The Three Principle Aspects of the Path Part 7

Emptiness is one of those Buddhist teachings that gets misunderstood almost as soon as the word comes out of someone's mouth. It sounds bleak. It sounds nihilistic. It sounds like the spiritual path is asking us to dissolve into nothingness, or to adopt some cool, detached attitude toward our lives and the people in them.

It's none of that.

In verse 10 of The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, Je Tsongkhapa points to what emptiness actually is — and what it isn't. This piece picks up where verse 9 left off. There, Tsongkhapa laid out the reasoning for why we need to meditate on non-dual wisdom in the first place. Here in verse 10, he tells us what we're actually cultivating.

A quick recap of where we are

The first two principles of the path are renunciation mind and bodhicitta.

Renunciation mind is really coming to a clear and definitive sobriety around life. Life has ups and downs. There are causes and conditions for that. And any dead ends we feel we're walking into, we have to investigate. Renunciation mind is finding some exhaustion with those dead ends — with how we're working with our emotions or thoughts, or with the dead end of seeking out outcomes in our life that continue to deceive and disappoint us. Slowly, we start to turn the mind away from those actions, behaviors, and habit patterns, and we start to see the genuine causes of our suffering more clearly.

This leads into bodhicitta — the altruistic mind that wishes freedom from dukkha not only for ourselves but for all sentient beings, and that aspires to attain awakening for the benefit of all of them. You can see how things build on each other. Without renunciation mind, bodhicitta isn't really possible, because we haven't done enough investigation into our own dissatisfaction to grow a sustainable and effective compassion for others.

Verse 9, and now verse 10, ask a different question: how do we actually free ourselves?

Cultivating new habits, growing as a person, fostering more loving and compassionate conduct — that's all well and fine, and Buddhism teaches how to do that. But there's a deeper-rooted bondage at the core of the Buddhist teachings — a misperception of self and other. Some kind of overlay, a projection, a habit pattern that's very deeply rooted, almost intuitive and primal, that we perpetuate. It's also difficult to uproot. It's difficult to even see.

A small detour through the 1960s

Generally, in Buddhism, we wouldn't know about this misperception until we encounter the teachings, or we encounter some kind of experience that shakes up our perspective on life — on how we work with our identities, how we hold ourselves and others, what we believe.

There are other ways to get this experience. One of my teachers, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, was — at least to my impression — quite a traditional Buddhist teacher, though nuanced and innovative in some ways. And yet on multiple occasions I heard him thank psychedelics for ushering in a chance for Buddhism and other Indic traditions to come into the West. I don't think he was a psychedelic user himself. But he thought the movement of the '60s and '70s, the social acceptance of psychedelics, opened the minds of people to, "Oh, things aren't as they appear." And then, of course, at some point those people wanted to seek out a path, and the Indian traditions are full of non-dual teachings on how to open up our perspective toward ourselves and life.

We're not cultivating psychedelic experiences in meditation. I personally don't believe psychedelics can take us all the way. I think they can give us glimpses, and then we need a path, some richer content to bring into our practice to really shift things in a more — for lack of a better word — permanent way. After a psychedelic experience, at some point everything reconstitutes. The ego reconstitutes, or we reconstitute the ego around a new psychedelic experience. That happens all the time. I just want to offer that there are other doorways and windows here.

What emptiness is actually pointing to

Emptiness is not about nothingness. It's about understanding what we're putting on top of what already exists.

This isn't too difficult to see in everyday life. Think of the last time you were in an interpersonal exchange where someone said a certain thing, or made a facial expression, or there was some body language, and you got really offended. I can't believe they said that. I can't believe they're so angry at me. I didn't do anything. And then, after some time, maybe you ask the person, or you find out some other way, and they tell you, "Oh no, I wasn't thinking that at all. I just ate something bitter and made that face." Or, "I was thinking about something else." Or, "I didn't intend that with the word I used."

If we genuinely feel there was a misperception, something almost magical happens. All that resentment and frustration toward the person — all of it built up — has the potential to just dissolve. Why? Because it wasn't true. It wasn't real. It was made up by our mind.

This happens all the time.

So as we get into these teachings, I'd encourage you to keep returning to examples like this from your own life. Because the teachings can get quite conceptual and intellectual when we're studying them, and it can seem far off or confusing. But it really comes down to very practical things: how we're perceiving ourselves and others, and how, based on that perception, the afflictive emotions arise.

There are five root afflictive emotions in this framework: misperception (ma rigpa) at the root, then aversion, attachment (or clinging), jealousy, and pride. These can branch off into many kinds of reactions. They're not quite emotions in the sense we normally use the word in the West — anger, for instance, is a complex thing, a set of many emotions. Buddhism describes these five as root confusions that arise from habit patterns and misperception.

