By Victor M Fontane
“Buddhists believe neither in a creator god, nor in an independently existent self,” His Holiness explained. “In the first turning of the wheel of dharma, his first teaching, the Buddha referred to causality and the selflessness of persons. In the second turning, he also indicated the selflessness of phenomena, their lack of intrinsic existence. What he taught during the third turning of the wheel became the basis of the Mind Only School of thought.
The wish for freedom, the altruistic intention to be of ultimate benefit to others, and the wisdom realizing emptiness constitute the three principal aspects of the path to enlightenment, three insights that form the indispensable support for all the practices of both sutra and tantra.
“Emptiness” or “voidness” is an expression used in Buddhist thought primarily to mark a distinction between the way things appear to be and the way they actually are, together with attendant attitudes which are held to be spiritually beneficial.
"Emptiness" is a central teaching of all Buddhism, but its true meaning is often misunderstood. If we are ever to embrace Buddhism properly into the West, we need to be clear about emptiness, since a wrong understanding of its meaning can be confusing, even harmful. The third century Indian Buddhist master Nagarjuna taught, "Emptiness wrongly grasped is like picking up a poisonous snake by the wrong end." In other words, we will be bitten!
Emptiness is not complete nothingness; it doesn't mean that nothing exists at all. This would be a nihilistic view contrary to common sense. What it does mean is that things do not exist the way our grasping self supposes they do. In his book on the Heart Sutra the Dalai Lama calls emptiness "the true nature of things and events," but in the same passage he warns us "to avoid the misapprehension that emptiness is an absolute reality or an independent truth." In other words, emptiness is not some kind of heaven or separate realm apart from this world and its woes.
The Heart Sutra says, "all phenomena in their own-being are empty." It doesn't say "all phenomena are empty." This distinction is vital. "Own-being" means separate independent existence. The passage means that nothing we see or hear (or are) stands alone; everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape. So though no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity, everything taken together is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls "interbeing." This term embraces the positive aspect of emptiness as it is lived and acted by a person of wisdom -- with its sense of connection, compassion and love. Think of the Dalai Lama himself and the kind of person he is -- generous, humble, smiling and laughing -- and we can see that a mere intellectual reading of emptiness fails to get at its practical joyous quality in spiritual life. So emptiness has two aspects, one negative and the other quite positive.
Comentarios