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“Before practicing meditation, we see that mountains are mountains. email: emptymountains@yahoo.com |
| Welcome to Empty Mountains... |
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This website was developed in order to respond to questions about Buddhist teachings on renunciation, selflessness, and emptiness. Buddhism is often misunderstood to be a pessimistic religion claiming that all desires are bad, that we have to lose our individuality in order to reach enlightenment, and that ultimate reality is a mere nothingness or void. How bleak! It is my hope that Empty Mountains will provide a much needed clarity. The presentation of Buddhism on this website helps us to broadly understand all of Buddha’s teachings on the model of the middle way—the touchstone of the Buddhist faith. The following sections illustrate the middle way in terms of Buddhist practice, selflessness, and emptiness (i.e., the true nature of all things), respectively.
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| Finding the Middle Way | ||||||
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The middle way (madhyama-pratipad in Sanskrit) is the foundation of all Buddhist teachings. It was discovered some 2,500 years ago by the young prince Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, during his search for the answer to the sufferings of sickness, ageing, death, and rebirth. Having been raised in luxury, he found that indulgence in pleasures is superficial, because a life lived in excess brings no lasting happiness. Therefore, to escape samsara (i.e., cyclic existence), he tried giving up ‘all’ pleasures, hoping that the end of suffering would come if he could suppress ‘every’ desire. At the time, Siddhartha also felt this meant having to abandon his wife and newborn son, but this extreme response came before he found the middle way. After leaving his princely life, Siddhartha chose a life of extreme austerity along with five other ascetics who were living in the forest, exposed to the elements. However, six years after beginning his spiritual journey, Siddhartha was on the verge of death due to self-mortification and denial of his body’s most basic requirements for sustenance. It is said that at one point, his daily nourishment consisted of just one sesame seed, one grain of rice, and one drop of water. Having taken asceticism to its furthest extreme, Siddhartha’s body had wasted away to mere skin and bones, and he no longer possessed the strength to meditate. He had gone too far, and there was still no relief for his existential pain. Lying emaciated along the side of a riverbank, he overheard an elder musician on a passing boat teaching his pupil how to properly tune a musical instrument: “If you tighten the string too much, it will snap. And if you leave it too slack, it won’t play.” Siddhartha recognized himself in the instruction, for he too had lived both the ‘slack’ life of hedonism and also now the immoderate life of asceticism which was about to ‘break’ him. Inspired by the lesson of the tempered string, he saw the fault and futility of both extremes and realized a path of moderation (i.e., neither sensual indulgence nor self-mortification), which he called the middle way:
Shortly thereafter, he accepted his first decent meal in years, and he found that it only helped his mental focus and meditative concentration. (Indeed, Siddhartha learned the middle way through a “balanced diet”!) Having restored his body and mind to health with this new perspective, Siddhartha now had not only the physical strength but also the correct view so as to reach enlightenment. (Learn more about the path to liberation and enlightenment at AboutKarma.org.) Having uprooted the causes of suffering, he taught the middle way to the world, although he knew few would understand his words, for this path lies at the razor’s edge between extremes.
It is this balanced view that seems to have no place in our everyday, dualistic language. We habitually polarize life as being “all or nothing.” Therefore, we say desire or no desire, and we say self or no self. We think that there are only two possibilities, and even among those who study and practice Buddhism, the four noble truths are often read as though nirvana comes through the “extinction of all desires.” This absurdly causes us to characterize the four noble truths as promoting asceticism! What happened to the middle?
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| Ultimate Selflessness & Conventional Self | ||||||
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The middle way is not only a path between extreme practices (such as wrong conduct and wrong moral discipline), but also between extreme views (such as eternalism and nihilism). In deep meditation, Siddhartha came to understand the true nature of reality. What he discovered were the two aspects of the middle way, each with its own special function: on the one hand, the ultimate aspect corrects the extreme practice of hedonism and the extreme view of eternalism; and on the other hand, the conventional aspect corrects the extreme practice of asceticism and the extreme view of nihilism.