The point is not that they need to go away. It's that we see — oh, there's no basis for them to arise. And if there's no basis for them to arise, they arise less. Then more pro-social emotions — compassion, love, empathy — can arise, because from a Buddhist perspective those are more natural to our buddha nature.

The verse itself

Here's verse 10:

The one who sees that cause and effect operate infallibly for all the phenomena of samsara and nirvana, and for whom any objects of conceptual focus have subsided, has set upon the path delighting all the buddhas.

Let me break this down.

"The one who sees that cause and effect operate infallibly." Cause and effect is at the root of Buddhist philosophy and cosmology, and it's something I'd encourage you to reflect on rather than simply accept. Fortunately, the principle of cause and effect is in alignment with most modern thinking — though our conduct often doesn't align with it. We could try to get an effect that doesn't actually match the cause we're creating. We need to make some money, so we lay on the couch. That's not an effect in accordance with the cause. But ideologically, most of us accept that the world functions on cause and effect.

What Tsongkhapa is pointing out is that, through meditation and reflection, our understanding of cause and effect becomes incontrovertible — not a firm belief, but something we've actually seen for ourselves. And we see that it functions both within samsara and nirvana.

A quick word on those terms. Samsara is the circle of dukkha that sentient beings find themselves in. There's a lot to say about samsara — it goes into Buddhist cosmology, into things we can't see — but we can also see samsara just now. Our mind believes in some kind of fixed reality, and that's samsara. There's a wonderful prayer that essentially says samsara is this mind clinging to like and dislike. I love that one because it makes it very practical.

Nirvana, in this context, refers to awakening — the enlightened mind, the enlightened experience that's possible for all sentient beings. We have to see through the samsaric mind in order to get closer to it.

So Tsongkhapa is saying: the one who sees cause and effect operating infallibly across both samsara and nirvana, and at the same time has had any objects of conceptual focus subside — that one has set upon the path delighting all the buddhas. Why does it delight them? Because they want to see us free. They don't want to see us in our dreamlike appearance of suffering, contracted, experiencing all kinds of suffering. Some of it we can bear; some is unbearable. The buddhas are delighted because once we see the truth, or see non-duality directly in meditation, it's just a matter of time before we wake up.

What "non-conceptual" actually means

Now we get to the part that needs unpacking: "for whom any objects of conceptual focus have subsided."

Some people get the wrong idea here — that if I just stop thinking, or if thoughts are completely gone, then I've realized emptiness. That's not it. What it means is that one is beyond — or has had a glimpse beyond, and continues to cultivate that glimpse — subject and object. Conceptuality has a deep meaning here. It doesn't just mean conceptual thoughts. It means a subject-object dual experience.

To unpack that further, it helps to talk about relative and absolute truth. These are formally referred to as the two truths.

A teacher friend of mine, Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, has a line I love. She says when we're starting to study the two truths, we have to first understand they're actually not two different things ultimately, and they're not true. I find that not only funny but useful, because we're not understanding two distinct things separate from each other. Actually, the samsaric experience — the confused experience, the experience of dukkha — is the artificial separation of the two truths. Fundamentally, naturally, they are inseparable. That's a deep-end note, but I want to seed the conversation with it.

Relative truth

"Relative" simply means that something is temporary. It's based on causes and conditions. It changes. It's not permanent. It's moving all the time. And it's relative in comparison to its parts and its relationships.

Time is a classic example. Two or three people sit in a single room with a watch or phone to measure time. How those three people feel and interpret the passing of time can be three different things. Five minutes can feel really quick for one of them and really slow for another. That alone starts to suggest time is relative.

Or take something less heady. Some people love tacos. It's their whole thing — they get excited when they get to go have tacos. Other people are more like, "Nice, but I'd rather have a hamburger, or vegetables." So are tacos the best? Are they amazing? I happen to like tacos, so for me they're pretty good. But they're not ultimately the best, because they would have to be the best for every single person in existence, for all time. (This is a reflection point — take a note, and after reading you can reflect on different experiences in your life that are relative.)

Relative doesn't mean bad. Relative is being pointed out because we so often resist it. When we take the relative to be absolute — meaning unchanging, existing as it appears — we suffer.

Absolute truth

The second of the two truths, the ultimate or absolute, is that everything is interdependent. When we actually look to find something, we can't — it's not ultimately findable — and yet it appears.

This is the tough side for most of us, because we hear it and think, "Wait, so I don't exist?" No, that's not what it means. We exist, but we exist in interdependence. We exist in a flow, a fluid movement of parts that have no static, reified, or inherent existence.

Some of this is jargon, and I'm using it because I'm trying to stick to the text. If you want to know where Tsongkhapa is drawing from, mainly it's Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti, the great Indian philosophers from the Nalanda tradition. It's worth starting to hear and reflect on this language. The basic point: if there's no independent existence, things are interdependent. They are based on parts — and even within their parts, we can't find the thing itself.

