by Greg Goode
May all the living things in all the planets, galaxies and universes be well, happy and free of suffering.
Real-World Applications
There are very good reasons to become practical about compassion. Our digitally-saturated modern world makes interdependence abundantly clear. Distant things are closer. It’s almost as if our thoughts and actions reach further than ever before. Our scope becomes broader. And the more we realize our interdependence, the more options we have to apply our caring intent. These insights have social dimensions, and in his book One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, Ethan Nichtern writes passionately about them:
At the same time, our insight into interdependence must lead us somewhere that Buddhist philosophy has rarely gone in its history: we must deeply examine, critique, and transform the complexes of confusion and suffering that exist not only on the personal level, but on the systemic and societal level. If Buddhism has any relevance here and now, it must quickly develop both social and political applications.
Nichtern (2007)
It is often said that love is the flipside of emptiness. Love is the fruition of emptiness. Emptiness is the nature of love. It is even more effective to approach your meditation from both directions.
References
Chödrön, Pema (2009). Perfect Just as You Are: Buddhist Practices on the Four Limitless Ones–Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity (Audio CD). Shambhala Audio.
Fredrickson, Barbara (2009). Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.
Gilbert, Paul (2010). The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life’s Challenges. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
Neff, Kristin (2011). Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind. New York, NY: William Morrow.
Salzberg, Sharon (2002). Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications.
Shantideva (2006). The Way of the Bodhisattva. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications.
CHAPTER 6 – HOW NOT TO MISUNDERSTAND EMPTINESS
The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma
Is based on two truths:
A truth of worldly convention
And an ultimate truth
Without a foundation in the conventional truth, The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, Liberation is not achieved.
Nagarjuna (1995) 24:8,10
There is a psychological possibility for you to fall into a trap of nihilism. The powerful philosophical arguments and experiential meditations that refute absolutist claims have the ability to make you feel that nothing at all matters and anything goes.
Buddhism attempts to avoid nihilism in many ways, including its emphasis on pratityasamutpada (dependent arising), abhidharma (the core of Buddhist psychology), meditation, epistemology, compassion, and social interactions, relations with the teacher and the sangha (the community of spiritual practitioners).
How can nihilism be avoided if you use mostly Western sources in your study of emptiness? Since emptiness is not studied outside of Buddhism with the same frequency it is studied in Buddhism, there are no socially popular non-Buddhist paths that give lots of emphasis to avoiding nihilism.
So how can you avoid nihilism outside a Buddhist path?
It’s a cliché, but there’s nothing wrong with following the conventional wisdom about keeping up a positive outlook on life. There are many ways to do this. And if you begin to feel diminished or depressed by studying the emptiness teachings, then put them aside.
In the following, we discuss a few more suggestions for avoiding nihilism.
The Two Truths
In keeping with the Tsongkhapa-styled approach to emptiness we are taking, we’d like to suggest the notion of the “two truths” as a way to help avoid nihilism. The two truths are said to be the conventional truth and the ultimate truth. You avoid nihilism by not rejecting conventional truth, but by using it in a proactive manner to realize the ultimate truth.
The two truths are explained like this: there are two ways of looking at the self and the world that engage different aspects. There is a regular, everyday way of looking at the self and the world; this is the conventional truth. The conventional truth helps us fulfill everyday purposes, but because of long-standing conditioning, our everyday way of looking has a mistaken impression embedded in it. This mistaken impression treats things as fixed and objective. According to the emptiness teachings, this mistaken impression of objectivity is responsible for our unease and suffering.
There is another way of looking at the self and the world. This is the ultimate truth, the truth of emptiness. When you realize the ultimate truth about something, you realize that it is empty, and not fixed or objective.
The conventional truth understands that “This is a table.” The ultimate truth realizes that “This table is empty” and corrects the mistaken impression of objectivity embedded in the conventional truth. The conventional truth grasps what something is. The ultimate truth realizes how it exists, as empty. These are the two aspects engaged by the two truths.
The ultimate truth is revealed in emptiness meditation when we are looking for how things really exist. The ultimate truth of the table is the emptiness of the table. This does not contradict or refute the conventional truth. It does not annihilate the everyday way of looking at things. Instead, it frees our everyday way of looking at things from the mistaken impression of objectivity. The ultimate truth liberates our experience.
Of course, this Buddhist division of truths sounds dualistic. But it is not dualistic, because the two truths are identical. That is, the ultimate truth is that the conventional truth is the only truth there is. The two truths are also different enough that they can help us avoid the dualistic extremes of nihilism and essentialism. And the division of truths is not ultimately true. It is only a conventional teaching mechanism that helps us gain clarity about what is refuted and what is retained in the emptiness approach. Here are some differences between the two truths, followed by areas where they are the same:
Differences Between the Two Truths
A conventional truth is said to be an object. An ultimate truth is said to be the emptiness of that object. Both truths are objects that can be grasped.
