trees and emptiness

it’s difficult to explain the buddhist notion of emptiness to people. sounds quite nihilistic. how can it describe the ultimate nature of reality, are they saying that it is a complete void? early buddhist translations made this even worse, when they translated the sanskrit word shunyata as voidness. but it’s really quite the opposite of that, it’s about the interdependence of all things.

this quote by sogyal rinpoche just came by my email inbox:

Nothing has any inherent existence of its own when you really look at it, and this absence of independent existence is what we call “emptiness.” Think of a tree. When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately it has no independent existence.

When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight—all form part of this tree.

As you begin to think more and more about the tree, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is; that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else; and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing. This is what we mean when we say things are empty, that they have no independent existence.

this is true of trees and everything really, but what’s even more amazing, it’s true of us too.

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