Two pillars of Buddhism recently explored through reading the wonderful Seeing that Frees by (the late) Rob Burbea, listening to lectures by James Low whom I discovered recently, and, tirelessly, through recordings of Alan Watts who never ceases to amaze me.
Emptiness doesn't mean there's nothing.
For good reason: we see, we hear, we feel. We imagine. Whatever the origin of these perceptions and the nature of the reality that produces them, we can agree on this: we do experience something. So no: there isn't nothing.
However, as soon as we focus on any particular subject—a tree, a chair, a passerby—we discover that it's extremely difficult to define anything independently of everything else.
The tree, for example. What makes a tree a tree?
Easy! Let's see... A trunk. Branches. Leaves. Roots... And there you have it?
Question: is the soil around the roots part of the tree? Answer: no! The soil is the soil; the tree is the tree—they're two separate things. Fair enough. However, have we ever seen a tree without soil? And if there's no tree without soil, is it really reasonable to exclude one from the definition of the other? Along the same lines, is the air part of the tree? Before answering, remember that wood comes from carbon in the air trapped through photosynthesis. ("Trees don't grow out of the ground, Feynman said, they grow out of the air.") And, to take the reasoning to its conclusion, since there's no tree without photosynthesis, and no photosynthesis without the sun, shouldn't the sun be integrated into the definition as well?
And the form itself, the color of the leaves, the smells of wood and chlorophyll, the roughness of the trunk—would any of this make sense if there weren't, in the same world, beings endowed with sight, smell, and touch to experience it? Therefore, are these characteristics inherent to the tree or inherent to those who perceive them? Is green a property of the leaves or a property of our visual cortex when we look at a leaf? And in that case, is it really reasonable to exclude ourselves from the definition?
tree (n.): A piece of universe made of soil, air, and sun whose leaves are green when certain animals look at them.
That's why for Buddhists, particularly in the Dzogchen tradition, nothing exists independently of everything else.
To think of the tree without soil, the object without context, the part without the whole, is to create concepts that mask the true nature of things. Of course, sometimes it's quite practical. Our brains not being infinitely expandable, we need to simplify. When I choose my socks in the morning, I don't think every day about the cosmic connection linking each fiber of the fabric to the rest of the universe. I take the striped ones because they smell less.
The problem arises when we forget that concepts are concepts.
My sock, like the tree, has no inherent essence, no cardinal characteristic that could be isolated from the rest, no "sockness" that exists independently of the world and observers. That's what Buddhists call "emptiness": the absence of inherent essence.
So when, for the sake of convenience, I consider my sock as a separate entity, I create a concept. And why not: if it makes my life easier, so much the better. But when I mistake this concept for reality, that's when things go south. I forget that the word "sock" is only an internal representation of a piece of the whole which, on all levels—physically, biologically, historically—cannot be separated from the rest. In doing so, I create an object that doesn't exist. Out of nothing, I've populated my reality with a new element that impacts my worldview and my actions. That's what "fabrication" is.
The problem with fabrication? It isolates.
By conceptualizing each phenomenon as a separate entity, everything seems disconnected from everything. Objects from each other. People from each other. Oneself from others. The world from oneself. We forget that this separation between each thing is only an idea we've manufactured ourselves to smooth over daily life. From it spring a certain loneliness, competition, a desire for control.
The goal of meditation, particularly in the practice of non-duality, is to deconstruct these concepts one by one in order to perceive the world again as it is: Whole. Singular. Present. And of which, just like trees and socks, we are an integral part.
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