Emptiness = No thingness

An excerpt from a teaching called Dharma and the Western Mind by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I like Dharma and I have a Western mind. I feel that this is something that I need to talk about a great deal.  I also feel that there have been certain challenges that I have become aware of in speaking to Westerners, and that these things need to be addressed, brought out in the open where we can examine them, see what they mean and how they affect us.  In doing so we will derive some useful answers that will help us to remain firm in our practice and keep us on the path of Dharma.

There are certain ideas and kinds of conceptualization that are natural for each culture.  Each culture formulates its own specific ideas about reaching conclusions, and accepting ideas and conceptualizations as their own.  We reach our own conclusions about norms and what is right, what is normal and what is appropriate. When you bring a system or a teaching to a culture, it is necessary to address the peculiar way in which that culture listens.  In order to do that you have to understand the way in which that culture hears.

When I first began to teach Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist ideas, I found that there was a tendency for Westerners to hear certain ideas in a particular way otherwise it turned them off. However, if these Westerners were given the idea in a different way it would be all right and appropriate.  They would understand it and it would not be distasteful to them.  I found that it was a particular challenge to speak to Westerners in this way. I would like to express some of what I learned about that to you.

When you speak to a Westerner about the Primordial Wisdom State it must be done very carefully.  I discovered that trying to convey to Westerners the idea of self-nature as being inherently empty is a very difficult thing for Westerners to deal with.  We hear emptiness and we think about something that we don’t like.  We hear “empty” and we think empty pocketbook, empty stomach, empty, dark, cold, lonely, and no good.  That wasn’t the emptiness that Lord Buddha was talking about.  That was not the idea to be conveyed.  When we think of emptiness we think of the opposite of fullness and that is not what Lord Buddha is talking about.  When we think of emptiness we think of something that is bereft of any comfort, of any meaning, of any glory and of anything beautiful. We are an emotional people and we like our ‘glory’ and our ‘beautiful’ and all that stuff, so we think that emptiness is not good.

Actually when the Buddha spoke of emptiness, he spoke in such a way that he was delivering his message from a state that does not distinguish between emptiness and fullness; a state that actually understands emptiness and fullness to be the same taste, the same nature. When we speak of emptiness we actually don’t speak of emptiness as nothing and cold but rather we speak of “no thingness.” In this case nothing doesn’t mean gone, it doesn’t mean black, it doesn’t mean terrible, it means no thing, just what it is supposed to mean.

The Buddha spoke of a state that was actually free of conceptualization.  For the most part all that we perceive, everything that we have ever known in fact, is conceptualization. We know nothing then of that underlying nature which is empty of that conceptualization.  We think that to not have that conceptualization is simply not to have – that there is an absence rather than a fullness.  This is very difficult for us.

One of the reasons that it is so difficult is first of all we have not become awake to the Primordial Wisdom State and we have never had a taste of it.  And that taste is important; it is important to sense the reality of it.  Also, we are a materialistic society.  We are a society that is based on ‘thingness’ and all of the things that become important to us, all of our goals, are so much a part of our pattern of thought.  There is a tendency to wrap our minds around ‘thingness,’ it is all that we know, all that we are aware of.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo