Alex Wilding

Abandoning ethics and compassion because, well, emptiness, is a bit of a disaster when it's done intentionally, as I'm afraid it sometimes is. I think one helpful way to draw near to this is to cast a quick eye over the history of the idea. In the very earliest layers of the Buddhist teachings that we have, the absence of a self is one of the key points.

I've often seen it referred to by the Pali name of anatta. It goes along with two other points, impermanence and suffering, but it's the absence of a self that concerns us here. One of many philosophical views that were current in the India of the Buddha's day is the thinking that we each have an individual, eternal self, an Atman.

Yeah, I do know there are all sorts of Atman theories, but the simple idea of an unchanging self is the one that matters here. I suspect that versions of this Atman idea could be found throughout history, East and West, But when we look at ourselves with a clear and steady eye, this kind of self is very difficult to find. We seem rather to be an assemblage, a bundle of bits and pieces.

The classic Buddhist teaching talks about the five heaps or the five skandhas. There are forms, feelings, perceptions, mental factors and so on. They all interact with one another. But where is the permanent self amongst them? The Buddha explicitly rejected the idea of an Atman that was current at the time.

It would be misleading to say that the idea of an Atman was a Hindu idea, because Hinduism as such didn't emerge until later. There was a melting pot of ideas and practices going on in the India of that day. The world has seen such intellectual and spiritual melting pots in other places. So let me just give a quick shout out to the work of William Dalrymple.

He has been a prolific author, and I've just been reading From the Holy Mountain, which I would recommend to anyone interested in how rich and varied the intellectual life of, for that matter, the Western world is. has been before it became flattened out by some very narrow later interpretations of Christianity and Islam. But I digress, as we used to say when I was at school.

The point is that the idea of a hard, moralist, eternal Atman was explicitly rejected. This line of thinking developed over time, and a number of Dharmas were identified. Unfortunately, I've got to digress again now to look at this word Dharma.

I did once hear that the famous Sanskrit dictionary by Monier-Williams lists 18 meanings of the word, but I could be wrong there, and even if I'm not, I suspect that might be an underestimate. Of these various meanings, two are particularly prominent in Buddhist literature. Firstly, we speak of the Dharma, meaning the Buddhist teachings.

When we take refuge, we take refuge in the three jewels, which are, of course, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the community. The word operates on multiple levels even there. It can be pictured as a stack of books, the Buddhist scriptures. And at the other end of the scale, Dharma refers to deep realization of the true nature of things.

Practicing the Dharma is another phrase used to refer to living in accordance with the teachings. The second group of meanings carried by the word Dharma could be described as the true elements of which reality is made up. As I just mentioned, we ourselves are made up of a bunch of bits and pieces. On the physical level, we are composed of the elements, and these are composed of tiny particles.

Our minds also contain thoughts and attitudes and emotions that together make up what we call our consciousness. So far so good. Or perhaps not. What indeed are these dharmas? Are these actually independent things? Or is it not rather the case that they all themselves only exist in relation to other things and other dharmas? Are the particles of earth, for example, themselves without parts?

Do they have an east and a west and north and a south? If they do, they're not partless and are therefore not ultimately real dharmas.

Reasoning along these and similar lines, questioning whether ultimately real dharmas could possibly exist, and even questioning whether cause and effect, essential as it is, has any ultimate reality, gave rise to libraries full of philosophical analysis and explanation. This is the background against which the idea of emptiness emerged.

Nothing exists in its own right, but things don't not exist either. We only have to drop a brick on our toe to know that in some way there is some kind of reality. This can be summed up in what is known as the Tetralemma, which was a common enough way of formulating things in Indian thought.

The four points in this tetralemma, put rather crudely, are that things don't exist, but that they don't not exist, and they don't both exist and not exist, and finally, that they don't neither exist nor not exist. And I think you'll agree that we've got to the end of logic here. Perhaps we've even gone over the edge.

Anyway, having rather radically swept away any positions or variations of positions about whether things exist or not, all summarized in the idea that things are empty, it must be clear that when we talk about emptiness, we aren't talking about some mystical void space somewhere else into which we hope to dissolve as we become enlightened.

It is this pencil in my hand as I write, this phone beside me, that pizza you're eating, that heartache he is feeling, and that toothache that's providing such a pain. These are the things that are empty. In short, all conceptual thinking actually misses the mark. Conceptual thinking is, of course, a wonderful thing. It's massively useful, but it's not the ultimate truth.

Trying to tease a logical truth out of this, then, is why so much ink does get used up.

In some corners of the Buddhist world, the idea rules of analysing and analysing and analysing again, running over all the theoretical intellectual proofs of emptiness, such as the Vajra slivers, which you can look up, until the practitioner enters a deep state of meditation where emptiness is understood or seen.

When this practitioner then emerges from that meditation and sees ordinary things again, it is held in that line of thinking that emptiness can no longer be seen and the practitioner must repeat this process again and again and again. Others, on the other hand, and I will admit that this is where my own sympathy lies, feel that this may be missing the point.