Empty of...
One thing that I've been thinking about that I'd like to talk about has to do with a couple of terms found in Buddhist literature: What is the distinction between them and how looking at experience in a certain way may be helpful.
One term is sunya, which means empty. it comes from the word sun, which is used for zero, nothing. So sunya refers to empty. Another similar word that appears in various texts is sunyata. Here sunya has a -ta ending. That ending in Pali and Sanskrit makes it more of an abstract noun. So you have sunya, meaning empty and sunyata, meaning emptiness.
Sunya also gets translated as "void" and sunyata probably gets translated as "the void." This is an important distinction.
What I'd like to talk about is sunya, empty. It's empty in terms of our experience. Because we're not just talking about an idea of empty, an idea of emptiness, but rather what is empty in our experience. What this process is that we're going through that seems to be at times empty of certain things.
Empty of is an important way of looking at it. That certain types of your experiences are not the same as they were some time ago or at certain times during your sittings because they're empty of something. You may be empty of having intense bursts of anxiety at certain things. Or you find that you're not thinking too much about an experience, you're not making something out of it. You find that your mind may be empty of something.
As well, you may find that you're in a calm state and you may not be able to use language or to know what's going on. That that state is empty of the use of language or of knowing what's going on.
So what you start to look at is that when experiences are empty of something there is also something there. That the empty of gives us a kind of way of starting to look at what's not present but it doesn't quite get at what is there.
Using these two terms - empty and emptiness - people suggest that if something is empty of there's a state of emptiness . But I would just say that you're having a variety of experiences that are empty of things.
You can see this as a trend or a development in meditation practice. In meditation practice what we're doing is what's traditionally looked at as a kind of reduction. We're reducing things down, stripping things away.
But what we're in essence doing, is becoming empty of certain ways of looking at things, empty of certain kinds of building on experience, empty of certain concepts of experience, empty of certain habitual reactions. What's there in your experience becomes hard to identify at times. The usual things that you identify with your experience become not so clear. In a sense, your experience may have been emptied of those.
Like language at times. You might find that when you're having experiences, when you're aware of bodily sensations and pains or certain kinds of emotions in your body, you might find that it's empty of certain things it's related to, certain content; or it's empty of a way that you might build upon it; or a way that you normally relate to it, trying to get rid of it or trying to manage it in some way, or soothe it.
You may find that experience itself is not emptiness, but it's empty of something. To start to make some of those discernments would be very helpful. It changes how you evaluate experience. If you look at experience as something that should be full then it needs to be bright lights, colors, bliss. If it needs to be energetic and active or something needs to be going on, then what you're saying is experience needs to have fullness in order to be known or to be valued.
What we're trying to develop is the capacity to see experience that starts to be stripped away a bit, experience that doesn't have the normal things we hold onto or that we use to anchor ourselves or that allow us to say, This is what it is.
All this relates to how we use language. For instance, if you say an experience is anger , that's a way of holding onto it and of making it more concrete. Whereas if you start to stay with parts of the experience and notice discernment around it, it may not just be anger but a hot feeling in the chest, a certain kind of pressure that you experience and certain intentions to say certain things. You might notice then that it has its own character. It's empty of the word of the category of anger. It starts to have its own characteristics.
Ordinarily with our use of language we're not only trying to complete things and define things, we're also making them full. We're putting something else upon the experience that may not actually be quite there. It may be just an interpretation, a way of presenting it to ourselves.
Of course, that's something that our minds will do. What you may notice is that experiences that seem to be empty of tend to also have a certain delicacy or softness or lack of hardness or solidity. That they may also not seem as truthful or valid in a way. They may seem subjective and personal.
I'm straining for words around this. The thing is that you may find is that there is less of something that you could put out to the world and say, "This is what it is." Internally, it starts to become, "This is what I'm going through and it has this flavor to it."
© 2007 The Skillful Meditation Project