Emptiness and Fabrication

Two pillars of Buddhism I've been exploring lately: by reading the wonderful Seeing That Frees by the late Rob Burbea, by listening to talks by James Low, whom I discovered recently, and, tirelessly, through the recordings of Alan Watts, who never stops amazing me.

Emptiness doesn't mean there is nothing.

And 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 much: we are experiencing something. So no: it isn't nothing.

On the other hand, as soon as you look at one thing in particular – a tree, a chair, a passerby – you find that it's extremely hard to define anything independently of everything else.

Take the tree. What makes a tree a tree?

Easy! Let's see... A trunk. Branches. Leaves. Roots... And that's it?

Question: is the soil around the roots part of the tree? Answer: no! Soil is soil; the tree is the tree – they're two separate things. Very well. But have you ever seen a tree without soil? And if there's no such thing as a tree without soil, does it really make sense to leave one out of the definition of the other? Along the same lines, is the air part of the tree? Before you answer, remember that wood comes from carbon in the air, captured through photosynthesis. ("Trees don't grow out of the ground," Feynman said, "they grow out of the air.") And to take the reasoning all the way, since there's no tree without photosynthesis, and no photosynthesis without the sun, shouldn't the sun be part of the definition too?

And the shape itself, the color of the leaves, the smell of wood and chlorophyll, the roughness of the trunk: would any of it mean anything if the same world didn't hold beings with sight, smell, and touch to experience it? So do these features belong to the tree, or to those who perceive them? Is green a property of leaves, or a property of our visual cortex when we look at a leaf? And if so, does it really make sense to leave us out of the definition?

tree (n.): A piece of the universe made of soil, air, and sun, whose leaves are green when certain animals look at them.

That's why for Buddhists, especially in the Dzogchen tradition, nothing exists independently of everything else.

To think of the tree without the soil, the object without its context, the part without the whole, is to create concepts that hide the true nature of things. Of course, sometimes that's very handy. Our brains can't stretch forever; we have to simplify. When I pick my socks in the morning, I don't think every day about the cosmic bond tying each fiber of the fabric to the rest of the universe. I take the striped ones because they smell less.

The problem comes when we forget that concepts are concepts.

My sock, like the tree, has no essence of its own, no defining feature you could isolate from the rest, no "sockness" existing independently of the world and of those who observe it. That's what Buddhists call "emptiness": the absence of an essence of its own. So when, for convenience, I treat my sock as a separate entity, I'm creating a concept. And why not: if it makes life easier, great. But when I mistake that concept for reality, that's when it all goes wrong. I forget that the word "sock" is only an internal representation of a piece of the whole which, at every level – physically, biologically, historically – can't be separated from the rest. In doing so, I create an object that doesn't exist. Out of nothing, I've added to my reality a new element that shapes how I see the world and how I act. That's "fabrication."

The trouble with fabrication? It isolates.

When every phenomenon is conceived as a separate entity, everything seems cut off from everything else. Objects from one another. People from one another. Self from others. The world from self. We forget that this separation between things is just an idea we manufactured ourselves to grease the wheels of daily life. Out of it come a certain loneliness, competition, a desire for control.

The aim of meditation, especially in the practice of non-duality, is to take these concepts apart one by one so as to see the world again as it is: Whole. One. Present. And something we are an integral part of, just like trees and socks.