Someone asked a question recently: how or why would you make any decision if everything is empty in nature? This is indicating that they’re assuming if everything is empty in nature then nothing exists, and so why bother? You just ground to a halt and disappear. No!
This is the interesting point. What the Buddha’s saying is the cup having no intrinsic nature actually proves that there is a cup there. Buddha teaches this in the Heart Sutra.
In the Heart Sutra, the Buddha’s sitting and blissing out in meditation on emptiness, and he’s channeling his thoughts into his disciples’ minds, and they’re having a conversation – it’s really Buddha’s teachings. Shariputra and the other one, Avalokiteshvara, as a tenth-level bodhisattva, are having a chat. And then Avalokiteshvara starts telling Shariputra how to think, and he basically lists all the different phenomena – the categories of phenomena – according to the Buddhist worldview and how they’re all empty.
The first lot are the five aggregates, and the very first of those is called “form,” which means the physical part of us. So he says, “Form is empty” – but you could say cup or anything, doesn’t matter: cup is empty – and then he says, “Emptiness is form.” What he’s meaning is where you find form, a cup, or anything else, there is where, right there, you will find the emptiness of form, of cup, or of anything else.
Conventionally, there is a cup. We label it, we say “a cup.”
“What’s that, Mummy?”
“It’s a cup.”
“What’s a cup?”
“It’s a flat-bottomed clay container.” That’s the first part of the definition: it tells you its conventional characteristics.
And then you say, “But, Mummy, what is it? What does it do?” She says, “It holds my tea.”
And then she proves it by putting the tea in the cup and you see it fits the definition.
A cup is that which is a flat-bottomed clay container that holds my tea: that’s its conventional reality. We agree upon that, we shake hands on it. So now when I say, “Pass me the cup,” you won’t pass me the toilet, because we all agree on our definitions.
The trouble is as soon as we say, “there’s a cup,” because of the primordial ignorance, the root delusion, we overexaggerate the existence of cup, we embellish it by imposing upon it this inherent, intrinsic, external, out-there cup from its own side, having nothing to do with me: there it is, out there. And that’s a complete fabrication.
The problem isn’t that we’ve said there’s a cup there; the problem is that we exaggerate the status of the cup.
That’s what all the delusions do: attachment exaggerates its deliciousness; this ignorance exaggerates its very ontological status. As Lama Zopa says, the delusions decorate on top of what is there layers upon layers upon layers of characteristics that just aren’t there.
So then we hear, “Oh, well, the cup is empty, there’s nothing from the side of the cup that makes it a cup,” we assume then there’s no cup. That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that’s “falling into the abyss of the great mistake,” as Lama Tsongkhapa puts it.
Buddha’s saying is, “Cup is empty of intrinsic cupness.” And then he says – turn it around – “Emptiness is cup.” In other words, how can you have the emptiness of intrinsic cup without a cup in the first place? The absence of inherent cup is a characteristic of a conventional cup.
If we say, “Oh, everything’s empty, there’s nothing, it’s all empty,” that’s completely nihilistic. That’s like absurdly not true. That cannot be the meaning of emptiness – it is evident to anyone with half a brain that there is not nothingness!
This approach here says there is a cup, there is a mala, there is a toilet, there is pee-pee, there is kaka, there is a computer. We can label them all: we can say there is good, there is bad; there is up, down; there is six inches, two inches. This is conventional reality!
We have created it, yes, but it doesn’t disappear into a puff of smoke when we see its emptiness. Okay, you stop creating pee-pee and kaka and cups and penises once you’ve achieved liberation on the basis of having realized emptiness, that’s true, but it doesn’t deny that they exist.
Everything that exists, in the Buddhist approach – everything that exists – is a knowable phenomenon, so it has to exist somewhere.
You can have a generality called “cups,” but if you want to cognize cup, you have to have a thing called a “cup” in front of you. You can talk about emptiness in general, but if you want to cognize emptiness, you have to find a phenomenon that possesses the characteristic of emptiness.
Emptiness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Emptiness is a characteristic of that which exists and therefore it’s a cognizable phenomenon: it exists.
So when you’ve realized the emptiness of cups and of people and of things and of compassion, everything, then you live vibrantly and blissfully and you’ll have compassion for every living being, and you’ll only want to help them.
I don’t know, what do you think?