Emptiness

[Rick]

I'm opening this thread as a catch-all for my questions and comments about emptiness ... so that I won't be tempted to open a new thread every time an insight or confusion around emptiness comes to me.

My hope is that the thread will be of use to others who are also interested in deepening their understanding of emptiness.

[Rick]

This came to me earlier today:

It's all in my head.

Everything I feel, sense, experience. Everything (I think) I know about myself, others, the world. It's all (in) my mind.

My mind creates my experience, and since I apprehend the world through experience, my mind creates the (my) world.

[dzogchungpa]

Here's a quote about emptiness from Conze's "Buddhist Thought in India":

As salt flavours food, so śūnyatā, or emptiness, should pervade the religious life, and give flavour to it. By themselves neither salt nor emptiness are particularly palatable or nourishing. When 'emptiness' is treated as a philosophical concept by untutored intellects which have no wisdom, it causes much bewilderment and remains barren of spiritual fruits. All that it is then good for is to produce futile assertions of the type that 'emptiness is not nothingness', and so on.

[Rick]

Regarding noumena = the actual existents that mind experiences as phenomena:

By definition, I (my mind) cannot know the true nature of noumena or, indeed, whether or not they actually exist. I can speculate, but that's about it.

So, any theories I have about noumena, such as the essential tree-ness of a tree, are at best, guesses. Which is fine. But guesses, no matter how strong the intuitive feeling behind them might be, should not be confused with certainty.

For this reason, it might make good sense for me to think and speak only about experienceable phenomena, and hold my mind and tongue when it comes to speculation about noumena.

[Bakmoon]

Perhaps it would be good for you to study some western philosophy on the subject. There's the writings of George Berkely where he lays out his arguments for subjective idealism (I don't agree with his conclusions, but he brings up a lot of important issues) and then the writings of philosophers who held to a phenomenalist understanding such as David Hume and John Stuart Mills.

Of course, the greatest philosopher with something to say on this issue is Immanuel Kant but you don't just read him for fun. Kant is much more challanging than these other philosophers so I would save him for last, but don't feel bad if you have a very hard time understanding him.

[Rick]

I *am* reading Western philosophy, for the first time ever (except for one course in college).

I'm familiar with the guys you mentioned, from secondary sources, not from working through the original texts (except excerpts).

I got the terms noumena and phenomena from Kant. (Thank you, Immanuel.) Berkeley leaves me scratching my head. Hume interests me quite a bit, especially his take on causality. And Bentham and Mill make lots of sense to me, in that I also see human thought and behavior as being (very) largely the product of moving towards pleasure and away from pain.

The Western philosophers who interest me the most are the process guys: Whitehead, Deleuze, even all the way back to Heraclitus. I find tremendous connection between process philosophy and Buddhism. I truly believe Western and Eastern philosophy complement each other, perhaps even "complete" each other (to quote Jerry Maguire).

[Bakmoon]

I'm familiar with the guys you mentioned, from secondary sources, not from working through the original texts (except excerpts).

I highly recommend that you focus on reading their original writings. Secondary sources are useful for understanding philosophers in the same way that travel guides are useful for visiting new places: they lead you to the most important features and they help you avoid getting too lost. But you will never have real understanding of a philosopher until you finally read them in their own words, just like you will never be able to have the experience of traveling to a foreign country just by reading a travel guide. This is because most secondary sources focus on listing out their main positions and summarizing a few of their arguments, but you can't learn philosophy that way. You need to be able to understand, follow, and critically assess each argument they make and every position they take, not just a few.

It may sound very intimidating for me to tell you to read these philosophers especially considering their very dense language, but from listening to you on this forum I can tell that you have the nessisary intellect to do this.

I got the terms noumena and phenomena from Kant. (Thank you, Immanuel.) Berkeley leaves me scratching my head. Hume interests me quite a bit, especially his take on causality. And Bentham and Mill make lots of sense to me, in that I also see human thought and behavior as being (very) largely the product of moving towards pleasure and away from pain.

The writings of all of these philosophers are quite relevant. Berkeley presents very deep and probing arguments that, for a properly prepared person, should be enough to have them seriously question their assumptions about the world. John Stuart Mills is very important though, because he wrote about the question of what it means to say that something exists in his book An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.