Sitting under the Bodhi Tree, Siddhartha applied the two truths of the middle way to every philosophical question, including the nature of the self. He came to reject the existence of an atman, understood either as a self-supporting, substantially existent self existing independently of the five aggregates of body and mind or, more subtly, as an inherently existent (or objectively findable) self existing somewhere within the aggregates or even as the collection of those aggregates. Instead, the Buddha taught anatman (literally, ‘no-self,’), but by this he merely meant “no atman.” The doctrine of ‘selflessness’ is too often overapplied because first we try to translate atman simply as ‘self,’ and so then we think that anatman is meant to negate every notion of self!
The Sanskrit word atman denotes an independent or inherently existent self, so it is best translated in a way that carries these connotations, rather than just the misleading single word self. Similarly, anatman should also be rendered into English as a phrase: “no independent self” or “no inherent self.” However, with the doctrine of no-self, Buddhists do not go so far as to mean a rejection of the conventional self, which will be explained below. Thinking that we can affirm nothing at all when we negate atman causes us to over negate and leads to nihilism. However, the Buddha never negates the middle view, only the two extremes flanking it. Each of the extremes is only a half-truth: eternalism is conventional truth without ultimate truth, and nihilism is ultimate truth without conventional truth.
In the above scripture, the famous second-century Buddhist Nagarjuna says that there is a conventional self, which is in accordance with ultimate selflessness (anatman). As they are both aspects of the middle way, then for a Buddha conventional self is none other than ultimate selflessness. Though at first they may seem to be contradictory, ‘self’ and ‘selflessness’ in this sense are in fact “two truths”! The middle way, by definition, excludes both extremes of an inherently existent self and utter self-negation. The negation of an extreme returns us back to the middle; and as there are two extremes, the middle way is thereby seen as twofold: neither one extreme nor the other. This is why enlightened beings teach the doctrine of ‘neither self nor nonself,’ which is to say, neither eternalism nor nihilism.
The Buddha intuitively understood what the wanderer meant by his two questions. By asking a question and then its exact opposite, Vacchagotta believed he was covering every possible point of view, but in fact he was merely going from one extreme to the other. That is to say, the Buddha knew that these questions had eternalistic and nihilistic slants. Many people have taken the Buddha’s silence to mean that such questions are unanswerable. But this is not always the case, since his chief disciple Ananda asked too, and the Buddha explained. The difference is that the Buddha could—in a way that Ananda would understand—qualify the differing concepts of self. While Ananda would not be confused by the seeming double-talk, the Buddha chose to save Vacchagotta from further confusion. Notice that the Buddha remained silent towards Vacchagotta on both sides of the issue of self: he could not affirm conventional truth without being mistaken for being an eternalist, nor could he affirm ultimate truth without being taken as a nihilist. Since Vacchagotta did not have an understanding of the centrist doctrine of selflessness, he and the Buddha had no frame-of-reference by which the Buddha could answer and not be misunderstood. It is for this reason that the Buddha chose silence, since any answer would have been taken the wrong way, thereby unintentionally reinforcing either eternalism or nihilism, at least in Vacchagotta’s mind. To free us from the limitations of binary language, the Buddha always has a “neither-nor” answer for every “either-or” question we might ask.
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| Emptiness & Interdependence | |||||||||
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There is no such thing as a closed system. Although the Sanskrit word shunyata is accurately translated into English as emptiness, it is sometimes alternatively translated as spaciousness or openness, meaning that everything is an open system, neither isolated nor self-contained. The reality of interdependence demonstrates that, rather than things being cutoff from each other, everything is ‘wide open,’ interconnected, and interrelated. Like anatman, the term shunyata is more faithfully translated as a phrase: “emptiness of inherent existence” or “emptiness of independent existence.” What does this mean? Anytime we search for a self that would give a phenomenon its supposed autonomous or separate existence, we come up empty-handed. However, this does not mean that emptiness negates conventional existence, only inherent existence (Skt. svabhava). As we shall see, a phenomenon’s existence does not indwell or inhere in itself but is merely a projection of mind, which is why we say that that object lacks ‘inherent existence.’ What is the best way to introduce this? In The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, Je Tsongkhapa says:
The easiest way to understand emptiness, then, is to begin by meditating on dependent relationship, also known as interdependence. These two—interdependence and emptiness—reflect the conventional and ultimate aspects of the middle way, respectively. Interdependence and emptiness are really getting at the same thing, albeit with different words: compare “every phenomenon exists dependently” with “no phenomenon exists independently.” Interdependence affirms dependent existence while emptiness negates independent existence, making emptiness just the flip side of interdependence; they always go hand in hand. So if we can accept the Buddha’s teachings on dependent relationship, then we can accept his teachings on emptiness. There are three levels of dependent relationship: gross, subtle, and very subtle. First, gross dependent relationship tells us that any impermanent phenomenon is dependent upon its causes for it to come into existence. No produced phenomenon exists independently of its causes. By removing just one cause or condition, the object would not have come into existence at all.
Second, subtle dependent relationship shows us that a phenomenon is dependent upon its parts. No composite phenomenon exists independently of its parts. For example, is a flower wholly different from its parts? No, the flower must be related to its parts, because if we take away all its parts, then there is nothing left to call a flower. Is the flower any of its individual parts? No, the flower is more than just one or two of its parts. A petal or stem alone is not the flower, and in fact none of the individual parts by itself could be called the flower. Is the flower then just the collection of all its parts together? (This is the hard one!) No, a collection of flower parts cannot be the flower because a collection of parts is just parts, but not the thing itself. Taking our body as an example, “the collection of all the parts of our body remains simply parts of our body—it does not magically transform into the part-possessor, our body” (Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Eight Steps to Happiness: the Buddhist Way of Loving Kindness, pp. 195-196, © 2000).
Third, very subtle dependent relationship reveals that a phenomenon exists in dependence upon naming or imputation by mind (with the ‘basis of imputation’ being the arbitrary collection of parts). No conceived phenomenon exists independently of imputation by mind. No object is more than the sum of its parts; the gestalt is merely what our minds are adding to the picture. That is to say, an object’s self-identity is nothing more than a mental construct, created from our side and not appearing from the side of the object.
Indeed, for a Buddhist it’s not a stretch to say that existence is in the eye of the beholder. What we see is merely an appearence to our mind from our mind. Everything is 100% subjective, yet we still think we are seeing things objectively! This distorted view of reality is what Buddhists refer to as the ‘sleep of ignorance.’ A Buddha is someone who has, quite simply, ‘woken up’ and enjoys the lucid freedom of his or her own mind. |
| For Everyone Who Dreams of Freedom... |
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So, what does it mean to say “empty mountains”? Thich Nhat Hanh’s words quoted at the top of this webpage can be understood in the following manner: “Before practicing meditation, we see that mountains are mountains,” is a reference to the extreme of inherent existence. Next are the two truths of the middle way: “When we start to practice, we see that mountains are no longer mountains,” is a reference to ultimate truth, and “After practicing a while, we see that mountains are again mountains” is a reference to conventional truth. Thich Nhat Hanh concludes by saying, “Now the mountains are very free. Our mind is still with the mountains, but it is no longer bound to anything.” This is a reference to the union of the two truths of the middle way, which is the liberating view of an enlightened being.
Buddha said that we create our own experiences—the world is what we make of it. So, if we understand that all the things we experience in the world around us are full of our own projections, then we can ask ourselves what is left behind once we take away all those projections? Nothing... they are empty! That is to say, everything is empty of our projections. From their side, people and things do not have any of the qualities—such as good or bad—that we are imputing onto them, and so they cannot inherently be sources of happiness or suffering. Therefore, freedom from suffering comes from within. That is to say, if happiness and suffering are experiences of the mind, then their main or substantial cause must also reside within the mind. This is why in the Sutras we are told, “If you realize your own mind, you will become a Buddha. You should not seek Buddhahood elsewhere” (Understanding the Mind: an Explanation of the Nature and Functions of the Mind, p. 1, © 1993, 1997, 2002). Buddha also said, “Change your mind, change your world.” By understanding the dependent relationship between our mind and external objects, we understand that the world we experience is merely a reflection of our own mind. Subject (i.e., mind) and object are not separately definable. So, if we understand that objects depend on the mind—not only in terms of their subjective qualities but also all their defining characteristics and functions—we can change the way objects appear to us simply by re-conceptualizing them. Even our own self-perceptions either as ordinary beings pervaded by suffering, or as enlightened beings abiding in great bliss, are just as malleable. Gradually, we will gain the ability to control our mind and in this way solve all our problems. What could be more liberating than this?! |
| DEDICATION |
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By this virtue may I quickly |
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Not Self-Mortification
