yet the echo of our perceptions persist within our mind,

Creating all sorts of distractions both bodily and mentally.

What Buddha discovered,

That the radical and immediate observation of these sensations dissipates them and provides insight,

But anyway,

Back to nothing.

In the Heart Sutra you have the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara speaking to the monk Shāri Pūtra,

Saying form is empty,

But emptiness is form.

Emptiness is not other than form,

And form is not other than emptiness.

Similarly,

Feelings,

Discernments,

Formative elements,

And consciousness are also empty.

Likewise,

Shāri Pūtra,

All phenomena are empty.

They have no defining characteristics,

They are unproduced,

They do not cease,

They are undefiled,

Yet they are not separate from defilement.

They do not decrease,

Yet they do not increase.

Emptiness,

Or Shūnyatā,

Is another word used to talk about no-thingness,

Or nothingness,

Or nothing,

But you may also find these words have other meanings as well in kind of the whole architecture of Buddhism.

In Christendom you have characters like Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite,

Who in and around 500 CE wrote head-spinning things like,

Although God is the cause of everything,

God is nothing.

God isn't something because God is beyond all being,

And so God can't be any sort of thing.

Therefore,

God must be nothing,

Or no thing,

End quote.

Which I think is a lovely way to look at it.

If something is beyond all things,

It cannot be some other thing,

And thus must be no thing whatsoever.

Another wonderful mystic from the Christian tradition,

In the 9th century,

John Scotus Aragana,

Used the Latin word nihil,

Nothing,

To describe God,

Who created the world ex nihilo,

Or out of nothing.

Since there was not anything before the creation in the Christian mythos besides God,

Then God's own substance is the basis of the world,

Which is no thing,

Or perhaps what one may say is that it is something which is beyond our measure of thingness,

Something which is so large it becomes small,

Or something that is so small it becomes large,

Like atoms and the expanse of the universe.

So essentially,

The world is nothing,

And it is the job of spiritual practitioners to fully appreciate nothing.

And the last example I'll give is from Meister Eckhart,

Who was a Christian mystic from the 14th century,

Who said,

Before there were any creatures,

God was not God.

Now I say that God,

As far as God is God,

Is not the perfected end of created beings.

So,

Therefore,

We beg God to rid us of God,

So we may grasp and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the tiniest fly and the soul are equal.

I pray to God that God will rid me of God,

For my real being is more than God.

If it isn't obvious the church leaders at the time weren't really too keen on this kind of strange way of thinking,

Yet it does spur us down an unfamiliar and maybe uncomfortable path of thinking.

I could go on and pull examples of this kind of thinking from all religions or strains of mystical thought,

But I think you get the point with these examples.

But what can we make of all of this?

Perhaps all this talk of nothing is off-putting.

Perhaps you connect with it.

Perhaps you are confused on why we would ever talk about nothing.

Well,

To me,

I think that to play with this idea of nothing philosophically,

Practically,

And spiritually is very important in the practice of meditation and can be used most readily no matter the practice you do,

Whether you are a Christian,

A Hindu,

A Daoist,

A Buddhist,

Or agnostic and are merely practicing these as kind of mind technologies.

We also can use it as a way to look at our life.

So often in our life we swing back and forth between seeing our existence as nothing special,

And at other times we understand and fully realize that our life is more than just our life.

It is an interconnected existence which extends way beyond the bounds of our understanding.

We understand that our life is full of meaning and that our death is a tremendous vibration of the sacredness which is existence,

But we also know that it is filled with sadness,

Those long forgotten,

And that in a thousand years there is a great chance that we will not even be a memory,

Our name having not even been spoken for hundreds of years,

And even then that is just a noise,

And who and what we think we are has vanished.

All of this flows through of us.

All of this is involved with nothing.

In Buddhism there is another word which is both a title for the Buddha and an attempt to describe the nothingness of the present infinite moment.

The reason it is a title for the Buddha is because it is an attempt to give description to his attainment and practice.

That word is tathata,

Which is translated as suchness,

Or thatness.

Tathata is not a thing which is out there to find.

It is something that is beyond us,

But is the direct nature of our experience beyond all of our craving for it,

To be more than what it is,

Beyond our thought that God is something out there which is other than this.

We call the Buddha tathata because he has perfected that and dwells here and now,

Beyond the tethers which may seem to yank us backwards and forwards.

I like to joke we are all in the fluid space of this present moment between the concrete past and the concrete future,

Getting whisked along on either side,

Unable to stop it,

Yet we find ourselves far too concerned with the walls,

And not where we find ourselves.

This is what Dogen was talking about when he taught that if you want to travel the way of the Buddhas and the Zen masters,

Then expect nothing,

Seek nothing,

And grasp nothing.

And what Meister Eckhart is talking about too,

That the practice is beyond anything that we want to apply to it.

It is a kind of hope,

Practice,

Or training to bring you just to this suchness,

This thatness,

This Shunyata,

This no-thing whatsoever.