One of the most famous examples is a chariot. Chandrakirti wrote a whole text pointing out interdependence through the parts of a chariot. We can use a car instead. Imagine any car. It appears, and there's no problem labeling it "car." It functions like a car. But when we actually look for the car, we have to be able to find it somewhere. Is it in the windshield? In a tire? In all four tires? In the metal around it? Imagine taking the car apart. Then take apart the parts. Everything becomes smaller and smaller — atoms, then quarks, then smaller still, until even from a modern physics perspective things become so dispersed they can't find a coherent reality, a single thing. Physicists have sometimes referred to this as the "god particle," the origination of everything. And in modern physics — this isn't Buddhism — they haven't found it.

Buddhism has known this for 2,600 years. The Buddha couldn't find it either. And that unfindability is totally okay. It doesn't destroy relative reality, and it causes freedom.

Ultimately, emptiness is about a very specific unfindability that we connect with in meditation. We study it, we reflect on it, and then we have to go through a process of actually looking for it — usually starting with the self, with a certain way we're interpreting "me," "mine," "I." This is challenging. But the point is fluidity, freedom, openness. The point is to show that there's no basis for the afflictive emotions to arise. Therefore we cease creating karma — at least, negative karma — eventually. And then we cease the samsaric experience completely.

Does that mean things end? In a way, maybe. But it doesn't mean we dissolve into nothingness. We become an enlightened being. What that is, and how an enlightened being functions — that's beyond what I can speak to here. I'm very far from it, obviously. And even from a scholarly perspective, that's territory for a geshe or khenpo. But understanding emptiness gives us at least a hint of what buddhahood might be like, which I think is helpful for understanding what we're actually doing on this path.

How something exists vs. how it appears

Another way I like to reflect on this — this is from traditional Buddhism — is to work with the way something exists versus the way it appears. It's a nice meditation. Take anything within the five sense perceptions. What you're hearing, what you're seeing. Eventually you can take thoughts, emotions, sensations in the body. Just be honest with the appearance: Okay, this is appearing to me as I think.

Likable and dislikable is an easier place to start.

I'm looking at something pink right now. I happen to like the color pink, so it's likable to me. That's the appearance — something pink, something outside myself, something likable. And yet — where is that likability found? In the top part? The bottom part? Where even is pink? Color is also relative. Pink is white and red mixed. So where does the white end? Where does the red begin? Where is the pink?

This sounds ridiculous if you've never done it. But if you start reflecting this way, you begin to see: we're not trying to destroy the appearance. The pink object is fine. That's relative truth, and I don't need to get rid of it. But once I see that the absolute truth is beyond pink, beyond whatever the object is, there's a lot more fluidity in play.

Emptiness is about play. Not play in the casual sense, but play where we don't get stuck in anything, and so there's a lot of freedom and openness. Compassion can develop out of emptiness, too.

Going beyond the words

Verse 11 will go even deeper, but verse 10 is really pointing out: what is this view we want to cultivate?

Tsongkhapa brings in the word "non-conceptual" because, of course, you're reading words about emptiness right now. We're looking at a text on a page, which is fully conceptual. We need to start somewhere. But what he's pointing out is that we need to land in an experiential, direct seeing of emptiness that's non-conceptual — not just the thinking mind interpreting something.

Buddhism is skillful here. We use study and understanding to develop appreciation, and to make our sense of things a little more definitive. Less vague. Okay, that starts to make sense. I can see how that would work. But when we meditate, eventually we have to go beyond the idea of it, beyond the thought of it, even beyond the reasoning. We use logic to meditate on emptiness, but at a certain point we have to go beyond logic. That's what Tsongkhapa is describing. The right view is this understanding of the inseparability of relative and absolute truth — interdependence, in another word. And we need to experience that directly.

A note for anyone feeling worn out

If this is unfamiliar territory, take it slow. This is content that, for most of us, takes many years of studying and listening and contemplating. For my first five years trying to study these teachings, they were just confounding and frustrating. But I kept going, and the understanding can get a little clearer. I'm still working on it. My understanding is still very preliminary, and I need to keep developing it too.

When confusion or frustration comes up, I'd recommend using the confusion to open up more questions, so it doesn't become a dead end. Often when we get frustrated we just think, "Okay, I can't do this." If a dharma topic is genuinely stressing you out, my suggestion is to put it on a metaphorical bookshelf in your living room — somewhere you have to walk past it from time to time, but not somewhere it's pressing on you. Set it aside for now.

But I also find that open questions and curiosity help a lot here. When I don't understand something, I take a break, put it down, and then ask: What is this trying to say? Is there a way in that meets me where I'm at? That tends to be more useful than letting the material overwhelm you.

Take it slow. Walk past the bookshelf if needed.