This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Several of you have asked me, would I say some more about emptiness? Now, this, of course, raises a dilemma. because in many of the sutras and the commentaries, they say nothing can be said about emptiness, and then they go on for five or six pages talking about emptiness. So maybe I should say nothing will be said about emptiness here tonight, and we'll now proceed to talk about it. So we'll see where it goes. When I was in college, I studied anthropology. And there's a central figure in anthropology, one of the sort of masters of anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss.

[01:07]

Some of you may have studied this. He had a famous proposition that said that culture is a thing sui generis. Sui generis is a Latin term that means self-generated. makes itself. In other words, it was his idea that culture just went along, making itself. I never bought that idea, and this was like 30 years ago, maybe more, because I thought, well, yeah, but if all the people and the language and the tools go away, in other words, all the stuff of culture, then culture can't exactly generate itself, can it? So that belief has kind of bothered me that sui generis, of generating itself, has been bothering me for about 30 years, and now I'm finally in a practice where we can actually talk about that.

[02:10]

And there were lots of other anthropologists who sort of argued with this idea of culture being a thing sui generis. But so if it's not sui generis, well, then what is it? Well, it's conditioned genesis. And that's sort of where I would like to start with this non-discussion of emptiness to have tonight with the idea that things are not sui generis, that they don't make themselves. So I'd like to take a look at some of the sources that tell us, that try to give a definition of emptiness that we can at least work with a little bit, even perhaps if there is In a sense, no definition, but we've got to start somewhere. Take a look at the words before we get rid of them. And I like very much what the Abhidharma actually has to say about this.

[03:11]

It's pretty succinct, and it has a punchline, which I really appreciate. The Abhidharma says three things about defining emptiness. Nothing arises from a single cause. Nothing arises by its own power. And nothing arises separately. And then here's the punchline. It says, quote, the parts are meaningless. if the relationships are not understood. This to me is the core of emptiness, if we're gonna talk about it. We like to say, well, emptiness is the 10,000 things. But the avidharma is very clear in saying, yeah, it's the 10,000 things and how they relate.

[04:17]

So it's not just enough to list the stuff the things or the ideas or the thoughts or any of that stuff that we think of as making emptiness. What is really important, says the Abhidharma, is the relationship of the stuff to each other. And to understand emptiness, partially at least, it's necessary to understand that relationship. In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, I love Red Pine's take on emptiness. This is really cute. He actually does it in a graphic. Those of you that have read the translation, he takes the graphic of the closed circle and reminds us that in the West, we interpret the closed circle as zero, as nothing. And in the East, the closed circle, the enso, is interpreted as everything. So there you have it.

[05:19]

There's the argument about emptiness in a nutshell. Is it nothing or is it everything? It's been lifetimes on that question. But I like that. I like that. And Abbott Steve, some of you remember, used to have in his, what's now Agent Roshi's office in Doka San Rim, used to have a painting by Michael Wenger that said, Buddhist math, one plus one equals zero. It's great. I love that. So is emptiness nothing, or is it everything? What a question. What fun. Thich Nhat Hanh sort of adds to the confusion. He says, to be empty of a separate self means to be full of everything. So this is just compounding, this non-definition we're working on here of emptiness. The sources don't always agree. What a surprise. So you have the Lankavatara Sutra that defines emptiness as a constant stream of becoming.

[06:26]

You have Bodhidharma's Bloodstream Sermon, which defines emptiness as motionless. And you have the Vimalakirti Sutra, which decides to have it both ways and says that emptiness is without action and without immobility. So there you have it. Emptiness. All or nothing. What is that? It's so interesting just to hold that question. We're kind of back to what is it that thus comes? The 10,000 things. The causes and conditions. All of the phrases that we're accustomed to pointing at graspable, definable thing. So this is what some of the literature says. I'm sure you all have other things that you've read about emptiness.

[07:29]

I did want to say that in this talk, I'm going to deliberately avoid an entire section of literature. So let me just confess that right up front and say that I'm going to completely stay away from the argument between the Mannyamaka and the Yogacarans, one of which says emptiness isn't any more real than anything else, and the other school says it's the only thing that's real. I don't understand this argument. I don't pretend to understand this argument, and I'm not going to sit up here and say that I do. So we'll just leave that one alone, and we'll let Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu just have at it. So we have the literature. We have the masters and the sutras and 2,500 years of wisdom trying to help us in a definition of emptiness. And then along comes Tiantang in one of the commentaries in the Book of Serenity, who says something I thought was very applicable to this.

[08:35]

He says, even if you can explain thoroughly, it can't compare with personally arriving once. So we have the foundation of the teachings, centuries of teachings about emptiness. Now, what to make of that here? Ourselves. What do we make of emptiness other than a philosophical debate? Well, a couple of things to say is that I don't really think that the starting point is to immediately get rid of the 10,000 things and to say, well, they don't exist. As Maya so astutely pointed out two weeks ago, there is no there. So where would you put the 10,000 things if you were going to get rid of them and then just have emptiness left? So there is no there to put them there. So there's just a here to deal with.

