Question by J9900: In Buddhism, how do you see emptiness in all phenomena?
According to Zen Master Linji, “Right view is to see in a penetrating way the mark of emptiness of all phenomena.” How do you do this?
Best answer:
Answer by roadside confessions
http://www.gotquestions.org/buddhism.html
Add your own answer in the comments!
By contemplating impermanence.
Let me try to explain this in plain English. Everything in this world is a result of the chain of cause and effect arising out of emptiness. So, let’s say we are this awareness in this emptiness. There’s really nothing to be aware about since there is nothing in the first place. When the first thing comes about, say the white background we know as emptiness appears, that’s when awareness becomes aware of the emptiness. That’s the first thing in the chain of cause and effect. Then say, your body pops up floating in that emptiness, you can see your hands and feet, and somehow you associate it with your self. A mirror pops up and you see your self so you really start to think the awareness is your body. Then, a floor pops up, then walls, etc…origination by dependence. Everything in the chain of cause and effect around you reinforces the illusion that the awareness is the body of yours. However, the ultimate truth is that you are just the awareness or emptiness witnessing/experiencing the moment.
When we become attached to the illusion that we are our body and not the awareness/emptiness that is experiencing the moment, we experience suffering. Why? Because our body gets sick and our body grows old. Our body is not really our body because we don’t have total control over it – otherwise, we can tell it not to get sick and not to grow old. Our body is like a rented apartment. We still have to keep it in good condition if we want to have a decent lifestyle although it does not belong to us. However, if the wall cracks a little in our rented apartment, do we become so attached to it that we fuss over it day and night like we would do if it were our own house? Same thing goes with our body. If we are too attached to it, we suffer. It’s all in our mind.
After that realization, you can’t really do much with it since you are still part of awareness/emptiness that is experiencing the body of yours. Welcome back to reality. However, now you realize that there are two extremes – complete emptiness in which there is no awareness and a world filled with things. So you take the middle way of realizing that you are the awareness that is emptiness, not the complete emptiness (of which, there is nothing to realize) but the one with the white background. Then, you become less attached to anything in this world, less emotional and less prone to suffering. That is enlightenment and the subsequent coming back to reality – something which cannot be effectively explained in words.
Our cells die at each moment and new ones are regenerated. Same applies to the pathways in our brains. So we are reincarnated at each moment as we are never exactly the same person with each passing moment. Were we the same person as we were before we changed into our current self? Were we the same person before we experienced a certain something in life which changed our perspective of life, our religion, or our philosophy?
It doesn’t always take such life changing moments if we care to notice the little differences in our body and all around us as time passes. We are reborn at each moment and at each moment, we can make a decision that will affect how we will be reincarnated in the next. From this perspective, each of our decision results in karma or cause and effect which triggers what will happen the next moment as a result of our actions. If we link up the nodes of each decisions we make at each moment, it becomes the chain of cause and effect or karmic constituents of our life. Once we realize this, we can stop mental suffering by not being attached to our decisions. The past is just a memory which is judged by our brain and different people have different perspectives of the past. The future has not even begun yet. The ultimate truth is right here right now at this very moment without the thoughts of our brain judging it. We often only see what our mind thinks and our body feels but not what we are really looking at. What we are really looking at is emptiness/awareness in all phenomena before our mind decides to carve it out from nothing and give it a name.
Think about how you started this life as a one-cell embryo. And how have you become you? Is that embryo you or you now is you? What about you teenager? And later?
Why don’t you look like the embryo any longer? Can you go back to that stage right now?
You see all you dan say is ‘NO’.
That is how you can try to understand things through reasoning that ‘nothing is permanent’. The impermanent things can not be something that is the entity you think you are.
Likewise, you are made of parts and processes. You would like to say the aggregate of these parts and processes are you. Then think again how independent these parts and processes are – none of them listen to your command. You may move your arm but things that makes your arms won’t listen to your command. Like immune system, all systems in you are all by themselves. When you get hungry – think if that is you hungry or is that the stomach in its processes that makes you think you are hungry.
Finally, these things are born, live and die – like your pets. If you look after them they can be fine – but they are fighting things that come against them that you can help them by taking medication and good nutrition.
After reading above, you got to answer what you really are. Whether they are you or you are them. Or you are just empty.
There are online sources you get seek out for answers. Please google search this – ‘buddhism emptiness’.
Emptiness means everything one encounters in life is indeed exists, but like everything in this world, its existence is inter-related and mutually dependent on other phenomena. Nothing possesses absolute identity, permanence, or an in-dwelling ‘self’.
What appears to our ordinary consciousness as a rose in bloom, is actually a rose in process. Through time lapse photography, we can see the crest and trough of the energy of the Rose as it generates buds, blooms, drops flowers and begins again, all the while growing in the process. Along side all the visible manifestations of process are the myriad aspects of its interaction with the other forces of the garden. The Rose interacts with the soil, taking in nutrients and dropping leaves and flowers to add new nutrients, hosting insects and the insects feeding each other, breathing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
Nothing about the rose is static, in fact its very being is in interaction. Our consciousness defines it as a thing, however, a unit which is separate from the other units in the minds arena. It is either experienced as foreground or background. When the mind contemplates a garden, it delegates the rose to the role of background, and when it considers the rose itself, the sky or the garden wall becomes the background. The reality of rose, however, is in its interaction with its environment. The names rose, garden, sky, earth are mere tools of the intellect and communication; having no real relationship to the reality of the phenomenon itself. This is always a matter of mutual interaction or better put, interpenetration. The Buddhist term mutual interpenetration recognizes the absolute coincidence of being that is an environment. Every aspect of the garden is effecting and being effected by all other aspects — simultaneously. The evidence of this reality is recognized in many disciplines; from ecology to particle physics. The essential point for the Zen student to realize is that his own being itself is also sharing in this interpenetration. There is no abiding reality of self outside of this interpenetration; no permanent soul, mind or spirit that is not one with this eternal interchange.
Understanding this reality is to have Wisdom, and Wisdom’s expression is compassion. Not just loving others as you would have them love you, but loving others because they are you! This is the real nature of love, the recognition of mutual identity. Just as the real nature of hate and fear is the ignorance of real self, which sees the world as a series of things outside of itself.