Into Emptiness: Chapter 1 Middle-length Summary

We suffer unnecessarily. This stems from a profound lack of self-knowledge, as if we are addicts clinging to a harmful substance. Like an addict's drug, the false notion of an independently existent self is the source of great misery for ourselves and others.

We imagine ourselves as solid, independent, and autonomous beings, devising schemes to acquire and to harm. Fear, anger, and pride drive us to harm others, attempting to satisfy the fleeting desires of this exaggerated self. This path of greed and harm, however, leads not towards happiness, but towards samsara: a cyclic path of dissatisfaction and misery.

Of course, we do exist. We are living beings who make choices that impact ourselves and others. However, we often feel the need to exist in a solid and independent way to feel truly real and alive. Death, however, tells a different story, and this is why we avoid its message.

The Message of Death: Impermanence and Emptiness

The message of death is that we are impermanent. Our bodies are disintegrating moment by moment, even now. We wish to believe otherwise, yet beneath our ever-changing minds and ageing bodies, there is no internal and essential self. We have no natural, independent existence.

Instead, we exist contingently and interdependently. We exist in dependence on our ancestors, our body parts, our food, air, water, and the other members of our society. Devoid of any self, any independent or substantial nature, our existence is possible only because it is far less rigid, less concrete, than what we imagine it to be.

Rather than seeing things as they are, we superimpose upon ourselves and on things around us a false existence, a self-existence, or an essential reality that does not exist at all. In Buddhist philosophy, the ultimate truth is the sheer absence, the lack of any such essence, which is emptiness, shunyata.

While it may sound bleak, disappointing, or frightening, it is the very nature of reality. It is this nature, this reality that is not fantasy, that ends up being our final hope and our refuge. The path to freedom from needless misery for ourselves and for others lies through a profound realisation of this fundamental reality.

Reframing Emptiness: Beyond the Negative Connotations

How can we feel that emptiness is a positive thing? The word has powerfully negative connotations, suggesting the opposite of a liberating spiritual path. It may suggest hollowness, deadness, despair, hopelessness, meaninglessness.

The Tibetan and Sanskrit words we translate as emptiness do literally mean emptiness. They refer specifically to a lack in absence in things, but not a lack of meaning or hope or existence. It is the lack of an exaggerated and distorted kind of existence that we have projected onto things and onto ourselves. It is the absence of a false essential nature with which we have unconsciously invested everything around us.

Doubt about our heavy-duty kind of reality can be frightening. Emptiness brings a doubt about this continuously heavy-duty kind of reality that we have taken for granted throughout our whole lives.

We may feel that things cannot exist at all if they do not exist in the solid way that we are accustomed to seeing them. However, if we had a solid kind of existence, we could never change. Locked into our essential nature, we would always be exactly as we are now.

There could be no life. Everything would be static and frozen. We could not interact with other living beings, grow, or learn. Emptiness allows for change and growth.

Consider this: you may not have a Ferrari today. Yet, thanks to emptiness, you potentially could have one tomorrow. The fact that you do not have a Ferrari right now is not a consistent, unchanging truth about your existence.

If you had the heavy-duty reality you unwittingly ascribe to yourself, an eternalist version of reality, there would be nothing. Your existence as you experience it now exists in virtue of emptiness; it is nothing other than emptiness.

Interdependence and Ethical Implications

As you grow, you learn that you are happy when you can bring happiness to other living beings and alleviate their suffering. They are empty, but this does not negate their existence or the painfulness of their suffering.

We are real, but we do not exist inherently. We exist interdependently upon other things, upon myriad things. Emptiness does not negate existence. Instead, it means that suffering is not a fixed part of reality.

Suffering can change because whether it gets better or worse depends on causes and conditions, which means that, in part, it depends on you, on us. You are part of it, not just a receiver of it.

Think of emptiness as the clear blue sky: a transparent space that is wide open. Your empty nature means that there is no limit to what you can become. You are not blocked, obstructed, or tied down.

Right now, our power to help others may be limited. Emptiness, however, is the lack of chains preventing you from becoming more wise and loving, more powerful to help others, and more capable to help yourself. It is the absence of bars on the door, the freedom from any built-in limit on what we can become and what we can be.

When we wonder how wise or loving we could become, let us not impose limitations that are not part of reality. We face difficulties, sometimes great ones, and the path demands time and effort. The obstacles are not insurmountable because they are not intrinsic to the structure of reality.

Fundamentally, all things are empty, and so are we of any intrinsic nature. This is why the reality of emptiness, properly understood, is a tremendous wellspring of hope and inspiration. Only because we are empty are the possibilities for what we can become wide open. The sky is the limit.

Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise: Wisdom and Compassion

Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelug Order of Tibetan Buddhism, explained emptiness in The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path (published in 1402). He maintained the validity of logic and ethical norms within a radical view of emptiness: all phenomena are devoid of any essential or intrinsic nature.

Like other Mahayana Buddhists, Tsongkhapa believed that all living beings have the potential to attain perfect happiness as fully enlightened Buddhas. The spiritual path to Buddhahood involves a balanced development of two factors: wisdom, which knows the emptiness of all that exists, and compassion, or compassionate action.

Wisdom destroys all reification and penetrates ultimate truth while leaving intact the conventional truths that allow us to exist, to make ethical distinctions, and to help those who suffer. One great teacher stated, 'Every syllable of Buddha Dharma is about ethics. Especially emptiness, if properly understood.'

