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Venerable Traleg Rinpoche In Mahayana
Buddhism the concept of emptiness occupies a position almost as
important as the Christian concept of God. The most important thing
for a Buddhist is the attainment of enlightenment, but to do this
one must understand emptiness as the spiritual reality that a Buddhist
is trying to access through the practice of meditation and other
spiritual engagements. However, emptiness is not some kind of occult
reality that is hidden behind the phenomenal world, it is not something
that is completely transcendent in the sense that of a separation
between the world as we perceive it and the reality of emptiness.
The way to understand emptiness is to see that it is present in
the phenomenal world. We can do this by observing how the world
functions. When we observe the world we first of all discover that
nothing remains the same - everything is transient and ephemeral,
nothing is enduring or permanent. From that we can gradually come
to appreciate the concept of emptiness, because if nothing has any
enduring essence it must be empty of any inherent nature of its
own. To come to understand
emptiness is to realise the nature of everything that exists, both
materially and psychically. When we observe the world, we see change.
When we direct our attention to ourselves and observe our minds,
we again find that the mind is in a dynamic state. Through an understanding
of emptiness, we come to see that everything exists in interrelationship.
Nothing can exist or function by itself; everything that exists
is dependent upon something else. That is a very
important concept to understand, because from a Buddhist point of
view, it is due to this lack of understanding that all of our misery
and unhappiness has come about. It is by clinging onto one's inner
experiences or events that take place in the external world as somehow
substantial, permanent and abiding that we have experiences of dissatisfaction,
frustration, anger and all the other conflicting emotions. The concept
of emptiness therefore, is not a purely philosophical concept as
much as an idea that is designed to alleviate our normal experience
of unhappiness. Reality has
to be understood as neither completely transcendent nor completely
immanent. As emptiness is an all-encompassing reality, we cannot
say that it is contained in the universe: everything that exists
must dwell in emptiness. Nagarjuna says that to understand that,
is to understand the identity of both samsara and nirvana. Samsara
consists of our everyday experience of the empirical world and nirvana
is equated with the understanding of emptiness. There is no difference
between samsara and nirvana in one sense; the nature of samsara
is nirvana, because the nature of everything that exists is emptiness.
Therefore, when we see things 'as they are,' we are able to avoid
two extremes: thinking that things have some kind of substantiality
or enduring essence and thinking that nothing exists at all, that
everything is an illusion with no reality whatsoever. By avoiding
these two extremes one is able to achieve liberation or enlightenment. If we try to
see this from a Christian point of view, I think it has some similarity
to what some Christians call negative theology - the whole idea
that God does not have any positive properties. You cannot say 'God
is love' or 'God is eternal' or 'God is some kind of substance,'
because to attribute any of these anthropomorphic qualities to God
is to turn God into another thing, another entity. God has to be
seen to be lacking in all of the familiar attributes that we normally
associate with the concept of a deity. The concept of emptiness
should not remain on the level of abstraction, in a state of suspension
that does not have any connection with our everyday experience.
From a Buddhist point of view, emptiness is present in our own subjectivity
as well as the objective world, it is an ever-present presence.
It is only due to our ignorance that we are not aware of its presence. Dr. Eric Ryan Traleg Rinpoche
has taken us into the heart of the problem very quickly. As Christians,
we are in a state of dialogue with eastern religions that has just
begun in the twentieth century and many Christian writers are saying
that we are philosophically where they were at the turn of the last
millennium. The dialogue with the east is now taken seriously by both in Catholic Christianity and the World Council of Churches. Prior to Vatican II, the widespread belief was that there was no salvation outside the church. In 1950, however, an American theologian was excommunicated for saying this, so times are changing. Even very conservative biblical theology - such as some Southern Baptist seminaries - will say that the Bible is a process of unfolding the message. Vatican II is very interesting. When the former
modes of interpretation came through, the first statement was the
old one, the second statement was a conflict between the old and
the new and the third statement is what I am trying to present here
now. Vatican II is a tremendous break in epistemology, in the nature
of what the Bible is. It is taking the Bible more seriously as Catholics,
which Protestants have been telling us for a long time, and using
scriptural scholarship to correct the theology. We were inclined
to come from theology to scripture. We still have grave inconsistencies
from Vatican II. However, it was an incredible attempt to change
our way of thinking, it affirmed that individual conscience is essential
and must be followed. Karl Rahner,
perhaps our greatest Roman Catholic theologian, said that we have
over-relied upon the Greek philosophical tradition as a tool for
thought. There are two streams of Greek thought: that of Parmenides
and that of Heraclitus and these two streams diverged. Parmenides
said that there is only being, there is only permanence which is
real; everything that moves and changes is unreal. The heart of
reality for Heraclitus was that everything is in strife and is changing.
At the heart of Christian theology then, we have a contradiction
that was not resolved in the Greek mind except by the fantastic
effort of Aristotle. The Greeks,
quite brilliantly with Aristotle, lined up the categories by which
we think. The leading category was substance. The most minor of
the categories was relation. The most powerful thought was Parmenides,
and Heraclitus on the side. Here, we have immutability as the sign
of the perfection of being. Therefore, God was conceived of as unchanging.
Modern theology does not talk about God as being unchanging or unchangeable.
Michael Pelani, who theologians have discovered very recently and
are getting excited by says, 'Buddhists, Moslems and Catholics are
all walking through the same territory and all have a history. We
have gone some distance through the territory and ignored each other.'