Just this moment.

Just this breath,

Just this feeling,

Or emotion,

Or sensation,

Or whatever it is.

Not seeing it as positive or negative.

Not seeing your meditation,

Your practice,

Or whatever as good or bad.

Just that it is exactly what it is then and there,

Beyond any symbolism or interpretation,

And seeing it no matter what it is.

For some reason it makes me think of what the burning bush said to Moses,

Ia sha'iya,

And that means I am that I am.

Sorry if I just slaughtered the Hebrew.

But that is all to say that there is nothing else.

Everything is here.

Everything now.

Both backward and forward into infinity.

Every time in which we could experience life is now.

Even if,

Here and now,

We are wondering about what might have been.

Even then we are,

Tathagata.

Even at our lowest we are still the Buddha.

Just as the compassion and wisdom within us has infinite possibility,

So does our ignorance and malice.

Yet both come from the same place,

Nowhere,

And at the same time,

Exactly here and now.

We can work to change them,

But we can only do that now.

We cannot change what has come and gone,

Only try our hardest to build a better future and understand more thoroughly this fathom long body expansive space that is happening right now.

Thanks to nothing,

Things can grow,

Things can develop,

Things can change.

Change is completely inevitable.

Change is,

In fact,

The only inevitability.

It is the only thing,

I think,

That is truly promised.

Where there is being,

There is change.

Change is the definition of being.

And change is wonderful.

And change is terrible.

Change is growth and development and exciting new things.

And change is loss and abandonment.

And these things are exactly the same thing.

Growth,

Development is loss.

Loss is growth and development.

The only reason we give them different names is because we like one and we don't like the others,

So we have different names for them.

But they're the same.

They're the nothing.

They're the emptiness.

In Buddhism,

Nothing is often called nihilism,

But not in the way we would think of the word nihilism to perhaps refer to Nietzschean philosophy or Friedrich Nietzsche,

But merely as a negation of thingness.

And in Buddhism,

Something is called eternalism.

Buddha himself never said if it was absolutely one thing or the other.

He never said that his teaching was one of eternalism or of nihilism,

And in fact he said that it was neither one of those things several times.

Emptiness is neither eternalism or nihilism.

It rests on the knife edge between the two.

It sits in the gray.

It is neither nothing nor something.

Yet there is also no emptiness.

Just like Avalokitesvara said in the Heart Sutra above,

Emptiness in the end is not just a meditative state,

An insight or some metaphysical notion of reality for us to play around with.

It's just a word,

A noise we make with our mouths,

A vibration of the air we have assigned meaning to to use to try and indicate how the world of our living experience is actualized in symbols.

It's not as we see it.

To see it is to apply thingness to it.

It's not as we grasp it.

To hold it is to apply thingness to it.

It's not as we worry about it.

To worry about it is to attach emotions and layers of ideas on it.

It's not like that.

It's empty,

Free of any binding,

Free of any idea of time,

Space,

Or realm of mind consciousness.

Nothing and emptiness is,

In one way of thinking,

The connecting force of being,

The space which unites all things.

You may search and search for something on the cushion,

And you can meditate for the next week trying to find your own something,

But all you will find is connection.

All you will find is the interconnectedness of being.

Nothing is itself alone.

You will find no one without you,

And you will find no one without me.

There will be no me without you and no you without me.

This is emptiness.

This is nothing.

The no-thing whatsoever.

If you look for yourself,

You will not find yourself.

You will find nothing.

You will only find everyone else and everything else that made you.

You will not find a singular agent that is outside of all of this,

Some thing or someone floating beyond all of this change,

Floating beyond all of this time,

This space,

This mind consciousness.

So emptiness and nothing is the opposite of cold and distant and foreboding and philosophical.

Emptiness is the most intimate possible thing.

It is the connecting thread that runs through the fabric of our beinghood,

Of our present now.

And nothing and emptiness are compassion.

Their ease and kindness and caring and absolute continuous belonging,

That thing which interlaces all of us together,

The thing that joins all places,

For without the space between them they would not be different.

Without the differences,

We can notice the similarities.

So how do we practice this nothing?

How do we practice and touch emptiness?

I think we do it by sitting on the cushion,

By walking,

By standing,

By laying,

By bringing ourselves to the practice of meditation,

However you want to do that,

Through prayer,

Through yoga,

Through breath practice,

Through concentration.

We get weary when we get weary.

We feel discomfort and stress and pain and anxiety when it is time to feel them.

And we don't always have to face them directly.

And we understand that everything in this entire universe,

Everything that we interact with,

Everything which is,

We recognize that we are interacting with the entire world and nothing.

We know our actions have vast importance,

But are also that they are nothing,

That they are empty,

That our kind words and actions resonate to build a better future,

But they are filled with the emptiness and the spirit of nothing.

We sit.

We practice.

We trust when we can and we live and be.

This is how we practice emptiness.

This is how we know that interconnectedness of everything and of nothing.

Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this and have a wonderful day.