Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, comes to us from the talk and#8220;Simplicityand#8221; by Kamalashila titled: and#8220;Seeing Emptinessand#8221;. Here he suggests a direct approach to emptiness by seeing the free and spacious nature of things, watching the motion in the mind and recognizing the elusive nature of thoughts.
Talk given at FWBO Day, 2004
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio – the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. [music] Okay, that's if you like the indirect method. But there are also more direct ways of seeing emptiness. And this is the second approach I had in mind. We can learn to look at anything, anything whatsoever and simply see directly it's free and spacious nature. For example, earlier on we were discussing the wind element. The element of movement in the universe. And I said, "Well, the mind also moves." There are winds, if you like, in the mind. Well, there are winds of mind. The mind is sometimes relatively still. Perhaps in deep meditation it becomes totally still. Certainly the winds become very subtle. At other times, there are breezes. There are gusts and gales. There are even whirlwinds and tornadoes coming our way. We can be overwhelmed by the power of our own thoughts and perceptions. We usually take them to be very concrete and real somehow. We get very, very affected by them. But they are not concrete and real, actually. They are just empty. You can look at all these moving thoughts and perceptions and see directly how empty and spacious it all is. And you can try this now as I speak, if you like. At least I find that when I'm listening to a talk, I'm fairly aware of my thoughts. Sometimes I'm thinking about what the speaker is saying. Sometimes not. I get involved in my own responses. For the purpose of this practice, it doesn't matter at all what the thought is. What matters is that it's there. Now, don't you find that when you look into the actual thought, it somehow disappears so that you wonder, where did it go? Isn't there an elusive, transparent quality to our thoughts so that they somehow seem to slide out of our grasp? There may have been some actual content to the thought, content that one could perhaps express in words. But in the actual experience of a thought, any thought, where exactly is the content? And this is just very interesting to look into. You start to wonder, was it ever actually there? What was there? And what would it have meant for it to be there? I mean, where would it have been? And where is all this happening? I hope you don't think I'm trying to confuse you. I mean, I find that if I really try to stay with the actual experience of thinking, the more I have to abandon my assumptions about what's happening. Thoughts may don't stop being meaningful by doing this. One's experience isn't reduced or negated at all. But the actual display of meaning in our thoughts is never concrete. We can never get hold of it somehow. I mean, what would get hold of what? And if you've ever tried to write thoughts down, you'll know that actually what you write down is never thoughts. What you write down, obviously, is words. Words are something quite different from thoughts. So, in all these ways, thoughts are what Buddhism calls for one of the better word "empty." They just can't be taken hold of. We can't even say that they really exist. But at the same time, it's absurd to say that they don't. And this is a reality that we can experience any time. And it's the same for all other objects of consciousness, feelings, emotions, and our entire perception of the material world. They all have this elusive, ungraspable quality. It's their magic quality. They are there, yet not there. Isn't this amazing? But existence is really so unexplainable that even though we seem so much in control of things, we have so little idea of what things are. And this magic empty quality is the nature of all things. Emptiness is in fact the ultimate element, you could say. It was even mind, even consciousness, the most inclusive of all the elements, the element in which all other elements take place. Mind is itself embraced by the nature of emptiness. Emptiness, the unobstructed freedom of everything, is nature. It's the real nature. And if we could see that consistently, we'd really be living naturally. That natural mess would be what Buddhism calls nirvana. And the Buddha himself described nirvana in just these terms. The natural state of nirvana, he says in the udana, what is scripture, is where the elements of water, earth, fire, and wind find no footing at all. There's no place for them, really. They are totally ungraspable. They are already liberated, quite naturally, and always have been. So on that note, we can bring our meditation to an end. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bight. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
