We finish the exploration of prajna with this longer passage on Emptiness by Norman Fischer from his book "The World Could Be Otherwise":
Understanding in Mahayana Buddhism means, specifically, understanding the empty nature of all phenomena… The word usually translated as “emptiness” is sunyata in Sanskrit. It comes from a root word suggesting swelling, something puffed up and hollow, with nothing inside, like a balloon. Emptiness implies a kind of deception. Beings, all things, thoughts, ideas, feelings—these are all deceptive. They seem to be something big and full, like a balloon, but when you prick them, they pop, Wizard of Oz–like. Like the Wizard, they are empty, completely lacking the substantiality they appear to have.
Over the centuries, Buddhists have put it like this: Things don’t actually exist. To say they do is an exaggeration, an overstatement of the case.Existence is an illusion. But to say things don’t exist isn’t right either. How could it be, when throughout our whole life we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and feel the world? Being is a paradox. The middle way, Mahayana Buddhists have said, isn’t, as originally conceived, a path of moderation between asceticism and sensuality; it’s the middle ground between the two extremes of existence and nonexistence. It’s the way things really are, neither existing nor not existing: empty, ungraspable, ineffable. As concluded in another of the perfection of understanding sutras, the Diamond Sutra, being is like a dream, a phantom, a flash of lightning, a magic show, a bubble, a dewdrop.
A balloon is empty of things but full of air. An empty glass is empty of liquid but also full of air. If being is empty, what is it empty of? And what is it full of?
The technical answer to the first question is that beings are empty of svabhava, own-being... To be empty of own-being is to lack independent substantial being—such as a soul or an essential consciousness—that can be isolated and grasped… Our mistaken notion of svabhava, or own-being, is what ties feeling-sensation in a painful knot. Without knowing we are doing it, we viscerally impute to things a deeply, almost physically held sense that they are there in a way they actually aren’t. If we truly appreciated that things are not there in the way we think they are, that they are there in some completely different way, we would not react to them in the way we normally do. Our pain would disentangle from its false support.
What about the second question? Like the empty balloon and the empty glass, if beings are empty of own-being, what are they full of? They are full of connection; they are full of one another; they are so radically interdependent they cannot exist in their own right as separately existent entities. There are, in fact, no things: there is only the endless ebb and flow of being, Avalokiteshvara’s compassionate ocean.
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Today’s talk comes from a year-long exploration of the paramitas, the perfecting qualities that lead to liberation, offered by HaiAn during the Thursday Meditations. Email haian@dharmapathways for the link to join these sessions on Zoom.
This session explores aspects of the sixth paramita, prajna or wisdom. If you’re unfamiliar with the paramitas, Chapter 25 in Thich Nhat Hanh’s “The Heart fo the Buddha’s Teaching” offers an introduction and Norman Fischer’s “The World Could be Otherwise” gives a deeper dive. The paramitas are related to the parami, in Pali, for the Theravada tradition.
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