Emptiness as Meditation on Peace
We continue to explore the foundational understanding at the heart of the early Mahāyāna vision as expressed in The Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines.
The heart of this text is about cultivating a radical interpretation of the Buddha's principle of emptiness that deconstructs language, subject and object, and all the dualities of the religion: suffering and peace, bondage and liberation, existence and non-existence. It does (or tries to do) all this without succumbing to nihilisms like spiritual bypass, which is the most important danger of this “Middle Way” approach.
In all the non-dual systems, we have to be careful what we are talking about if we want to use these doctrines as support for choices in the world. Saying that there is no self, no other, and no path, how do we live in relationship and community? This is a variation of the question that runs through the whole text: how should a Bodhisattva practice? But what do we do with the answer that Bodhisattvas “do not create a perception of” persons or practices? It can’t mean they don’t do anything! So it must mean that what they do is so deeply filtered through this lens of emptiness that it can’t be analyzed as “doing” anymore.
I think it’s impossible to talk about emptiness as a conceptual filter without including the meditative attainment of thought-free samādhi. So much here is about the inability of language to adequately describe what’s going on. This is a natural philosophical outgrowth of meditations where practitioners are resting in states where they are free of thought for long periods of time.
Emptiness is not a philosophical trick, it’s a contemplation of peacefulness. At the heart of this contemplation is the understanding that language gets in the way of peace, always. And even liberating language like poetry and Dharma teaching is still only a conventionally-agreed-upon fiction that has as its primary if unintended function to create division and boundaries in a world where there are none in nature.
So we’ll look at the non-dual approach as a way to see language for what it is—and isn’t—and draw on the experience of the mind in meditation as a somatic suggestion for how emptiness functions specifically as a short circuit for conceptual thinking.
Recorded at Insight Meditation Satsang
Online, July 2, 2024
Opening to the Perfection of Wisdom
For several months in 2024, we explored at Satsang the extraordinary Prajñāpāramitā approach to meditation, inquiry, and insight through the early Mahāyāna text The Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines. This collection of talks and meditations are compiled into an on-demand course, where you can track your progress through the full collection.
This is the last public post in the series. To learn what happens (or doesn’t “happen”) next, take the course!
We have also included the recordings from our Fall 2024 retreat where we focused on the beloved short summary text of the Prajñāpāramitā literature known as the Heart of the Teachings on the Perfection of Wisdom, or Heart Sūtra.
All courses are offered in Gift Economy, with no one turned away.