Emptiness shows you the true ground of self-cherishing and self-grasping, the very things that make you act unethically. The root of our current unsatisfactory condition in this cycle of death and rebirth is our innate tendency to hold this distorted, reifying view of ourselves. We also have innate tendencies to view all other phenomena in the same manner.

To achieve wisdom, to know emptiness, is to overcome this reifying view by seeing that the exaggerated self that we have imagined does not in fact exist at all. Tsongkhapa stressed that we must use reason to refute the existence of this reified self or essence.

Emptiness and Interdependence: A Conventional Existence

Our utter lack of a self-existent self and independent existence does not mean that we do not exist at all. Persons and other phenomena do exist interdependently. The Buddha spoke of himself and his actions; he used the word 'I'. It is natural and correct to use language in this way. Persons and other things exist only in a conventional sense.

This conventional existence is sufficient and necessary for them to function and exist as they do. Without any fixed, unchanging, intrinsic nature, without any intrinsic capacity to exist, we are nonetheless fully capable of choosing and acting.

Having arrived through analytical introspection at the correct philosophical view that the self lacks a shred of intrinsic nature, a bodhisattva in quest of Buddhahood proceeds along the path through intense, deep, and extensive meditative familiarisation with this view. These wisdom practices operate in a powerful synergy with the bodhisattva's compassion and love.

Realising emptiness can support and augment the power of compassion in several ways. Number one, by seeing that there is no inherently existing difference between self and other, the meditator undermines their self-cherishing sense. Number two, by seeing that she shares with all beings a fundamental nature of emptiness, the meditator strengthens a deep sense of closeness and relatedness to others. Number three, knowing that the state of being a Buddha is radically different from their current condition, the meditator needs to develop a powerful conviction that it is possible to become a fully enlightened Buddha.

The Six Perfections and the Primacy of Wisdom

When a bodhisattva trains in compassion-motivated practices such as generosity, her virtues are purified and qualified as perfections (paramitas) through being associated with the bodhisattva's wisdom. A bodhisattva seeks to attain the enormous helping powers of a Buddha by training in the six perfections: generosity, ethical discipline, patience, joy, perseverance, meditative stabilisation, and wisdom.

While we start with generosity, wisdom supports all of them. Wisdom is any instance of discerning and analytical understanding that can sort out what is what and see things for what they are. Tsongkhapa teaches us that this discerning wisdom is critical to the path. As long as your direction is set correctly, which is your wisdom penetrating and understanding emptiness, everything else is just a matter of time.

It is important to prepare ourselves by first considering carefully the goal we are trying to achieve. When the reasons for aspiring to these goals are set out very clearly in our minds, then we are armored against any form of discouragement. Discerning understanding is already a sort of wisdom. Wisdom enables bodhisattvas to make sound decisions about what to do and what not to do.

The Dangers of Not Having Wisdom

Lacking the wisdom to make careful distinctions, we are strongly disposed to simply accept things as they appear on the surface, which is a profound fault that causes vast amounts of unnecessary misery. For example, believing that our human foes are naturally evil and our friends are naturally good, just as they appear in our minds, we set out for war with the absolute certainty that our violent actions are moral, just, noble, perhaps even holy.

There are many ways that not having wisdom causes us problems. Failing to analyse carefully, we tend to treat as though absolutely contradictory and mutually exclusive many things that are, in fact, only superficially discordant or that occur together infrequently. Tsongkhapa teaches us that careful discernment is one of the most important aspects of wisdom.

Compatibly relating ultimate reality and conventional existence is a massive argument. Without the light of emptiness, without the light of this wisdom of emptiness to guide us to the intended meaning of passages in Buddhist scriptures, we easily fall into a tangle and have unending confusion as to how to proceed.

How to Become Wise: Study and Practice

How do you become wise? All good qualities arise from wisdom, so we should do everything that we can to develop and strengthen this quality. An indispensable key to developing wisdom is studying the Dharma to the very best of your ability. Broad study of Buddhist scriptures and their commentaries is, according to Tsongkhapa, the sacred life force of the path. However, study cannot be a substitute for and cannot go without practice; they have to go hand in hand.

Tsongkhapa shows that it is precisely those setting out to practice, to meditate seriously, who most need to study the teachings carefully to avoid going astray in their meditation practice. It is spiritual poison to believe that serious practice can bypass study and discerning analysis.

When setting out to study Buddhist texts, we should do the best we can with the analytical capacity we have. Your meditation practice must be exactly what you have first studied and thought about carefully. When you have understood something and have taken it to heart, then it can serve as a beneficial focal point for deep meditation.

Serenity and Insight: The Essence of Virtue

The source of all your virtue in this world derives from serenity and insight, which are special meditative qualities that a spiritual practitioner develops only after long training. Buddhist teachings include a vast number of different meditation techniques, but they can be summed up within the categories pertaining to serenity and insight.

• Meditations that engage and strengthen our capacity to focus and to stabilise the mind without distraction, culminating in perfect serenity.
• Meditations that use and develop the capacity to discern and analyse the qualities of an object.

The full benefits of Buddhist meditation come only through a balanced practice in which both capacities are fully developed. Neither analytical meditation nor stabilising meditation alone can suffice. Meditative serenity suppresses the disturbing and painful manifest forms of the afflictions, creating a clear field within which meditative wisdom can develop into profound insight, penetrating through subtler levels of self-deception to eventually root out even the subtlest latent forms of the afflictions.