A friend recently sent an essay from 2006 by Than Geoff (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) on emptiness. Than Geoff studied meditation and Buddhism in Thailand for many years and ordained there as a Buddhist monk. He is a prolific writer, speaker, and meditation teacher and a member of the Forest Monks, a school in Thai Buddhism that advocates living in the forest and meditating in the wilderness like the Buddha did. The essay has lots of good advice about life and meditation practice, but I believe he makes an error in his assumptions about how the human mind works and a quite fundamental error when talking about emptiness.
Than Geoff starts by asserting that a metaphysical view on emptiness basically isn't much help if you are addicted to alcohol or other unskillful behaviors. He says that the problem is tactical: you believe that drinking alcohol to excess will increase your happiness more than the negative impact it will have on your short and long term health, family and work relations, and your ability to function in society. He then states that the solution needs to be tactical. A view that alcohol is somehow empty of any real existence isn't going to help you become unaddicted and lead to skillful behaviors that foster longer term happiness. While this advice is sound on the surface, it represents a misunderstanding of the neurobiology of addiction. Most people that suffer from some kind of addictive behavior don't really make a cognitive tradeoff ("alcohol today == more happiness for me today but less tomorrow!").
Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist and former professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, outlines the problem clearly in this recent essay at Aeon. The problem is that the human system consisting of the brain, body, and mind falls into a dynamic attractor that basically generates a lot of negative side effects for the person, but they can't get out of it by simple cognitive reasoning because other, stronger parts of the brain that are unresponsive to logic are in control, namely those involved in emotions and reward/punishment. Dynamic attractors are states in dynamical systems that are stable but not static, in that they can continue running through the exactly same states for a long time undisturbed. What is needed to break out of such an attractor is some emotional push. Lewis gives the example of a woman who was addicted to opiate pain killers. The woman was caught on a camera in her mother-in-law's bedroom stealing pills. The emotional trauma of being confronted with the evidence forced her into therapy and then she stopped. Lewis is also quite critical of the dominant meme regarding addiction, of medicalizing it and treating it as a disease.
But back to Than Geoff. Than Geoff goes on to say that the Buddha talked about emptiness in three distinct ways in the Pali Canon:
- As an approach to meditation,
- As an attribute to the senses and their objects,
- As a state of concentration.
In the first approach, more really was involved than meditation. The approach was to practice in general. Than Geoff starts by discussing a sutta in which the Buddha talks with his son, Rahula, about skillful and unskillful action, an aspect of sila. He recommends for Rahula to reflect on an action before undertaking it, and note whether any harm will come out of it. Similarly, the Buddha recommended that monks go from a village to the forest for meditation and note that the forest was empty of any of the disturbances that the monk would encounter in a village. And finally, the Buddha recommended when trying to attain the higher jhanas, to note the disturbance due to emotional tones in the mind when in the lower jhanas and drop them. Each of these tactical actions consists of seeing how cognitively dropping some set of actions/thoughts results in a reduction of harm, where "harm" in the case of the jhanas is interpreted to mean emotional disturbance. So one can see progressing through the improvement of sila (noting the absence of certain negative emotional states associated with unskillful actions), to basic vipassana meditation (noting the absence of village distractions in the forest), through to the higher jhanas (the disturbance caused by piti in the 3rd jhana which is gone in the 4th). The result of applying the cognitive corrective is that the resulting mind states are empty of in some sense harmful attributes.
I believe this approach to meditation practice could be valuable, but it has really never worked for me. My meditation is only under loose cognitive control, and typically I need to just establish an intention to reach some state and either I do or I don't. Typically, when I'm really sitting well, cognitive factors will drop away and my mind will be working at a more intuitive level, with a high degree of somatic (body-centered) feeling involved. Its never worked for me, for example when in access concentration, to say to myself: "This mind state is disturbed by thinking. First jhana, where there is no thinking, would be much more pleasant so I will drop thinking." On the other hand, the tactical cognitive approach has worked quite well for me in the area of skillful v.s. unskillful action. In the past, I've been able to keep my weight down by considering the consequences (more difficulty walking, less agility, the risk of diabetes and heart disease, etc.) of eating too much and exercising too little.
Than Geoff says that the second way the Buddha talks about emptiness is as an attribute to the senses and their objects. In Samyutta Nikaya 35.85, the Buddha recommends to Ananda to note that the world and the six senses (hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and the mind sense) are empty of self or anything pertaining to self. From a philosophical standpoint, the Theravada holds that the self is empty, that is, there is no object within a person that exists from its own side which constitutes the self, nor is there anything out in the world that constitutes such a self. That doesn't mean that the self does not exist, just that it is not a self-existent thing. The self is like a car*, in that it consists of parts which are conceptually designated by the term "self" for economy of cognitive processing. The self has no existence from its own side, if any of the constituent parts were missing, so would be the self. The Theravada holds that many objects are also constituted as aggregates of smaller objects, and therefore are just conceptual. Not-self or non-self is one of the three Marks of Existence (the other two being impermanence and suffering). Than Geoff goes on to discuss some practical aspects of the not-self view.
The problem is, if you drill down into the Theravada philosophical view, emptiness isn't an attribute, its the fundamental basis of all reality. Saying emptiness is an attribute of some object is like saying that space is an attribute of the universe. Saying space is an attribute means that the universe can appear either with or without space, which is of course nonsense because space (and of course time) defines the universe. Similarly, according to the Madhyamika view of Nagarjuna, emptiness is not optional. Nothing in the universe of samsara and nirvana has any real, self-existence from its own side. Nagarjuna presents the philosophical argument for this view in his Mulamadhyamikakarika (Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way) which I've been studying for the last 5 months. You can see some of my previous blog posts on the topic here and here.
The final way Than Geoff identifies the Buddha talking about emptiness is as a state of concentration, namely the 9th jhana (5th formless jhana), cessation, or nirodha samapatti. In a couple suttas, the Buddha recommends pursuing the above mentioned approach, noting the unpleasant nature of particular emotional attributes or sensations, beyond the form jhanas into complete cessation of all sensory and cognitive activity. This attainment is quite distinct from a path moment, which occurs quite suddenly and as a result of cultivating awareness of the three Marks of Existence, not the impact of some mind states on your relaxation and pleasure as for nirodha.
I suspect that Than Geoff's motivation in writing this essay was to appeal to people who were having difficulty with sila related problems like addictions or with basic meditation practice. As evidence, I would note that he spends relatively little time on the third way he identifies the Buddha as having talked about emptiness, with respect to the other two. Getting into nirodha is quite an advanced attainment, in some reports, only open to people who have achieved the 4th path moment, so it would be of little interest to folks with more basic problems. But I think he could have done a better job by leaving emptiness out of the picture, and just talked about not-self. Not-self is good for dealing with all kinds of problems and perfectly consistent with the Theravada philosophical approach. Emptiness is somewhat deeper and more tricky, and best left to Mahayana philosophers like Nagarjuna.
* The traditional analogy is to a chariot, but when was the last time you saw a chariot?
Image source: http://awakeningtimes.com
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