[muni]

All great philosophers!

The sky thinking to be a cloud, forgetting to be sky... Then these clouds start to know all about the sky. I always have been wondering, how far clouds can go with this?

[Kaccāni]

For this reason, it might make good sense for me to think and speak only about experienceable phenomena, and hold my mind and tongue when it comes to speculation about noumena.

I'll make 10 extra prostrations for this insight.

Best wishes
Kc

[daelm]

For this reason, it might make good sense for me to think and speak only about experienceable phenomena, and hold my mind and tongue when it comes to speculation about noumena.

yes. you might also see practice then as simply being the business of patiently increasing the range of experience-able phenomena, until it includes the noumena.

[Rick]

Insight of the Day:

This object that I'm holding in my hand ... it's pink, it has a handle with a certain shape, a bunch of flexible plastic bristles arranged in an oval, a weight, a texture. I can run it over the fur of my cat, and he purrs like mad.

So what is it? Well, it's a brush. Or, if I'm being clever, it's a thing with no name, brush is simply an interpretation I impose on it. But if I look deeper I notice that even if I don't name it, I think of it as a *thing* that *possesses* (owns) certain characteristics: color, weight, texture, etc. But is it? There clearly is color, weight, texture etc. But do these "belong" to anything ... or do they just happen to coexist in an interdependent relationship?

This is starting to remind me more and more of an optical illusion, where you see the conventional interpretation of an image, and then every so often, quite rarely, you see something else ... and you wonder if you've gone a bit mad.

[Rick]

For this reason, it might make good sense for me to think and speak only about experienceable phenomena, and hold my mind and tongue when it comes to speculation about noumena.

I'll make 10 extra prostrations for this insight.

Best wishes
Kc

Thanks! I appreciate (and need) all the help I can get.

[Rick]

For this reason, it might make good sense for me to think and speak only about experienceable phenomena, and hold my mind and tongue when it comes to speculation about noumena.

yes. you might also see practice then as simply being the business of patiently increasing the range of experience-able phenomena, until it includes the noumena.

Nice! But I have to be a bit careful with things like this, or I'll start to set grokking noumena as a goal, and then I'll get all starry eyed and lose touch with the reality of my current state of understanding.

[Rick]

"Emptiness is not something made up by the mind; this is how things have been from the start." — the Dalai Lama

This seems to indicate that emptiness itself is not empty. But everything is empty, so why should emptiness be exempt?

[tomschwarz]

dear rachmiel from beginningless time! I think that you know the answer to this one ))). of course, it is exactly as you said it. All that is in you mind, which is all that you know, is (has been) created by your mind. That is relative truth. Enter absolute truth, the truth of interdependence, aka emptiness: why is your mind now thinking, ah tomschwarz! My dear friend and supporter from beginningless time! ...because you are not alone in there. Actually everything that you create (d) in your mind is dependent on beings/phenomena outside of your mind. You are like my father now cradling me in your mind. Thank you.

[SeeLion]

It's all in my head.

That's not emptiness, that's fullness.

You should fully empty your head, that's what emptiness is

To me emptiness is non-attachment.

It's a trap: If one thinks too much about emptiness, one becomes attached to it (well, more to the results of the thinking).

[Bakmoon]

"Emptiness is not something made up by the mind; this is how things have been from the start." — the Dalai Lama

This seems to indicate that emptiness itself is not empty. But everything is empty, so why should emptiness be exempt?

That's misunderstanding what is meant. What His Holiness means is that the fact that things are empty remains true if you know about it or not, or whether you have realized it or not. It is very much the case that emptiness itself is also empty. In fact the first translation of the Madhyamakavatara I ever read was in a book called "The Emptiness of Emptiness" which was a translation and an introductory essay.

[Kaccāni]

Yes. Emptiness itself is empty. Now go down that recursion until you drop out

Mu, ku, ku ku, kukuruku.

Best wishes
Kc

[Rick]

Bakmoon: But doesn't emptiness say that all empty things are "made up by the mind?" Also, if emptiness is how it's been "from the start," doesn't this imply inherent existence?

Kaccani: The rabbit hole beckons.

[Karma Dondrup Tashi]

It's all in my head.

Sounds like you are moving from Sautrantika to Chittamatra view.

Progress.