[09:38]

Also, I think if you prematurely get rid of the 10,000 things, then you end up with what Matsu calls pernicious oneness. I love that phrase, pernicious oneness. That seems to me to say sort of this belief that, yes, everything is one, and sort of this sort of floating, unexamined thing. that I don't think is particularly helpful. So somewhere between saying it's all just one and getting rid of the 10,000 things, what might we say about emptiness? So I would like to offer two definitions that I have found helpful. The first is that emptiness is togetherness and connection. As the Alvidharma says, the important clincher is the relationship.

[10:41]

So you can take two things, and depending on their relationship, you get vastly different meanings and vastly different interpretations. So to study how things come together and what is the connection seems to me to be helpful. Another word for this is dependent co-arising. To me, dependent co-arising is just a fancy term for togetherness. So studying what is it that comes together, not just things, but all things, thoughts, beliefs, And to remember that the I and the self that were allegedly in some manner sort of trying to diminish or get rid of in a separate way is also a contributor to emptiness.

[11:51]

It's also a concept, also a thought, and it plays in the mix. So what comes together, staying with the questions, what comes together and how is it connected? To maybe put it a different way, the togetherness and the connection of emptiness is, in fact, not an I. It's a we. I would like to suggest that emptiness is a we. It's a deep exploration of the we that comes together. W-E, not W-E-E, we. The second definition of emptiness that I would like to offer is that emptiness is flexibility and potential. Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.

[12:53]

We get into trouble when we believe in a fixed, permanent whatever. Put in your own word, self. But because things aren't exactly fixed and aren't exactly permanent, I think it's very interesting that Thich Nhat Hanh and Nagarjuna, centuries apart, said almost the same thing, that because of emptiness, all things are possible. I'd like to give three examples of that sort of go from concrete thingness through not so concrete, to illustrate this. Emptiness is flexibility and potential. In the spring of 1970, Apollo 13 was launched from Cape Canaveral on its way to the moon.

[14:02]

And two days into the mission, halfway to the moon, an oxygen tank blew up. And those of you that were either old enough to remember this like I am or have seen the movie know what happened. That catastrophe ensued, lots of electrical systems shut down, the astronauts had to move into the lunar module in order to survive. And in the midst of all this, the carbon monoxide filters on the spacecraft failed. And they were in grave danger of suffocating. up there in space. And those of you that are old enough to remember this, remember that the entire world stopped for four days while they got this thing figured out. And I would say, not to put too fine a point on it, that emptiness saved them. And here's what happened. They had to make a carbon monoxide filter if they were going to be able to survive and get through this. And what they had on board was not more carbon monoxide filters. They had spacesuits and gloves and

[15:06]

you know, bags and duct tape and all that stuff, but they didn't have any filters. So they had to make the filters out of this stuff that looked like other stuff. It looked like spacesuits and bags and duct tape and all of that. But because those things were actually empty, and had flexibility and potential, and because the minds and the thoughts that were working on this problem were not fixed and not permanent, they were actually able to take the gloves and the spacesuits and the bags and the duct tape and make carbon monoxide filters. So there's a very concrete example. There's an, well, not every day, let's hope not. Ah, I'd be rude at it. But there is a very concrete, you know, it's like, so how does emptiness help me do the dishes? Well, actually, it does. You know, how does emptiness help me survive in space?

[16:10]

Well, it does, because emptiness is flexibility and potential. So another example, my second example, a little bit more into the realm of the conceptual, was this. what I thought was an ingenious experiment. Well, it wasn't an experiment. It was a test that a college physics professor gave his students several years ago. It made the news. You probably heard about this. And it was a freshman physics class. And the final exam of this physics class was what the professor did was he had a cylinder in his room that was bolted to a table. And the cylinder was maybe three or four feet tall. And into the bottom of the cylinder, he dropped a ping pong ball. and said to his physics students, you may use anything in the room and everything that you have learned about physics to get the ping pong ball out of the bottom of the cylinder, but you can't tip the table. So in other words, you have to leave the table right where it was. And these physics students were so, as it turns out, locked, or not empty,

[17:20]

in their thinking about the problem. They tried everything. They tried tape. They tried fishing it out. They put paper clips together, unbent them, and fished them out, and tried it. And the ping pong ball wasn't coming out. And they had 20 minutes to get it out, and they didn't do it. Now, over in the corner of the classroom where it had sat all semester was a water cooler. If you are fixated on the idea that the water cooler is for drinking, you wouldn't think to take the water, pour it in the cylinder, and float the ping pong ball out of the cylinder. And they didn't think that. So the emptiness of the water, something to drink, but also a flotation device. So locked into some thinking,

[18:21]

That is not flexibility and potential. It's kind of a counter example of the Apollo 13 example. And then finally, to take this to totally a realm of not things, Norman Fisher, in his book, Taking Our Places, has a wonderful explanation of the emptiness of ritual and ceremony. I like this very much. says, ritual depends on the imagination's capacity to transform the material world into the non-material world and vice versa. In order to do this, you have to have a sense of flexibility about material mundane reality to see what it is, but also that it can be something else. So things are not what they seem. nor are they otherwise.

