Emptiness: The Cup is Empty, Long Live the Cup!

Emptiness is a fundamental teaching of Buddhism, and one of the most difficult to accept. At face value emptiness seems like a very negative word. If I'm drinking coffee and my cup becomes empty then I have run out of coffee and it's no reason to celebrate. If my wallet is empty then I have no money and there's no reason to celebrate. If I open a present to find an empty box, I would not be happy.

Emptiness is a translation from the word Sunyata, which can also be translated to voidness. But, as always, language is rarely capable of depicting meaning. In Buddhism, emptiness is a very positive word as it defines the love of life and existence itself, and membership to the family of the universe, to the family of God. Emptiness promotes objects, it doesn't demote them or deny them. It puts objects away from loneliness and into the arms of God.

There was once a man who swept roads for a living. One morning he was sitting down with a friend and said "You know I've had this broom for 17 years, this broom is my best and oldest companion". The friend was amazed, "17 Years? That's a long time!". The road sweeper explained, "Yes it is! I've only changed the handle 8 times and the brush 5 times.".

So we can see that the broom is not really a broom of 17 years. Yet if we were to look even more deeply into the broom we would see that even the brush is not really a brush. It is wood from a tree, that arose from the dirt in which it was planted. The bristles come from a horse perhaps, that was fed on grass and water. Somebody looked after the horse, his love for the horse perhaps was taught to him by his father. A horse, grass, trees, sunshine, water, people and their ancestors: You can say the brush is all of these things. If you take away all the components of a brush you are left with nothing, so the brush itself is empty yet at the same time full of everything.

What makes this a wonderful concept is that it means that the brush shares its existence with everything else in the universe. It is not just a brush, it is a part of a family, the family of God. It is inter-dependent. As Thich Nhat Hanh would say, it inter-is.

In being mindful we can look deeply into the existence of everything in our daily life and see its true nature, we can see that it touches everything in the universe. By being mindful of this we understand the family nature of the universe, and that everything we do effects this family. Every action has a result or consequences. This is the basis of Karma in Buddhism, a topic for another post.

The fact that everything effects members of this universal family is the basis of the Buddhist code of morality, true compassion. You see that when another is suffering, you are suffering. When another is happy, you are happy. It is really not that different to the Golden Rule, of altruism.

However it should be noted that this view of emptiness does go against some schools of Buddhism, in which the concept is seen a negative against the self. These schools are quite nihilistic in their perspective. It was the Mahayanan tradition that brought balance to the teachings by emphasizing emptiness as being empty of atomicity, of autonomy, not just empty of existence. In this sense Mahayana has compassion as a basic fundamental, derived from the simple concept of interbeing. Mahayana Buddhism is life affirming, not life denying. Every part of life is a part of the universal family, the one consciousness, and every part of that family is as important as the family itself.

Emptiness, of course, goes beyond what a Christian can accept. Christians believe that the universe was made by God as a gift to man. Under this belief you can say that man is justified in doing anything with these gifts as they are his. The morality in Christianity stems purely from following the life of Jesus and of the ten commandments.

Christians do not believe that humans are born purely from components, but that each human is instilled with a divine spirit. So humans are not empty in that sense. The Christian view of emptiness therefore constitutes mortality, that life can indeed end, and only the divine spirit can live on in heaven.

We'll leave the Buddhist view of rebirth to another post, suffice to say that it is quite obvious how rebirth arises from the simple concept of emptiness.