The Emptiness of Emptiness

For a three-year period in my life—1974-1976—I was deeply into the Prajnaparamita Sutras. My spiritual practice during this period focused on two things: developing a mind that dwelled upon nothing, and seeing all things as empty. But then, thanks to the teachings of Adi Da Samraj (then known as Bubba Free John), I had an epiphany: I realized that my attempts to develop a non-abiding mind and to negate phenomenal reality by imagining it as empty were simply forms of the avoidance of relationship (or whole-body communion with the Whole).

After my epiphany, I continued, for a few years, to randomly attend sittings at Zen groups, but I no longer had an interest in Zen philosophy and its apotheosis of emptiness. I basically forgot about the emptiness Dharma until 2003, when a friend introduced me to the teachings of Ayn Rand, which not only enlightened me on emptiness, but also inspired me to study academic texts on the subject by Buddhism professors. As I read these texts, which typically explain emptiness philosophy in the context of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka, I further refined my consideration of the subject, and I knew it was just a matter of time until I wrote on it.

Ayn Rand on Emptiness

According to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist epistemology, emptiness, like nothingness, is a non-existent with no ontological status, and those who grant it such status are guilty of what Rand calls “the reification of zero.” Emptiness is simply a term that describes the absence of something in relation to some “thing,” meaning an existent. There must first be a thing that can be described as empty before one can speak of emptiness. We can describe a coffee cup or one’s head as empty, but once the cup is filled with coffee or one’s head with knowledge, emptiness, a dependent quality, is vanished.

How about universal empty space? Surely that must be proof that emptiness is all-pervading and exists apart from, and even prior to, objects. Not true, I say. Although space is universal and formless, it is not empty, but teeming with sub-atomic particles and quantum activity. And the fact that scientists cannot create a vacuum devoid of subatomic particles proves that emptiness cannot be created.

What then is space if not emptiness? Along with many others, I contend that space is actually an ethereal substance, an emanated interface between the Unmanifest and the material world. And the fact that gravity curves space proves that it is substantial rather than empty. When so-called empty space is understood to be the ether, the pranically-charged, subtle-realm medium that lies between, and connects, the Divine Realm and the material world, then a proper theosophical understanding of the “structure” of the All is possible.

The Heart Sutra

The Heart Sutra is without doubt the most revered scripture in the Zen Buddhist canon. Regularly chanted before Zen sittings, it summarizes the fundamental Zennist view of reality. And the epitome of this view is made clear in the first two sentences of the Sutra, which go: “Form is not different from Emptiness, and Emptiness is not different than Form. Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form.”

What’s wrong with this Zennist view of reality? First off, if form is not different from emptiness, then why is there a need for an emptiness doctrine? Why not just have a form doctrine and reduce everything to form? Instead of seeing everything as empty, as Zennists do, why not just see everything as form? If an emptiness doctrine were central to spiritual life, then why don’t all spiritual traditions have one? Among the Great Spiritual Traditions, only certain Mahayana schools of Buddhism apotheosize the void. If emptiness were Ultimate Reality, then Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam would also apotheosize the void; but they don’t.

Real-world experience informs us that form and emptiness are not the same. Try walking through a wall in your room, and no matter how hard you try to convince yourself that form and emptiness are the same, your experience will tell you otherwise. How then can we make sense of the Heart Sutra?  By understanding it as a provisional teaching that, by reducing form to emptiness, fosters non-attachment to the material world. As such, its function is the same as the Hindu Maya doctrine, which enjoins yogis to see the world as unreal.

When singer-mystic Donovan, in his song There is a Mountain, rhapsodizes: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is,” he’s telling us that the ordinary man and the Zen master both see the mountain as a mountain, but that the Zen student, striving to become a master, negates the mountain by seeing it as empty. Again, this can be understood as a provisional practice, which the cognoscenti reject in favor of a more direct approach to Awakening.

What the Heart Sutra (and the Prajnaparamita Sutras) is really about is crossing to the Other Shore, which means Awakening as the Heart, one’s Buddha-nature.   Prajnaparamita (lit. the Perfection of Wisdom) means wisdom (or cognizant citta) that has crossed over, or gone beyond, samsara, and merged with Bodhi, meaning the awakening Light-Energy that “produces,” or unveils, Bodhicitta, or Buddhahood. When it’s understood what the Heart Sutra is really about, it’s also understood what the emptiness doctrine is about.

