Emptiness for Beginners

I will have to continue this in the coming days. Got a busy week ahead, so comment if you like and sorry I can't finish now.

I'm really scrambling for help. I wonder how matt is becoming a true Buddha. I say you're becoming enlightened and just go with it please . Have the greatest confidence with the Buddha. Matt please be a boddhisattva for me and society.

I always wonder how others can make my life better. I am so attracted to DEFILEMENTS which makes me unworthy of Buddhahood. I want a GOD that can save me from myself. Is this human or mythological?

SILENCE PREVAILS over all this noise, bullshit, lies, conflict, war, duality, thoughts, hate, sadness, comparisons, and my ego.

Matt is a Buddha and knows HOW to make us right on the path of 8.
I sit still, watch television and other media.

Hi Schnoebi,

The concept of emptiness, no-soul or no-self in Buddhism is pretty hard to understand, and even more difficult to realize directly.

One thing that helped me though, is that the Buddha rejected the idea of a permanent self or soul that goes from life to life, as many of the people believed in during his time. They believed that the soul was some sort of unchanging essence that moved from life to life.
The Buddha however rejected this unchanging soul or self, because the most important aspect of our 'self' is mind, and mind is constantly changing, like a flowing river. A river may appear to remain the same, but if you look closely, it is obvious that a river moves and changes constantly. So similarly, whatever continues from life to life is a continuously changing phenomenon.

Later on, people have tried to explain selflessness or emptiness in many different ways, but one cannot really put this into words at all: perhaps we can compare it to a smell or a taste. Of course, specialists can describe to each other when a wine has all kinds of special flavours and smells, but the experience of tasting a wine cannot be conveyed with words.

So all we can do is look at the descriptions of selflessness or emptiness, try to see how close we can get to intellectually understanding it by looking at it from many different angles, until one day we may experience for ourselves what it is really about.
But please do not get discouraged or frustrated because selflessness/emptiness is difficult to grasp. Instead, we can feel very fortunate that we begin to dig for the most precious thing thinkable: not gold, but ultimate happiness, freedom from suffering for all sentient beings, including ourselves.

From the Buddhist point of view, we have all lived countless lives, and so far, we have never come to find permanent happiness, free from any sufferig or problems, despite the fact that we all want to be happy. This must logically mean that the path to this happiness is neither obvious, nor easy to travel, otherwise we would have long ago travelled it....

Possibly the most obvious obstacle to finding complete freedom from suffering is that we always tend to put our energy in short-term happiness: wealth, good food and drink, sex, whatever. According to the Buddha, we are actually all like prisoners of our attachment to these temporary pleasures. We put all our energy in them, but at best, all we get is short-term relief of problems and pain, and often not even that...

Another problem with this thread is the title, emptiness for beginners, which is kind of an oxymoron, because emptiness is a very advanced topic, one which is actually impossible to understand, because it is impossible to describe in words.

We can talk about it, though. I have heard or read people say it should not be talked about, because any description or analysis will be misleading, but I do not believe that. I believe what Rudy said, that we should consider the many descriptions of it as if we are trying to view emptiness from different angles. I think that is very apt, because in attempting to describe or explain something that can not be put into words, we are beating around the bush, so to speak. Analyzing emptiness is something one does from the outside, from a certain vantage point. The more vantage points we consider, the better we may come to get a sense of what lies in between them.

We can break the topic of emptiness into two parts, though. They are 1. the experience or realization of emptiness and 2.that emptiness is the ultimate nature of all phenomena.

Nothing and no one have inherent existence. Not you, not me, not the dog, the t.v. or the computer you or I are using.

Another way it is often said is that they lack existence from their own side. They do not exist independently. For individuals like us, existence is a valid subjective experience, not an objective one, and for any phenomena, existence itself is a concept that does not hold up to analysis informed by the concept, much less the realization of emptiness.

And it bears repeating that this lack of inherent existence is also concept, it is something we can understand.

So already we have established two valid concepts about emptiness: 1. Emptiness as a topic has a conceptual component, it has meaning. That all phenomena lack inherent existence is a meaningful statement that can be understood.
2. Emptiness as a topic may also refer to an experience that can not be described and so strictly speaking can not be understood.

And now we can take up the conceptual side of this, what does it mean that things lack inherent existence? Well, a good place to begin that discussion is not with the ultimate nature of phenomena, but with the mundane nature of phenomena, Inter-dependence.

Mahayana and Vajryanna Buddhists say that all living things, and in fact all things animate or inanimate are interdependent because they have dependent origination. I will begin to explain these concepts, but first I want to underscore that they are concepts.

That is why interdependence is the mundane and not the ultimate nature of reality and phenomena, because our ordinary minds perceive and experience reality and its components as concepts, not directly. We do not ordinarily perceive or experience things as they truly are, we experience mental constructs, holographic p (I am trying to remember a word, be back when I do.)

So lets get back to dependent origination. For this we need an example, and I like to use a wooden chair. Let us consider how the chair came to be. It was made by people from wood and glue, and sold in a store.

And all of these components of the origin of the chair or causes of the chair have their own causes, and causes go hand in hand with conditions, so Buddhists always speak of causes and conditions. For example, for there to be wood to work with there must have been a tree, and the tree needed all the right conditions to grow. It needed a seed, and the seed needed the right soil, sunlight and water to sprout and grow into a sapling.

So rain is a cause, but rain alone does not produce a tree, and it has to fall within certain parameters. The rains (or snow) can't fall too far apart, and if there is too much, then that would kill the sapling. So there needed to be precipitation in a certain way, and that is a condition. We all can imagine many conditions that need to be right for the tree to grow.

What caused the seed? What caused those causes and conditions? Analysis like that soon takes us far back in time and beyond our knowledge and understanding. It seems to regress infinitely, and Buddhists believe it does, because unlike people who believe in a creator God, we assert that nothing can be its own cause.

Of course the same is true of the people who milled the lumber, and the people who crafted, shipped and sold the chair. They also have causes dependent on right conditions and so on to infinity.

So this is enough for today. I mean it is enough writing for me. I would like to propose a couple of applications, though. 1. Can the concept of inter-dependence change how you think of someone who irritates you? 2. Does the concept of inter-dependence give you a sense of the importance of developing patience in viewing reality more clearly?

I will write more about emptiness another day.

Thank you Matt and Ruby for your expansive replies on interdependence and emptiness, both of which made sense to my brain.
I am still stuck. What is the thing, that is encouraged in Buddhism, to accumulate merit and to relieve all sentient beings from suffering? Interdependence suggests a separation as well as a whole. Some call it the ego, some call it the soul, others call it the non-self. I am not looking for a name, just an understanding of what it is.

schnoebi writes:

```I am still stuck. What is the thing, that is encouraged in Buddhism, to accumulate merit and to relieve all sentient beings from suffering? Interdependence suggests a separation as well as a whole.
Some call it the ego, some call it the soul, others call it the non-self. I am not looking for a name, just an understanding of what it is.```

Your are going in circles here.
To answer the question `What is the thing ?` we need labels........
Each label is a delusion and the very need for making the label is our problem which we need to get rid of.

Pretty confusing but, as some people have experienced,.....confusion dawns as wisdom..., at some point of practice.

There is a lot of literature about what mind (the non-self, the stream of consciousness etc.) is and how it looks like. Pick labels and descriptions which make sense to you. They are means of understanding and will be replaced by other labels later on the next level of understanding until you do not need them.

Tamara