We have established that when any phenomenon is sought through analysis, it cannot be found. Sometime during the early sixties when I was reflecting on a passage by Tsongkhapa [founder of the Gelugpa school to which the Dalai Lama belongs] about unfindability and the fact that phenomena are dependent on conceptuality, it was as if lightning coursed within my chest. For Buddhists, the main topic of the training in wisdom is emptiness, or selflessness, which means the absence of a permanent, unitary and independent self or, more subtly, the absence of inherent existence either in living beings or in other phenomena. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. The emptiness of existence was a pain, an all-too-real pain that we endured begrudgingly and thanklessly. This selection is from How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. A wise consciousness, not satisfied with mere appearances, analyzes to find whether objects inherently exist as they seem to do but discovers their absence of inherent existence. Food that looks so good in a restaurant may not sit so well in your stomach. In his book The Snow Leopard (1987) Peter Matthiessen describes sitting on hard rocks in the Himalayas and experiencing an emptiness or Void at the heart of phenomenal existence: A sense of … Emptiness, or selflessness, can only be understood if we firstidentifythat of which phenomena are empty. The lack of care, empathy and love for the self can result in chronic illnesses like anxiety and depression. But still I cannot claim full understanding of emptiness. ( Log Out /  Phenomena do indeed exist, but not in the way we think they do. This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. Even the pomp and splendour of the rich in their stately castles is at bottom nothing but a futile attempt to escape the very essence of existence, misery. The Buddha said that all compounded phenomena disintegrate. Accordingly this is a finite existence, and its antithesis would be an infinite, neither exposed to any attack from without nor in want of help from without, and hence [Greek: aei hosautos on], in eternal rest; [Greek: oute gignomenon, oute apollymenon], without change, without time, and without diversity; the negative knowledge of which is the fundamental note of Plato’s philosophy. Therefore organic life is like balancing a pole on one’s hand; it must be kept in continual motion, and have a constant supply of matter of which it is continually and endlessly in need. Only then may your consciousness be transformed into the omniscience of a Buddha. a lack of anything which may indicate an independent existence, separate from causes and conditions. That innate and ineradicable craving for what is out of the common proves how glad we are to have the natural and tedious course of things interrupted. When training to develop wisdom, you are seeking through analysis to find the inherent existence of whatever object you are considering—yourself, another person, your body, your mind, or anything else. That the most perfect manifestation of the will to live, which presents itself in the extremely subtle and complicated machinery of the human organism, must fall to dust and finally deliver up its whole being to dissolution, is the naïve way in which Nature, invariably true and genuine, declares the whole striving of the will in its very essence to be of no avail. Looking at the matter a little closer, we see at the very outset that the existence of inorganic matter is being constantly attacked by chemical forces which eventually annihilates it. 3. A wooden table, for instance, does not exist independently; rather, it depends on a great many causes such as a tree, the carpenter who makes it, and so forth; it also depends upon its own parts. Time, and the transitoriness of all things, are merely the form under which the will to live, which as the thing-in-itself is imperishable, has revealed to Time the futility of its efforts. © 2003 by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D. COVID-19 has brought tremendous suffering, uncertainty, fear, and strain to the world. Ultimate analysis does not negate conventional existence or truth. What is there left of them now? It was during times of torment that he realized the need for meaning to keep us going. You need a belief in the consequences of actions to choose virtue in your life and discard nonvirtue. Nowadays I always meditate on emptiness in the morning and bring that experience into the day’s activities. The Emptiness of Existence. śūnyatā; Tib. It is the same as a man running downhill, who falls if he tries to stop, and it is only by his continuing to run on that he keeps on his legs; it is like a pole balanced on one’s finger-tips, or like a planet that would fall into its sun as soon as it stopped hurrying onwards. The mathematical analogy of emptiness is not zero, but the empty set. The Buddha said that all compounded phenomena disintegrate. This turns out to be the case for everything, for all phenomena. Born in 1788 and died 1860, he was a well-known German philosopher who is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation.] And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death. "Emptiness" is a central teaching of all Buddhism, but its true meaning is often misunderstood. 2. This is because the Will, taken in itself, is the lord of worlds; since everything belongs to it, it is not satisfied with a portion of anything, but only with the whole, which, however, is endless. All posts must be about philosophy. You are analyzing not the mere appearance but the inherent nature of the object. Only the ghost of a remembrance! A man to his astonishment all at once becomes conscious of existing after having been in a state of non-existence for many thousands of years, when, presently again, he returns to a state of non-existence for an equally long time. Even sensual pleasure itself is nothing but a continual striving, which ceases directly its aim is attained. If, for instance, life, the longing for which constitutes our very being, had in itself any positive and real value, boredom could not exist; mere existence in itself would supply us with everything, and therefore satisfy us. Then again, there is the insatiability of each individual will; every time it is satisfied a new wish is engendered, and there is no end to its eternally insatiable desires. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is all that takes place. Emptiness is as important in the Theravada tradition as it is in the Mahayana. First of all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters the harbour dismasted. The Emptiness of Existence by Arthur Schopenhauer 1881 [Schopenhauer needs little introduction to those with a pessimistic philosophical outlook. However, Buddhists do value the existence of a self that changes from moment to moment, designated in dependence upon the continuum of mind and body. This is when my understanding of the cessation of the afflictive emotions as a true possibility became real. It is merely the superimposition of inherent existence upon conventional, phenomenal appearances that … Remove the ignorance that misconceives phenomena to inherently exist and you prevent the generation of afflictive emotions like lust and hatred. The Dalai Lama is universally respected as a spokesman for the peaceful and compassionate resolution of conflict. You might think that emptiness means nothingness, but it does not. At the same time, they are conscious that their existence is so fashioned as to last only for a certain time, as has been said. The more you look into how an ignorant consciousness conceives phenomena to exist, the more you find that phenomena do not exist that way. The Heart Sutra teaches us that form may be empty of self but it’s full of everything else.. In the same way, when the thought “I” arises in dependence upon mind and body, nothing within mind and body—neither the collection which is a continuum of earlier and later moments, nor the collection of the parts at one time, nor the separate parts, nor the continuum of any of the separate parts—is in even the slightest way the “I.” Also there is not even the slightest something that is a different entity from mind and body that is apprehendable as the “I.” Consequently, the “I” is merely set up by conceptuality in dependence upon mind and body; it is not established by way of its own entity. This instinct may be compared to the threading of a string of pearls; one individual succeeding another as rapidly as the pearls on the thread. For specific purposes, he sometimes spoke in nonfinal ways. Because all phenomena appear to exist in their own right, all of our ordinary perceptions are mistaken. And how different the beginning of our life is to the end! Certain non-Buddhists who accept rebirth accept the transitory nature of mind and body, but they believe in a self that is permanent, changeless and unitary. Through meditation you have identified both the false mode of appearance and the false mode of apprehension. So that to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. For Buddhists… We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. As soon as there are no needs and illusion we become conscious of the absolute barrenness and emptiness of existence. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The Emptiness of Existence by Arthur Schopenhauer 1881 [Schopenhauer needs little introduction to those with a pessimistic philosophical outlook. That it is only Ideas which exist, and the shadow-like nature of the thing corresponding to them, is the basis of Plato’s teachings. For instance, something may—in terms of how it appears—look good, but, due to its inner nature being different, it can turn bad once it is affected by conditions. The former is made up of deluded hopes, sensual enjoyment, while the latter is pursued by bodily decay and the odour of death. But over a period of time, when you add your owninvestigations to the reading, the faultiness … And it is the same with everything that really falls to our lot. Whenever we think about objects, do we mistakenly believe that they exist in their own right? This movie is a beautiful poetic masterpiece, from the creative mind of Charlie Kaufman, and this is also his directorial debut. Reflect on how you yourself appear to your mind as if inherently existent. Emptiness and existence may seem like opposing concepts: existence seems as if it is anything other than empty, and emptiness seems as though it does not exist. This is the dominant note of Goethe’s beautiful song: “Hoch auf dem alten Thurme steht So that we resemble such phenomena as smoke, fire, or a jet of water, all of which die out or stop directly there is no supply of matter. Essentially, therefore, it has to take the form of continual motion without there ever being any possibility of our finding the rest after which we are always striving. Physicists today keep discovering finer and finer components of matter, yet they still cannot understand its ultimate nature. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D. Excerpted with permission of Pockets Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Meanwhile it must excite our pity when we consider how extremely little this lord of the world receives, when it makes its appearance as an individual; for the most part only just enough to maintain the body. The conclusion that all things are empty of inherent existence and appear only in dependence on our minds is not an obvious truth. The second and third noble truths lead us to understand the causes of suffering and whether or not those causes can be removed. However, when phenomena appear to us, they do not at all appear as if they exist this way. Your life will seem to have lost all meaning and your existence will feel purposeless. If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. If this is solved, then that which has been won becomes a burden, and involves the second task of its being got rid of in order to ward off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, is ready to fall upon any life that is secure from want. We could conceive of the tree as lacking inherent existence. Emptiness as a Meditative State. Emptiness meditation begins as an insight or analytic method that leads to the direct (and eventually global) perception of the absence of inherent existence. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life — that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. How foolish it is for a man to regret and deplore his having made no use of past opportunities, which might have secured him this or that happiness or enjoyment! Man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.