Embracing Emptiness

I write this post in the spirit of Zen; an honest examination of mind.

I started out as a Buddhist. I took dukkha/suffering/unsatisfactoriness as a fact of life. In that mindset, it's easy to see how all good things, love, achievements and pleasure are so clearly transitory, making them ultimately meaningless and empty. I had a strong intuition of this for a long time.

It's an easy leap from there, although one that took a long time to sink in for me, to see all bad things, pain, suffering and failure as just as transitory, making them ultimately meaningless and empty. After all, did any of your pain exist before you were born? Will any of your suffering exist after you die?

A monk asked, "When a dying monk passes away, where does he go?" "After the fire, a single reed stem," said the Master.

The Record of Tung-shan (Dongshan) #92

If both sides are empty, both good and bad, the terms themselves become empty and meaningless. All becomes empty.

Let alone that, I think we are all missing a visceral understanding of impermanence and death. Sure, we all know we are going to die. There is, however, a huge difference between knowledge of the theory and a deeply felt and experienced understanding of our temporary nature. For some funny reason, the few glimpses I get of this true understanding always happen just after I wake up or just before I go to sleep. In both cases, the conceptual mind is quite toned down.

So, not only is everything we experience empty from a preferential, discerning point of view as detailed above. It's also ultimately meaningless in a temporal sense.

I used to believe in some sense of non-duality, now I reject it as well. Regardless, it's a good starting out point for mind examination as the first step to what brings people to believe in non-duality is valid. Understanding that anything that enters through your senses becomes the content of your mind, a direct part of it. When you hear the thunder outside your window with your chin rested on your hand, the sound and the sensation are not something that is happening to your mind but rather what make up your mind in that moment.

This of course means that the content of your mind is always constantly changing. Your mind's make-up is vastly different when you are horny and when you are attending a funeral. So then your mind itself is also transitory, meaningless and empty.

After all, if some magical all-in-one non-duality would be the case, your mind would have existed in some form before you were born and would continue existing after you die. There is no good evidence for this. All of the contents of my mind are there because of my physical senses and/or my brain (in the case of dreaming and seeing, hearing and feeling inside a dream).

I reject meditation. The contents of my mind might be at one point a raging sea of overwhelming sensations and thoughts, while at another point it might be calm and still as a serene pond. If both states are equally empty, what is there to gain from meditation and mind pacification techniques?

Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching #507: 507

The second patriarch asked Bodhidharma, "Can I hear about the Dharma seal of the Buddhas?" He said, "The Dharma seal of the Buddha is not gotten from another." The second patriarch said, "My mind is not yet at peace; please pacify my mind for me." He said, "Bring me your mind and I will pacify it for you." The second patriarch said, "Having looked for my mind, I cannot find it." Bodhidharma said, "I have pacified your mind for you."

Everything is fundamentally empty. The four noble truths are empty. Zen enlightenment is empty. Me understanding all this is empty.

Emperor Wu of Liang asked Great Teacher Bodhidharma, "What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?" Bodhidharma said, "Empty--there's no holy." The emperor said, " Who are you facing me?" Bodhidharma said, "Don't know." The emperor didn't understand. Bodhidharma subsequently crossed the Yangtse River, came to Shaolin, and faced a wall for nine years.

Book of Serenity #2: Bodhidharma's "Emptiness"

What is there to gain from emptiness? Nothing at all. An illusory sense of peace and ease perhaps, equally as empty as anything above.

Submitted August 14, 2020 at 03:53AM by SpringRainPeace https://ift.tt/3kFMmAF