According to the Madhyamika teachings, conventional truth is realized by means of perception, inference, verbal testimony and analogy (all of which are themselves conventional). Ultimate truth is realized through analytic meditation or critical rational insight, leading to the nonconceptual realization of emptiness.
Cognition of conventional truth picks up the fact that the object is present and can perform functions. But it carries the mistaken impression that the object exists in a mind-independent way, and this impression leads to suffering. Cognition of the ultimate truth does not pick up the fact of an object’s existence, but does reveal how it exists, which brings freedom and spaciousness.
Conventional truth is used to distinguish between everyday truth and everyday falsity. For example, conventional truth distinguishes between a lie and a true statement in the courtroom, or between a fake Louis Vuitton bag and a real one. Ultimate truth does not distinguish between these things, but establishes that no statement, and indeed no Louis Vuitton bag, exists as a separate, mind-independent object.
Even though conventional truth is unmistaken about the difference between a fake Louis Vuitton bag and a real one, it is still mistaken about how these bags exist. Conventional truth carries the mistaken impression that the bags exist in an objective, inherent, mind-independent way. In contrast, the ultimate truth is the true nature of these bags, which is that that they are empty, not existing in an objective, mind-independent way.
Solid cultivation in conventional truth is required in order to realize the ultimate truth. This is one of the most important things to understand about conventional truth. It helps explain why the emptin
ess teachings do not reject conventional truth. The importance of conventional truth was expressed by Nagarjuna (also cited in the epigraph at the top of this chapter):
Without a foundation in the conventional truth,
The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,
Liberation is not achieved.
Identity Between the Two Truths
As the Heart Sutra says, form and emptiness are identical. Form is conventional truth and emptiness is the ultimate truth. You never find one without the other.
Form does not differ from emptiness
And emptiness does not differ from form.
Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
To be empty of inherent existence is to be conventional only. To be conventional only is to be empty of inherent existence.
The ultimate truth itself (i.e. emptiness) is conventional. Nagarjuna’s Treatise on the Middle Way contains a key stanza (24:18) that shows how emptiness (which is an ultimate truth) is itself empty (which is relational or conventional).
Whatever is dependently co-arisen,
that is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation,
Is itself the middle way.
Emptiness is the ultimate truth. But emptiness is empty because it is merely a dependent designation. Because emptiness is empty, it is conventional. The ultimate truth, emptiness, is merely a conventional truth. There is great beauty and liberating irony in this identity. The ultimate truth is that the conventional truth is the only truth there is. Conventional is as ultimate as you get. This means that there is no other higher, transcendental, super-ultimate or inherently existent truth that governs the ultimate truth revealed in emptiness meditation. And why isn’t there? Because as emptiness meditation reveals, everything, even emptiness, is empty. In fact, the very next stanza in Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom states this in a very direct way, “Therefore a nonempty thing does not exist” (24:19).
From the perspective of emptiness teaching, conventional truth is what allows you to get through life while at the same time giving you the tools to realize emptiness and freedom. Conventional truth is never rejected or refuted by emptiness realization. Rather, life is transformed. Conventional truth is also an antidote to nihilism. Nihilism would reject conventional truth altogether, and would also find itself bereft of tools to realize emptiness. Another reason that conventional truth is not rejected is that the two truths are identical; so if conventional truth were rejected, then this would entail the rejection of ultimate truth, emptiness itself!
Conventional Truth and Nihilism
A good relationship with conventional truth, which amounts to not rejecting it, can save us from a nihilism that says, “Conventional truths are mistaken about how things really exist, so I’m going to reject all of them. There’s no point. Nothing matters, and nothing helps.” You don’t have to think about these things or have a theory about conventional truth. At the same time, respecting conventional truth can prevent this kind of reaction to the emptiness teachings. And conventional truth provides the tools necessary to realize emptiness, which is a cure for both nihilism and its flipside, essentialism.
And just how much conventional truth do we need? According to the Madhyamika emptiness teachings, we need enough to function on a day-to-day basis. Conventional truth helps with compassion. That is, we need respect for conventional truth to help us recognize that other beings are not essentially different from ourselves, and that if we wish (and act upon our wish) that we fare well, then it makes just as much sense to wish (and act upon our wish) that others fare well.
Respecting conventional truth also gives us a good handle on the difference between conventional truth and conventional falsity. This in turn helps us with our emptiness meditations. Taking advantage of the logical relations provided by conventional truth, we perform emptiness meditations many times in many ways. Each time we experience the freeing insights into emptiness.