Nagarjuna’s Middle Way

Nagarjuna is probably the most important thinker in Buddhism after Gautama.  Many Buddhists, including renowned integralist Ken Wilber, consider him a genius for the ages. I, however, am not one of the many. In fact, I contend that Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka (or “Middle Way”) does not represent a Greater Vehicle than Gautama’s, but a lesser one. Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy can be summarized thus:

Everything—meaning all phenomena in all states—exists conventionally, or nominally, or provisionally, but not inherently. In other words, whatever exists, exists, or co-arises, interdependently with other phenomena. This dependent co-arising, or interconnected origination, is called “emptiness,” because it implies that whatever arises has no independent self-existence or self-nature; therefore its “essence” is emptiness. This further implies that nothing, in and of itself, is born or dies, or produced or annihilated. Hence the “extremes” of existence and non-existence are negated, and what’s left, according to Nagarjuna, is the non-abiding Middle Way of emptiness, or thusness, the “ultimate reality” of things.

The point of demonstrating this “emptiness” is to lead one to Nirvana. But Nagarjuna’s Nirvana is not Gautama’s. In his book Nagarjuna’s Seventy Stanzas, author David Ross Komito writes:

The emptiness of inherent existence of all phenomena is the naturally abiding nirvana which can be seen directly by a person on the Path of Seeing. Thus the term ‘naturally abiding nirvana’ and ‘emptiness’ are synonymous.

Nagarjuna doesn’t have a clue what Nirvana is. Nirvana is not a matter of seeing all existents as empty, as free from the “extremes” of inherent existence and nihilistic non-existence. Moreover, Nirvana cannot be “seen” because it is not an object. Nirvana, as Gautama defines it, is the drying up of the outflows, the defilements that perpetuate samsara (or becoming). Nirvana is the end of becoming; therefore, it is Being, which, relative to a bodhisattva, is awakened timeless, spaceless Awareness. But because Nagarjuna was a deluded philosopher and not an awakened Buddha, he ignorantly reduces Nirvana to “emptiness,” an emptiness or voidness, which, unlike in the case of Zen and Dzogchen masters, is not synonymous with an Absolute, or Mind, or Dharmakaya.

Nagarjuna is right when he says there has never been a single thing, but he is wrong in failing to identify all “pseudo-entities,” or conventional existents, as derivative modifications or permutations of single Great Existent, or all-subsuming Being, or Mind. Nagarjuna’s “emptiness” is not the Ultimate Reality of all things; Consciousness-Energy, the Divine Being, is. By failing to identify timeless Awareness as the Dharmadhatu, the all-pervading, spaceless Substratum underlying phenomenal existence, Nagarjuna is guilty of “Context-dropping.”

In India, Shankara, figuratively speaking, “kicked Nagarjuna’s butt” in debates by making it clear that Brahman, not emptiness, is the Condition of all conditions, and that true Nirvana is Self-realization. Moreover, Yogacara (or Mind-only) Buddhism in India also rejected Nagarjuna’s metaphysics by emphasizing Mind, or Consciousness, as the Essence of all phenomena.

But today, Nagarjuna’s nonsense lives on, as modern-day Prasangika-Madhyamaka Buddhism professors, such as Jeffrey Hopkins, Guy Newman, and Jay Garfield, continue to push his “Middle Way” as the apex of Buddhist thought.

For example, in his book The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Professor Garfield, a la Nagarjuna, rejects the importance of essence and identity. According to Garfield, “It is important that objects and their characteristics, personas and their states be unified. But if we introduce essence and entity into our ontology this will be impossible.”

In diametrical opposition to Professor Garfield, I say that unless we introduce Essence (timeless Awareness) and Entity (the Divine Being, or Ati-Buddha, or Trikaya, or Godhead, or the Unborn and Unmade of Gautama) into our ontology, this unification, and a consequent integral philosophy, is impossible, because contrary to what Nagarjuna and Garfield preach, all dharmas are not empty. Rather, they are temporary non-binding modifications or permutations of Mind-Energy, the Radiant Transcendental Light-Consciousness; hence, in agreement with modern physics, and in contradistinction to Nagarjuna, all things are not reducible to emptiness, but to Energy, which itself is irreducible. Ultimate Reality is not dependent origination and the emptiness or essencelessness of all phenomena; it is Self-Existing, Self-Radiant Self-Awareness. And this is Self-evident to an Awakened, or En-Light-ened, One.

If you read Garfield’s book, you will find that Nagarjuna cannot write clearly, that he specializes in cryptic passages that are difficult to decipher. You will also find that he makes ridiculous statements. For example, even Garfield has to reject his absurd statement “The identity of mover and motion; the agent and action are identical.” Here are a few more examples of his defective thinking:

Compound phenomena are all deceptive. Therefore they are false. Whatever is deceptive is false.

Unbeknownst to Nagarjuna, phenomena are neither true nor false, nor deceptive nor non-deceptive; they just are. The categories that Nagarjuna superimposes on phenomena are simply his own biased and deluded concepts.

Whatever is dependently arisen, such a thing is essentially peaceful. Therefore, that which is arising itself are [sic] themselves peaceful.

Again, Nagarjuna is guilty of superimposing his own value-judgments on phenomena. According to his “logic,” even Hiroshima was “peaceful.”

It is not tenable for that which depends on something else to be different from it.

In other words, if you depend on food stamps, you’re not different from them. If you depend on the sun’s light, you’re not different from the sun. What self-evident nonsense.

What Nagarjuna attempts to do in his discourse is to demonstrate the emptiness of all phenomenal existents, including conditions, effects, elements, aggregates, et al. The end result, in Garfield’s words, is: “As far as analysis, one finds only dependence, relativity, and emptiness, and their dependence, relativity, and emptiness.” Beyond informing us ad nauseum that everything under the sun is dependently originated, and thereby, necessarily, essenceless or empty, Nagarjuna, a circumscribed thinker, has virtually nothing to say.

The Buddha didn’t find what Nagarjuna found, mere emptiness. He found the “Uncompounded, the Unmade, the Unborn.” And rest in this unmanifest, timeless, spaceless Domain, the Dharmakaya, is Nirvana, the end of samsara, the succession of time-bound, unsatisfactory states of being. But Nagarjuna, a pointy-headed philosopher, just like Jay Garfield (birds of a feather flock together), never moves beyond the analysis of phenomena to a recognition of the Reality that underlies conditional appearances. Whereas Nagarjuna and Garfield repeatedly encounter infinite regresses, the great sages encounter real Emptiness, the Great Void—formless, timeless, spaceless Awareness, or Mind, the hypercosmic Substratum that eludes Nagarjuna, who can’t fathom a Supreme Source prior to and beyond phenomena.

If you are interested in Nagarjuna’s disintegral “fishbowl” philosophy, with lengthy Indo-Tibetan interpretations by a hyper-intellectual academic seemingly incapable of moving beyond the confines of Prasangika-Madhyamaka and into real Spirituality—Mind (the Dharmakaya) and Energy (the Sambhogakaya) and the direct means to realize them—then Garfield’s book could be for you.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in an impressive, inexpensive text by an author who, like me, finds Nagarjuna an affront to Aristotelian logic, then you might want to get philosophy professor Avi Sion’s Buddhist Illogic: A Critical Analysis of Nagarjuna’s Arguments. Here is Sion’s description of the text:

[The text] demonstrates the many sophistries involved in Nagarjuna’s arguments. Nagarjuna uses double standards, applying or ignoring the Laws of thought and other norms as convenient to his goals; he manipulates his readers, by giving seemingly logical forms (like the dilemma) to his discourse, while in fact engaged in non-sequiturs or appealing to doubtful premises; he plays with words, relying on unclear terminology, misleading equivocations, and unfair fixations of meaning; and he ‘steals concepts,’ using them to deny the very percepts on which they are based.

In summary, I contend that Nagarjuna’s Middle Way is a perversion of original Buddhism, and that Nagajuna was to Gautama what Joseph Smith and John Calvin were to Jesus­—a perverter of the religion’s original Teaching. I contend that his “Middle Way” is not a middle way at all, but rather an extreme way that, egregiously, reduces Ultimate Reality (the Divine Existent) to a non-existent emptiness.