He says that we frequently identify the territory with a map; we
make the map the territory. When we are talking theologically, we
have got a map through this great, mysterious territory. The danger
lies in mistaking the map for the territory, however. Saint Paul
provided a more encompassing view when he said, 'In Him we live
and move and have our being.' To put it more ontologically: we are
beings in Being. How can we ever distance from being to describe
Being? How can we move apart and start to give it qualities? Does
Being well up within us and utter its own words? I want to do
some Parmidean type thinking and look into the question of substance.
Here, it was thought that the eyes misrepresented reality and the
mind corrected that misrepresentation. The mind is the spiritual
thing that can see the reality that is misrepresented by the senses.
Therefore, they did not trust the senses and looked for that which
stood behind appearances - the substance that lay underneath. That
became our reflective way of talking to ourselves about something
which we ultimately cannot say anything about. However, we need
to talk about it in the desperate way that we need to say something
when we love. So we say, 'God is beautiful,' 'God is immutable,'
'God is this and God is that.' When I was doing
philosophy at Catholic University, which is a pontifical university
in Washington, there were the old scholastics and the new phenomenologists
in the same department. The old scholastics were great scholars;
they really did their homework. I have never forgotten the way they
studied. You had to honour them, but trying to write essays that
said it was not important to use the Greek approach, which said
that 'God is this or that,' was very difficult. I am very indebted
to Gabriel Marcel for the way I am trying to think. He was of French,
agnostic, Jewish and Protestant background and he became a Christian.
He really was founding French phenomenology. He said, 'We have forgotten
the meaning of mystery; we have turned mystery into a problem to
be solved.' When we look at mystery and raise questions about it,
we are encroaching on the possibilities of the question and turning
back in an infinite regress. We cannot find the ground because we
are involved in it - "In Him I live and move and have my being." One of our twentieth
century holy people was Carlo Caretta, who wrote about very simple
things very profoundly. Let us look at how he handled the saying,
'God is love.' He wrote a chapter entitled, 'What is love?' Here
he says that Christ is the possibility for human love. This is very
similar to an atheist of that time, who wrote that human love does
not exist. I think that they are both being very, very honest. The
Christian message on the question of love is that is a possibility
- that is what we mean by agape. We are still struggling with the
concept, we are too positive about what love is. When we say 'God
is love,' we are back in the old subject/predicate problem, which
is very Greek. You have a subject, a copula and a predicate - God
is love. But wait a minute, what is love? Well, that is the predicate,
but we cannot say 'God is love and love is God.' Let us increase
the predicates: 'man is rational.' What is 'rational?' We say that
man is good at mathematics, man is good at this and that, and we
keep adding it up until you get a multitude of disciplines, none
of which really feed back sufficiently to tell us what it is to
be human. Ven. Traleg Rinpoche From the Buddhist
point of view, we would not say emptiness is love as such. The impulse
to generate genuine love and compassion arises from an understanding
of emptiness, because unless one has a proper understanding of emptiness,
one's mind is governed by illusions. If one has an understanding
of emptiness, the capacity to be able to love others and have compassion
for others automatically develops. There is a clear link between
emptiness and love, but we cannot say that emptiness is love as
you might say 'God is love,' because emptiness does not have any
attributes of being a person. However, because material things and
the centres of consciousness of individuals have the same nature
- the nature of emptiness - there is a distinct link between emptiness
and love and compassion in human beings. If you have
a certain feeling of the presence of another being or another mind
in meditation, it has to be understood as part of oneself. We might
say that it has something to do with glimpsing one's Buddha-nature,
or something like that, rather than automatically thinking, 'I am
in the presence of some greater being that is separate from me.'
It may be that one is gradually accessing a part of oneself that
one is not familiar with. If one sees God as part of oneself, that
would be much more similar to the Buddhist idea. If God is seen
as totally other, where there is some kind of unequal relationship:
that is quite different to the Buddhist view. I have read
a little about what is called process theology. Process theologians
say that God is dependent upon the creation as much as the creation
is dependent upon God. God is not a creator in the literal sense,
it is more a matter of emanation rather than creation as such. Nor
is God some kind of static substance, but is present in the world
as a dynamic concept. I think that sort of concept is quite similar
to Buddhism, in that emptiness is not transcendent because it is
already present in the world. At the same time, emptiness is not
contained in the world. Rather, the world is contained in emptiness. Dr. Eric Ryan Western scholastics
used two terms for this: immanence and transcendence - that God
is both immanent and transcendent. In other words, the law of identity
was at the basis of this thinking, yet we constantly had to break
it because this is not the way that it is presented in the Bible.
It is not the way of deep Christian trust and faith or experience.
God is experienced both as Holy Other and yet is so close that He
is closer to me than I am to myself. The self is not there when
God is there, because God is so total. There are other Christian
traditions that are also deep, mystical tradition. The terms 'within'
and 'without' are spatial terms and the idea of God being distant
is very much the product of Aristotelian tools of thought. This
became the official theology. The 'unmoved mover' of Aristotle was
often distant, disinterested and not at all immanent and when that
category of thinking came, led to the otherness of God. However,
the scholastics were much better thinkers than that; they knew that
God was also with us, so they tried to play this 'within' and 'without.'
These are our categories of thoughts, these are our maps. Next feature article>> What Religion Is An extract of a teaching given by the Dr Nicholas Coleman |
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