The classic metaphor to describe emptiness is two sheaves of wheat leaning against each other. This structure – their “stand-uprightness” is not an effect of either one or the other sheaf of wheat, but arises from their interaction.
In my last blog I wrote about what emptiness means in a Buddhisty context, and some ways to understand emptiness on an intellectual level. I think this is useful, at the very least to satisfy left-brained people like me who can’t get over their need to understand things intellectually before really diving into the actual practice. But I do also think that a clear understanding of this sort of reasoning, and the ability to figure out logically why a certain phenomenon must be empty even before it seems to be so – can indeed be a very fruitful first step for many insight practices. Nagarjuna (see my the previous blog) certainly spent a great many pages on how emptiness applies to real world objects – not just minds – as well.
However it is true that the real rubber of emptiness hits the road when it is used in practice to directly scrutinise our perceptions. Once you understand that there are no separate things, it begins to seem very curious that there is nevertheless such a strong perception of separate things, and of ourselves as a separate, non-empty, static entity.
Our perceptions are just like the two sheaves of wheat leaning against each other; one sheaf is the outside world impinging on our senses, but the other sheaf is what’s doing the perceiving – our mind. Perceptions are constructed dependent on both. If the outside world is different, our perception will be different, and if our mind is different, the perception will also be different.
What kind of differences in the mind account for differences in perception has a great deal to do with our prior experiences of interacting with the world, our expectations, intentions, and how we’re using our attention. It is worth noting briefly that the Buddha’s formulation of karma can be readily expressed in these terms with fairly few modifications; as Culadasa once put it: “karma is not about what happens to you; karma is about what kind of mind it’s happening to”.
If we can be aware of the part our mind plays in creating perceptions, those perceptions no longer seem quite so ‘real’ – they are seen as a construction that is partially dependent on what our minds are bringing to the table from their side. They thus can lose a great deal of power over us.
There is an old Zen saying:
Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers.
After a little training, mountains were not mountains and rivers were not rivers.
Now again, after realisation, mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers.
This could be interpreted through the lens of this two-sheaves of wheat model of perceptions. At first, before training, we only see the outside world, and we believe that our perceptions of it are perfectly veridical (mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers). If we feel bad, it is because something bad is happening to us. We are only seeing the outside sheaf – this is a kind of eternalism, or in other words a belief in the realness of the world as we experience it.
Then, after we begin training, we examine closely how the mind constructs our experience, moment to moment, and find that all perceptions are fabricated by the mind – everything is miraculously appearing out of this mind-stuff, empty of form. If we stop paying attention to things, or stop looking at them in the particular way that gave rise to the associated perception, those perceptions just dissolve away! This can lead to a kind of nihilism – believing that nothing is real at all – everything only a kind of mirage, or that everything is mind (mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers).
However, at the end, we come to be aware of perceptions arising from the inside and the outside together; not things in themselves, but not non-existent either; just a stream in an ever-moving and interconnected process, one sub-process of which is the mind that perceives them.
There are some spectacular and really very interesting things we can start to notice about the part played by the mind in constructing experience, and I hope to write some more about the practices involved and the sort of things available to notice soon*.
*(ish)
