Meditations on Emptiness: How Things Don’t Exist and How They Do
April 19, 2011 
One of the reasons to go into retreat is that it is there, where distractions are minimized and there’s nothing much else to do, that we finally get a chance to think. We slow down, catch our breath, and at long last enjoy an opportunity to really use our heads and try to work things out.
"Silence"
A day of Silence
Can be a pilgrimage in itself.
A day of Silence
Can help you listen
To the Soul play
In marvelous lute and drum.
Is not most talking
A crazed defense of a crumbling fort?
I thought we came here
To surrender in Silence,
To yield to Light and Happiness,
To Dance within
In celebration of Love's Victory!
- Hafiz, translated in I Heard God Laughing by Daniel Ladinsky
It is in retreat that one can make some real progress when it comes to meditations and contemplations on the nature of reality. In our regular lives, we rarely (if ever) actually recognize reality as it is. We live days, weeks, months, years or even whole lifetimes deluded and spaced out about what’s what. Because of this deep ignorance, we remain in the benighted, suffering condition called samsara.
In this unawakened state, we turn things inside out. As it says in the Yoga Sutra (2.5), we mistake changing things for unchanging things, impure things for pure ones, things that have no defining essence for things that do, and things that bring us more dissatisfaction and discontentment for things that will make us happy.
When we take the time and make the effort to examine life instead of just sleepwalking through it, it becomes clear that we are regularly populating our world with things that aren’t really there – what in Tibetan are called gakjas. A permanent and unchanging iPad – one that will never break, wear out, or become obsolete – is purely illusory. A physical body (yours or someone else’s) that isn’t just a bag of bones filled with blood, mucus, vomit, pus, urine, feces, and other rather impure substances has actually never existed at all. An essentially irritating person – one whom everyone would find to be irritating and who could never be anything other than irritating – well, that too is a mere chimera. And external objects (money, possessions, career, vacations, etc.) or other people (boyfriend, girlfriend, children, parents, companions) who have the power to make you happy are also completely fanciful.
These illusions are empty of existing the way we imagine them to. Something we think is there – permanence, purity, an essence, or the ability in something or someone external to ourselves to bring us true happiness – is not there. Something has gone missing; the thing or being is devoid of a quality we believe it has.
Deep retreat is a great time to really drill down into one of the classical emptiness meditations. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to do one such meditation for a month. Over and over, for two hours, four times a day, I just meditated on a Buddha statue, thinking, “If that statue were out there the way I think it is, it would have to be one thing or many things, singular or plural.” Then the internal debate begins: If the Buddha statue was one thing, how could I be seeing different parts in it – the head, torso, limbs, etc.? It must be many things. But if it were many things, how could I see just one Buddha statue on my altar? Is it one or many? One or many?
After literally weeks of repeatedly doing such a meditation, a suspicion begins to dawn on you: The Buddha statue I think is out there cannot actually be there at all. As Master Shantideva says in his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (9.32), “Because of strengthening the habit of thinking of the emptiness of things, the habit of thinking that things exist is eliminated.” The Master continues by saying that one practices detaching from the illusory appearance of things by thinking, “Nothing at all exists (kim cin na asti).”
Such a disturbing thought functions as a kind of shock treatment for a mind that is grasping to an objective, independently existing world. Sometimes practitioners feel like they’re done when they get this far: “Everything’s just a projection. Nothing really exists. It’s all just illusory.” But this is also incorrect, and potentially dangerously so.
Having advised us to practice thinking that nothing exists, Shantideva concludes this passage with, “Only later does one abandon even this idea.” When we have disrupted our certainty that things exist the way they seem by going to the opposite extreme of nihilism, we must move to a more balanced and correct view.
The Buddha taught that there are “two realities” (dva satya), and his wording was not accidental. They are both “realities.” There is an “ultimate” reality, accessed by the inexpressible and non-conceptual deep understanding of the emptiness of things. But there is also what is called “mundane” (loka) or “deceptive” (samvirti) reality – and it is real too. The world of appearances may be “deceptive” in the sense that it can appear differently from the way it really is (changing things might seem like they are unchanging, impure things may appear as pure, etc.). But the reality of dependently existing things is real and does exist.
In “deceptive reality” or the reality of appearances, things and beings exist contingently on other things. Objects exist dependently on subjects being aware of them, and subjects exist dependently on being aware of objects. But neither objects nor subjects exist “truly,” meaning objectively and independently. To cite Shantideva once again, “It is not things that are seen, heard, and known that is being refuted here. It is the conceptualization of those things as truly existing – which is the cause of our suffering – that is here repudiated.” (Guide, 9.26)
Having explored how things don’t exist in deep meditations like the “one or many,” we must then complement such meditations by contemplating how they do exist. They do exist dependently – and they are empty of existing in any other way than that. Emptiness and interdependency are not two different things; they aren’t even really accurately depicted as “two sides of the same coin.” Emptiness and interdependency are two ways of talking about the same thing.
To think otherwise is to deviate from correct view. Arya Nagarjuna unequivocally identifies emptiness with dependent origination: “Whatever arises dependently is what is called emptiness (yah pratityasamutpadah shunyatam tam pracakshmahe),” and goes on to note, “There is nothing whatsoever that does not arise dependently, and thus there is nothing whatsoever that is not empty.” (Root Verses on the Middle Way 24.19-20).
In our retreat meditations on the nature of reality, we must try to avoid extremes and stick to the “middle way.” We must turn away from illusion without turning our backs on reality. We might spend a period in which we alternate between thinking how things are empty, on the one hand, and how they exist dependently on the other. But eventually we must get to the place where we realize that these are just two ways of expressing the very same thing. We must remember Je Tsongkapa’s profound words from his Three Principal Paths:
You've yet to realize the thought of the Able
As long as two ideas seem to you disparate:
The appearance of things - infallible interdependence;
And emptiness - beyond taking any position.
At some point they no longer alternate, come together;
Just seeing that interdependence never fails
Brings realization that destroys how you hold to objects,
And then your analysis with view is complete.