Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

For now let us just make one point in this connection. Often when we are suffering, some emptiness view or other is quite capable of dissolving or substantially reducing that suffering. Sometimes just dissolving it thus is fine. Sometimes though, that suffering may be felt to be an integral part of one’s humanity, so that it might seem necessary to

To begin to more accurately comprehend what emptiness means and why it is regarded as the most significant aspect of the Dharma, so central and vital on the path of awakening, we can follow the Buddha in tracing the question of suffering to its root. It’s clear that our lives, at least at times, involve suffering (dukkha in Pali) – pain, dis-ease,

Voidness, the roots of suffering, and the way things seem to be

Emptiness – in Pali, suññatā, in Sanskrit, śūnyatā, which may also be translated as ‘voidness’ – is deep and subtle, however, not easy to see or explain, and in many respects it is even counter-intuitive. It is extremely rare for a full realization to come suddenly. Almost always a journey of understanding is required, one that liberates gradually.

We understand: this is neither nihilism nor reification. As the Zen saying puts it: “True emptiness equals wondrous being.”

To say that all things are void, however, is not to say that they don’t exist at all. Emptiness is not nihilism. Clearly and undeniably there are appearances of things and those appearances follow reliable laws and function in terms of predictable cause and effect. It turns out, rather, that to see that something is empty is to see that it is beyon

Realizing voidness dissolves dukkha Unquestioningly but mistakenly then, we intuitively sense and believe in this inherent existence of phenomena, in ‘real’ experiences of a ‘real’ self in a world of ‘real’ things. Now, in itself, this may strike some as a rather abstract or irrelevant piece of metaphysical philosophizing. But as alluded to earlier

A core insight repeatedly insisted on in this book is that fundamentally what gets us into trouble are the ways we typically view things, and our blind clinging to these ways of seeing. At the roots of our suffering – primary in engendering, perpetuating, and exacerbating it – are our habitual conceptions and the ways of looking they spawn. It is t

Voidness and impermanence Of course, the analogy of the holographic tiger is also limited in a number of ways. Exactly what it means to say that all things are ‘not real’ we will uncover gradually through this book, since, as we have said, it can only properly be comprehended through the development of deeper meditative insight. What the analogy do