When we look at the meaning of ‘emptiness’, the Sanskrit word is sunyata. One of the literal meanings of the sunya is ‘empty’ and another one is ‘zero.’ In Indian mathematics, the zero sign is sunya, but it has quite a different meaning that zero in the West. When we think of ‘zero’, we think nothing, but in India the circle of sunya , or zero, means fullness, completeness, or wholeness. In the same way, ‘emptiness does not mean “nothingness”, but rather “fullness” in the sense of full potential—anything can happen in emptiness and because of its emptiness. A lot of people think that if nothing really exists, how can anything function? [or come to be?] However, Nargarjuna said that it is precisely because everything does not really exist that everything functions. If everything were truly existent, existing in or of itself and thus being unchanging, things [becoming] would not depend on anything. But then they could not interact with each other either because that entails change [becoming something other than itself]. Therefore it is only due to everything changing all the time that interaction and functioning are possible. The root of eh word sunya means to swell, which implies the notion of hollowness. In this way, the phenomenon of seeming reality outwardly appear to be real and solid, while actually resembling empty balloons which are only inflated by our ignorance. Through our ignorance we inflate a lot of nothings into very big somethings. When they swell up, that is the circle, or balloon of sunya. Thus sunyata is not just nothingness, but everything coming out of the infinite space of phenomena in which nothing can be pinpointed but everything can happen. In this sense, sunyata means the complete potential for everything to arise and it also means dependent origination. Everything that seems to be real is just like blown-up balloons—a lot of hot air and not much else, if anything. This is also what the etymology of “to swell” for sunya points to. As long as it is unquestioned, our seeming reality seems to be swell, but when we reflect and meditate upon emptiness, all those balloons that we usually entertain ourselves with become punctured and are revealed as what they really are, which is just the hot air within them. [I doubt the ancient Hindus knew what an industrial-era “balloon” was; therefore this seems like a false analogy. But they knew what a seed was, and how a tiny, dry and seemingly dead seed “swells up” and bursts open to become a new life form, thousands of times larger than the original seed, and capable of continuously producing new seeds, and thus infintely new life forms. Seed, or bija, seems to be more closely analogous to the image of “swell”. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the Sanskrit term बीज bīja (Jp. 種子 shuji), literally seed, is used as a metaphor for the origin or cause of things.] When we look at the concept of zero in mathematics, if we just take one zero, it seems to be nothing, but many zeros following any other number mean a lot, such as one hundred, one thousand, or one billion. This shows that infinite quantities can come from zero. Therefore, it is not just nothing. Likewise, emptiness is not nothing” which is emphasized in many Buddhist texts over and over again. However it is not “something”either. [In this context, sunya or zero functions as a “placeholder”, as the space or spaciousness within which something—and infinitely everything—can happen.] from The Heart Attack Sutra, a new commentary by Karl Brunnholzl, pp. 13-14, with [my comments].
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 18:45:21 +0000
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