Emptiness is one of the core teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, available in both Sanskrit texts and Pali. Buddhist doctrine has historically been presented as a broad and narrow interpretation, which has frequently varied from one Buddhist school to another. Generally, emptiness is a mode of perception. Buddhism believes that emptiness is a way in which we perceive things; we view experiences or things. Looking at activities in one’s mind, including the sense without a sense of anything lying behind these activities or things (Burton 12). This manner of view is called emptiness since it is based on the prepositions usually added to our experience in order to make sense of the stories, plus the worldviews fashioned to what we really are and the kind of world we are living in. Despite the fact that these views and stories have been used, Buddha raised a question about our identity and the reality of the universe at large.
Pulling away the attention of direct experience on how events influence people in the immediate present makes them get along in the way when human beings try to understand and come up with a solution to the problem of suffering. A typical example is a condition where you are meditating and suddenly some feeling of anger towards your parent, maybe your mother, appears. The immediate impact of this on your mind will be the reflex of identifying the fact that you are angry. Elaboration on the feeling of anger then comes where your mind works out on the relationship between you and your mother or sometimes the general view of when and where the anger towards your mother can be justified.
From Buddha’s perspective, the problem that these stories and views entail is all about suffering. The more one gets involved in these stories and views, the more he or she gets into them, and further, the more one gets distracted from picturing the actual suffering (Burton 12). Labels I and mine set all these procedures in motion. These bring confusion, making you unable to unravel the root cause of the suffering and do away with it. The conceptual theory of emptiness is regarded as solitarily the most imperative in Mahayana Buddhism. “Sunyata” is a Sanskrit term for emptiness, and the soul is considered empty. The importance of this theory is established in three approaches to the ways in which we think. These characteristics are known as Tilakkhana in Buddhism, and they are essential for one to realize Nirvana. These characteristics are part of the method of insight. During the time of Buddha, understanding of the soul being in existence happened deep in the hearts of people and when Budha preached first discourse, only one listener out of the five gained entry to the sainthood because them being Brahmins, they believe in the existence of the soul.
Western philosophy has contributed much to the misunderstanding of emptiness and its misconstruction. According to these philosophers, emptiness can only be related to the sceptical outset. This notion of emptiness has been mistaken for a long time as nihilism, where reality is taken as unknowable, meaning nothing exists, and nothing can be communicated about the world. According to Buddhists’ practice and knowledge of emptiness, nihilism is right the opposite. Emptiness portrays the ultimate reality as knowable, and a clear-cut ontological exists on a phenomenal basis. Through communication, useful knowledge can be derived from the word. A typical example of what emptiness implies in Buddhism is a situation where we look at a simple object like a glass. Many people always believe that a glass is empty if it contains neither a solid nor a liquid (Shonin et al. 123). That is actually the ordinary meaning of emptiness or something being empty. The glass is only empty of solids and liquid, but it is a fact that air is completely full of the glass. In this case, if we want to be precise about the glass being empty, then we have to say whatever the cup is empty of. From that perception, a cup can never be empty. Even if you put the cup in a vacuum, it will still be full of light space and even radiation. This makes it clear from that particular point of view that a glass is ever full of something.
This is directly the reverse of what Buddhists perceive as ever being empty. Buddhist’s understanding of reality, in this case emptiness, is quite different from the physical meaning of the word itself. To them, the glass being empty means it is exactly devoid of any kind of inherent existence. Non-inherent here, in this case, means the glass exists, yes, but just like any other thing in the world, its existence depends on other factors. Characteristics like being hollow, cylindrical and spherical are considered non-intrinsic to glasses. The properties of the glass and its components do not imply at any chance the act of being glassines, and they are not the glass itself. This means that the material and shape of the glass are not the same. The function is not just a glass; all these components come up and make the glass. From this, we can deduce that we need to meet all of the components of conditions before we come up with a glass. A glass will come from a combination of functions, shape, base materials, use and other aspects. The existence of all these conditions is what triggers the mind to impute an object as a glass (Shonin et al. 123). When just one of all the conditions making up the glass ceases to exist, like when it breaks, it forfeits the idea of being a glass since its shape, functions and the imputation of being a glass through perception freaks out. It is, therefore, very correct when a Buddhist say the existence of a cup depends on some external circumstances, and its being physically present is an illusion.
One would always wonder why such an ambiguous word was taught in Buddhist schools. The importance of this word was really the importance it holds in its profound insight as to why we do suffer. From this word, we learn that we suffer just because we grasp right after objects, thinking they are solid, fixed, real, capable and substantial of being owned by ego. We can see through the illusion by opening ourselves to the reality of fluidity and flux, which cannot be ultimately ungraspable and inconceivable because human beings can relax into clarity, courage, and compassion. That is why Buddhists insist on making the meaning of emptiness such a great that it must just be taught in such a critical way as they do (William et al. 309). We realize that based on what Buddha is saying about emptiness, all things on earth are conditioned and are related in one way or another. They are empty, which means they are not independent at all. This is why, from the Hearth of Sutra, Bodhisattva speaks out that form feeling, consciousness, and volition are always in their own being empty and void. This is just to imply that everything, according to Mahayana Buddhism, is empty, meaning all that is on earth is empty of soul. From the fact that nothing exists independently, as Buddhists say, all are void of the so-called bhava and abhava dharma. Soul exists neither inside nor outside, which means there is no soul in an ordinary world, even in Nirvana.
Finally, the perception of not-self/self and the dependence arising were fundamental and permanent. Not- a self type of teaching is one of the teachings regarded by Buddhists as the special breakthrough of Buddha, his discovery solidifying his superiority upon other teachings. In Buddha’s own ideas, anything considered Self cannot lead to suffering and would remain permanent, and it would, on the other hand, obey the individual to whom it is Self (William et al. 309). This means that the self is certainly controllable and would be conducive to excitement and not suffering.
In summary, one’s insight into the nature of reality is enhanced/deepened, and one would grow the acuity of reality. Thereafter, one can perceive events and phenomena as an illusion, and such kind of reality perception soon pervades one’s connections with utmost reality. The emptiness, considered as the eventual nature of realism, is actually not the utter reality; neither does the word occur. Emptiness cannot be conceived as sovereign from the basis of the phenomena since, through close examination of reality, it is found to be empty of inherent existence. Taking the emptiness to be an object, that object again becomes empty, according to Buddha, makes us conclude that everything is empty, which is empty. Buddha is important for all Buddhists since it is believed that the only way to know reality is emptiness.
Work Cited
Burton, David F. Emptiness appraised: A critical study of Nâgârjuna’s philosophy. Routledge, 2015: Pp 12.
Shonin, Edo, William Van Gordon, and Mark D. Griffiths. “The emerging role of Buddhism in clinical psychology: Toward effective integration.” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality6.2 (2014): Pp 123.
Van Gordon, William, Edo Shonin, and Mark D. Griffiths. “Buddhist emptiness theory: Implications for psychology.” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 9.4 (2017): Pp 309.
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