Dharma Talk: Emptiness And Love Given At Kuan Yin Centre Oct 20, 2021

This is a recording of a talk given at the Kuan Yin Centre on October 20th, 2021. It describes three pathways to realise emptiness: 1. Via mindfulness 2. Via graduated steps of perception and 3. By abiding in one of the boundless divine abodes (benevolence, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity).

Transcript

Welcome everyone for a Dharma talk and tonight I'd like to give a brief talk on emptiness again and that's been the topic of the my last few talks but this time I'd like to eventually get to emptiness from the perspective of the Four Divine Evotes,

Loving kindness or warm benevolence metta,

Compassion,

Appreciative joy and equanimity.

So emptiness is usually explained from the perspective of insight and there's a variety of ways we can have this direct experience of emptiness otherwise known as not-self and emptiness is of course an insight into the nature of reality,

The nature of conditioned phenomena.

Conditioned phenomena is all impermanent and when we can see that things are impermanent we also see that things are unsatisfactory in their nature,

They're not unable to give us enduring happiness.

They are also not self,

They also do not have a single lasting thing that we can call self.

Emptiness is this understanding that things do not arise out of themselves,

Things are dependent on other things for their very existence.

There's nothing independent and solitary,

Separate in existence.

That includes what we normally call ourselves and I think a couple of,

Probably about a month ago,

I think I gave a talk at a day of meditation on the five khanda.

The five khanda being a form,

Feelings,

Perceptions,

Mental formations and consciousness which usually refers to these aggregates that we call ourselves and we talked about the emptiness of that.

So usually or one way we arrive at this insight of emptiness is through satipatthana.

Satipatthana being the four establishments of mindfulness,

Mindfulness of body,

Feelings,

Heart-mind or mind and phenomena.

I won't go into great details about that but one way we can understand mindfulness is what I like to say as,

And quoting Analayo here,

Soft awake presence.

So when we are soft and awake and present to experience here now,

Which is the only time there is,

We begin to see the true nature of this experience rather than this,

It's kind of illusionary in many respects,

This illusionary sense that something solid is here.

Like when we see,

When we become completely present with ourselves,

What we call ourselves,

This experience of this,

We see that there is justice,

Just this moment and not what we're conceiving of it to be.

I mean,

Concepts are true,

They're truly concepts but they're not what we make them out to be.

We believe that we are this solid personality,

For example.

So insight and establishing the establishment of mindfulness are one way to see impermanence and when we see impermanence we also see not-self and the dukkha nature of experience.

These are called the three characteristics of existence.

That's part of the aims of insight meditation,

To see these three characteristics of existence.

It's not the only aims but it's part of this,

Part of the developing insight.

And I think the last talk I gave at Kuan Yin Center,

The last talk was supposed to be about a month ago but I'd broken my elbow,

Which is still fractured,

It's still healing but it's getting better.

And so we've just gone into lockdown,

Although we're going to announce a lockdown,

I didn't think it was right for me to arrive,

We're in the middle of lockdown.

So the time before that I gave a talk online and it was about the emptiness of ego.

So this is emptiness again and the way I talked about it two months ago was by mentioning a sutta called the Chula Sunyata Sutta.

The Chula Sunyata Sutta.

Sunyata means emptiness in Pali and also in Sanskrit I think.

So in this sutta the Buddha outlines the graduated path to emptiness and he talks about it in this way,

He talks about it as seeing by fully focusing on the perception of a refined perception of something,

We see the emptiness of a less refined aspect of that object.

And I'll try to explain this a little bit clearer by providing an example.

In this graduated path to emptiness in the sutta that the Buddha expounded,

He made an example of when we can fully focus and become absorbed in or fully connect with,

Not necessarily absorbed in but connect with the perception of spaciousness for example,

Boundless spaciousness,

Knowing that the space beneath us,

Space above us,

Space in front of us and there is space,

We normally don't perceive that,

We normally just perceive the objects that are in the space like this room and my hand and that video camera and so on.

We normally perceive these things but if we can put all our attention on the spaciousness that's there,

What happens is we see the emptiness of the objects in the space.

We see that they're mostly kind of created from our perceptions actually,

But the point is by focusing on a more refined aspect of experience we see the emptiness of something less refined.

So in this case spaciousness,

Seeing fully perceiving spaciousness,

We also see the emptiness of materiality.

On the next step of this Chulan Shunyata Sutta,

The Buddha talks about being fully perceiving the consciousness of spaciousness.

It's like looking at consciousness,

Turning your perceptions around so you're looking at that which knows experience.

And in this,

When we do this,

We recognise that we're fully subjective,

We're turning our attention to subjectivity completely,

Fully perceiving of the consciousness of boundless space.

What we see is the emptiness of objectivity,

The emptiness of when we're fully focusing on subjectivity,

We see the emptiness of objectivity.

And in some ways this is described as non-duality.

This is what is called non-duality as far as I understand,

Seeing that it's just our mind,

Like the world is our creation.

So in that way we see the emptiness of objectivity.

Going even more refined on this Sutta,

The Buddha talked about being perceiving not-self,

Seeing the not-self nature of what we normally call ourselves.

Fully seeing that,

We realise the emptiness of self,

If that makes sense.

And the way you do this at a meditative level is actually starting to look at,

It's sort of a shift in perspective.

You come to experience,

Looking at experience as clearly seeing it as not-self.

And in that respect we see the emptiness of self.

It's a bit hard to describe that just in a couple of words,

But that is actually the third step on this graduated path to emptiness.

The fourth step is getting very,

Very refined and it's the fourth and final step on,

As he's described in the Sutta.

And this is by taking up what's called sign-less samadhi.

Sign-less samadhi means that we have developed concentration or samadhi,

But without an object.

Just our minds are collecting,

But we're not focusing on anything.

The word for sign in Pali is nimitta.

So it's a samadhi without a nimitta,

Which means what happens,

As far as I understand,

Is that rather than going out and creating.

.

.

A nimitta is the way we recognise things,

Like I'm recognising John,

I'm recognising Alan.

There's certain features about you that you have a sign of who you are.

I recognise I'm hungry by the sign of my googling belly.

I recognise something,

Like I recognise that as a door because I know it's a door.

But if I don't have any of that nimitta,

I don't have that sign,

I pull back from projecting out the sign onto it,

I realise the emptiness of my projections,

That makes sense.

Like I see that if I no longer project out onto something,

I no longer project a sign onto anything.

I stop before I start to conceive of John,

For example,

And just stay in samadhi without the sign,

Without the sign of John or door or camera or my belly or the rising and falling of my abdomen with my breath.

If I just stay with that,

I'm not creating anything.

So this is quite profound,

Yet it's still not,

It's still not,

You know,

Nibbana.

But it is inclining towards nibbana.

So I'm talking about ways we discover emptiness.

And I could go into great details about,

You know,

What we do from there.

But I'll restrain a little bit because I want to talk about how now we can,

There's another pathway to this,

There's another pathway to realising not-self,

There's another pathway to realising almost experientially this experience of not-self.

And that is through love.

And it is through the divine abodes,

I would say,

You know,

Love in the Buddhist sense is the divine abode.

The divine abode is warm benevolence,

Metta,

Compassion,

Appreciative joy,

Or mudita,

Otherwise known as sympathetic joy or empathetic joy,

And equanimity,

Abiding in these states of mind.

And I think of,

You know,

When I,

Years ago when I was first interested in meditation,

I used to read about the mystics.

And the mystics would become completely present,

Like their worlds would be turned inside out,

They'd see reality from this perspective of now.

And seeing this perspective of now,

They'd also see this infinite or this connectedness to other beings,

Like the barriers of me and you fall away.

We fall in love.

And we no longer abide in sort of selfishness or self-centredness or even narcissism,

Which is what Buddhism is all about curing us from,

This sense of separation from connection with other things.

As I said earlier,

One way we can understand emptiness is from,

Is by describing things as interconnected.

Everything's interconnected,

Like no one thing is by itself and no one thing arises because of its,

On its own account.

It's dependent on other things for its arising.

So coming back to,

Coming back to falling in love.

So I was reading about these mystics,

They have this experience of now like completely being absorbed in this present moment.

And the other side of that is loving,

Like opening up to love,

Infinite love,

Boundless love,

Which is what we describe with metta,

Karuna or compassion,

Appreciative joy,

Or mudita and upekka or equipoise,

Sometimes it's described as.

So I think we can cultivate this,

We can cultivate warm benevolence,

Just like we can cultivate being present.

And you know,

We just meditated for about an hour.

And I was,

I was reminded of just being present,

You know,

I've had a pretty stressful day and I noticed anxiety arise a few times today.

And it was really lovely to just be present,

To be present,

To be present,

Because to be present with my anxiety,

For example,

To be present,

Completely present,

Just here,

Now,

Here,

Now.

And then when we can do that,

That sense of ego and this barriers between self and other,

They just completely dissolve away.

And we can cultivate it as a loving kindness practice.

One way,

I mean,

There's many ways of cultivating the Four Diviner Boats and I've got,

I've done courses on this and,

You know,

There's tomes written on this.

One way I like to practice is by simply being aware in my daily life and also in my,

During my meditation practices of signs that I'm letting go of my ego,

Signs that I'm actually connecting with another,

Like signs that I'm putting aside my own blinkers of self and opening up to out there,

Letting that sense of me and you dissolve away and there is just this and this is connection.

So what I do is I notice this,

I notice moments of this and the other day I was just watching TV and there was a woman talking about,

It was a First Nations person talking about the difficulties they're having.

And I just kind of tuned into her and I fell in love with her.

It was so,

It was so beautiful.

It was just kind of opening up to what she was saying.

She wasn't even,

She's present on the TV but it was this connection and seeing with her,

Into her,

Like feeling into her and I believe that that's like a moment of not-self.

It's like we let go of these barriers of me and you.

We open up to the,

Experientially to emptiness,

To not-self,

To love.

So coming back to how we can cultivate it,

I personally like being able to find signs of it,

Then really pay attention to that experience and then nourish and nurture that experience,

Enhance it and enrich it by being very mindful of it,

Being very,

Developing samadhi on it and let it grow in and of itself and then it just sort of has its own momentum and the me gets left behind and one becomes absorbed into this experience of boundless love.

So,

And we can do that with all the divine abodes actually,

Moments of compassion,

Moments of appreciative joy and moments of deep peace with the way things are.

So thank you very much.

I think that's enough for the Dharma talk.

I hope that it's been helpful and I hope you can forgive me for forgetting the numbers in the refuges.

I was thinking about something else.

It just goes to show when you're not focusing on something and you're distracted,

What happens?

Thanks very much.