[19:25]

And it's kind of interesting and somewhat amusing sometimes to talk about emptiness in terms of things. Agent Roshi has been taking up the example of the cup. And we discussed the example that, you know, it's a cup until it drops on the floor and then it's a mouse, for example. So the emptiness of things is interesting, but what I... Most would like to emphasize this evening is where emptiness can serve us and our study of us can serve us most deeply, and that is to deeply study and consider the emptiness of other beings. Fixed, permanent, unchanging ideas of other beings leads to war. in one way or another. That group, as if they were different from us, that group is bad, wrong, different.

[20:35]

They have always been that way and they will always be that way and they're a nuisance and so we're going to get rid of them. This is prevalent and it is completely counter to our vow to save all beings. To save all beings, you cannot have a fixed, permanent idea of the person sitting next to you. You cannot have a fixed, permanent idea of what another nation is. To deeply examine emptiness in the context of the vow To save all beings is essential, and I beg you to do it. Please, do not assume that you know what is coming up through the door. Do not assume that you know what you're waking up to next to you in the bed every morning. Do not assume what is next to you on the time.

[21:36]

This is where emptiness comes home to our heart most, is with each other. is with the vow to save all beings. It doesn't mean that we condone certain behaviors, but it means that we study them. To have some flexibility and potential about another being is critical. if we're going to make it on this planet. I vow to save all beings. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Now, numberless, is it zero? And how do you interpret that zero as numberless?

[22:38]

Numberless can be 10,000 things. It can also be zero. Can we see the flexibility and the potential of other beings and therefore make a choice about the other beings that we choose to make? The classic question of what makes a Buddha? All beings. What makes a criminal? All beings. In order to Understand the type of being we're meeting and the type of being that we're creating. Emptiness is the fundamental teaching. What is it that thus comes? There's a fundamental principle in quantum physics that says the observation of any phenomena

[23:44]

changes that phenomena. This is the study of emptiness. The examination of emptiness not only changes what we examine, but changes us as we do the examining. So let's apply the Abhidharma's principles and the punchline to people, to other beings. No one arises from a single cause. No one arises by their own power. No one arises separately. Talking about people as objects is meaningless if the relationship is not understood. So my deep request is that you hold the vow to save all beings, to help all beings, and do that within the context of emptiness.

[25:06]

It may be, though, that starting with people is complicated because we know them. We have some feelings about them, and they're kind of in our face every day, for better or for worse. But I've noticed something curious about many of the talks that happen in this hall and how they end. And they end with something often that I think is a helpful place to start or to explore because it's so interesting to so many of us. and that is to explore emptiness in music. So many of our Dharma talks, as it turns out, end with a song. Have you noticed that? Don't worry. I'm not going to sing tonight, and you aren't either, so it's okay.

[26:12]

I've listed a few here. Let's face the music and dance. That comes up a lot. Blue skies. When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bob and along. Last Sunday, it's a wonderful world. Abbot Steve even has a song about emptiness, which I'm sure many of you have tried to sing with him, Schlepp and Schenade. Remember that one? So I wish he were here instead of on his way to Japan so he could sing that chorus. And I wonder, so many of you in the practice period have said to me that you are starved for music. And I think it's beyond just music as a distraction. I think that there's something in us that gets it, that music is, in a sense, a fundamental way to enter emptiness. Maybe when we can't face studying the emptiness of a person, Maybe we can start with something else, and maybe it's not music for you, but I've heard from an awful lot of you that it is music for you, so I'm going to go with that one for just a minute.

[27:22]

Music is sort of the quintessential emptiness in a way. It doesn't exist anywhere. It has no place. A friend of mine at Palo Alto Research Center, the Xerox Research Center, wrote a paper once, and his title of it was, Where is the Star-Spangled Banner? And yet music is 10,000 things coming together. It takes the instruments. It takes the time period of the composer. It takes the thoughts and feelings of the composer. It takes the historical context, 1812 Overture, for example. It takes a voice. It takes nothing. but the song in your heart. So maybe, in our vow to save all beings, maybe part of that is to study harmony and to see the emptiness of harmony and the emptiness of other beings

[28:44]

and just emptiness, maybe, as a way to find the song in our heart. I think if we find the song in our heart, we can perhaps be open to some flexibility and some potential. Music is ultimately flexible. All those notes can make any tune. The potential in music is amazing. So I offer that as a way to enter emptiness if it's too scary to come in through relationships, through people, through human relationships. So remembering our vow to save all beings and doing that by touching this song in our heart, I would like to end tonight with a song. with my favorite piece of music, which is emptiness to me.

[29:49]

This was very helpful to me. The piece is about 10 minutes, so I invite you to get comfortable. Some of you might know it. It's Barber's Adagio for Strings. Ha ha ha.

[31:37]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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