What the Two Truths Don’t Do
One thing that the two truths do not do is tell us which flavor of conventional truth we should adopt. We actually can’t think of any major way of life or spiritual tradition that can’t be pursued in a compatible way while studying emptiness (though perhaps the more orthodox representatives of some paths might not agree with this statement!). By “flavor” we mean way of life, or what Richard Rorty describes as “final vocabulary,” the words we find most comfortable and fitting when we explain our beliefs and actions.22 Is it perhaps Buddhism? Advaita? A monotheistic Western religion? Awareness-style non-dualism? Liberal humanism? Skepticism? Science? Art? Music or dance? Logically speaking, these are not mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive. But they can all be forms of life that take up a great part of a person’s thinking and energy. A person can be so involved with one of these activities or approaches to life that there is little or no time for the others.
Most of the traditional Madhyamika materials were written at a time when people didn’t face all these alternatives. There was an assumption in the texts that the conventional truth would be comprised of the set of Buddhist teachings themselves. Indeed, almost anyone who sets out to study emptiness would already be doing so from within a Buddhist context.
But what about now? In our day and age, we can no longer assume that anyone interested in emptiness teachings will encounter them in the context of Buddhism. We cannot recommend that you should adopt Buddhism if you wish to study emptiness! You may have a different way of life or final vocabulary already. And then there are the many congruent, non-Buddhist, non-essentialist teachings that we are writing about in this book. Some of them, such as the works of Wittgenstein or Derrida, have no historical connection to Buddhism whatsoever.
The relatively abstract two-truths teaching doesn’t tell us what our final vocabulary should be. Even though we need conventional truth in order to realize emptiness, the two-truth teaching does not tell us what our conventional truth should look like.
This silence on final vocabularies is actually an openness that can help us avoid nihilism! We don’t have to be Buddhist, and can indeed follow other paths. There are many paths, interests, subcultures and forms of life that you can embrace in conjunction with your emptiness study that are compatible and helpful.
The rest of this chapter will make some suggestions along these lines. We will return to this topic at the end of the book when we discuss living an empty life.
Four Possibilities
We would like to describe four (of countless) possible ways of life, candidates for types of conventional truth, which are compatible with studying emptiness and which can also help prevent nihilism. These possibilities can be thought of as guides to conventional truth. They can be engaged alone or in combination. Each one could serve as a matrix of experience, and as convention, need not come under the searching lens of ultimate analysis. Of course, there may come a time when you need to subject your own form of life to scrutiny. “Was I taking it as conventional? Or something more?” But this need not be done right away.
There are four approaches we can suggest at this point. We see the difference between these accounts more as a matter of style and personal temperament rather than a matter of hard facts or clear boundaries:
Science – Science gives an intuitive and commonly accepted way to speak about the world, including the physical, social and psychological worlds. Science gives people a good understanding of what to take as true or false, and what to consider as knowledge. Most people learn these ways of thinking during their education, so there is not too much to add here, except possibly to remind people not to regard science as ultimately true or inherently established. Sometimes science is so authoritative that it lends itself to be taken in this way. In fact, it can be a very fruitful emptiness meditation to critique the seeming objectivity of scientific claims and conclusions. In any case, the respect for reasoning that one finds in sc
ience is an effective antidote to nihilism and a superb assist in your emptiness meditation.
Conversation and dialogue – These are very useful mechanisms for establishing our joint reality in Western liberal democracies. Non-foundationalists like Richard Rorty have long emphasized the importance of conversation in a non-ontologically grounded (i.e. empty) world in which it is neither possible nor coherent to believe in fixed, objective, mind-independent truths. And at the same time, conversation yields abundant give-and-take for emptiness meditations. Many of the great philosophers who brought us emptiness teachings patterned their work as conversations or dialogues.
Poetry, art and religion – These forms of life can create beautiful, right-brained, conventional realities that seem quite different from the ones envisioned in a scientific or logical mindset. We are sensitive to the sort of things that Heidegger was getting at with his critique of technology, in which he argued that viewing the world exclusively through the grid of “technology” is an impoverished way of living. Thus poetry, art and religion disclose the world quite differently, making it beautiful and free, while at the same time providing enough normative guidance to use them in emptiness meditations. If you resonate with mysticism, these experiences can be just as important a part of your world as scientific truths.
Emptiness metaphors – Viewing the self and the world explicitly through emptiness metaphors and logical arguments is another way to look sensibly at the many phenomena. In other words, you can adopt the view and vocabulary of the emptiness teaching you are studying. You can adopt the language of Sextus, Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Quine, Rorty, Nagarjuna or whoever you are working with. This is in effect how the classic Buddhist emptiness teachings proceeded – they used their own models and metaphors based on the ethics, cosmology and psychology of the time. The students came to see the world accordingly, but in a lighthearted way.
