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Emptiness... the Most Profound Truth

One of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism is that nothing exists inherently - all phenomena are the result of the constant interplay of causes and conditions. To understand this, we could look at the phenomenon of ocean waves.

When I mention ocean waves, most everyone immediately develops a clear picture of what a wave is. Yet, when we truly consider it, we only imagine or perceive that a wave is a "thing" we can picture. What we actually pictured was the phenomenon that exists as a result of winds, geologic changes, gravity and tidal movements. We perceive that the water is "moving forward" and yet in reality, there is very little forward motion of the individual water molecules in a wave. What we are seeing is nothing more than the result of causes and conditions. Apart from the ocean, there can be no wave, just as apart from water, there can be no ice cubes.

Similarly, each of us perceives the words on this website as being "written" or "printed" letters. Yet that is only our distorted perception. What we are really looking at are individual pixels arranged on a screen... dark or light spots, arranged according to a mathematical equation, so that the light and dark interplay seems to be letters and words.

From this basic awareness of things not being what we perceive them to be, we can begin to understand the concept of emptiness - or sunyata. Yet in the Heart Sutra, the Buddha says that true emptiness is beyond words, expression or thought. This idea is not unlike the way that the Desert Fathers viewed the Absolute or Ground of Being.

From the Buddhist perspective, emptiness is not a lack or absence of something, as we might think in the West. It is instead the lens through which we learn to truly see things for what they are. Scientists, grappling with this idea, developed their "theory of relativity", which unintentionally begins to scratch the surface of what sunyata is all about.

When we say that all things are an illusion, we are not saying that they do not exist. In fact, many people become misguided, when studying Buddhism without a qualified teacher on this very point. What we mean by calling all things illusion is that nothing is as we perceive it.

Right now, the table at which you sit appears to be the thing we call a table. But in reality, it is wood, nails, glue, and perhaps paint or stains, assembled to make a table. Looking closer, the wood is part of a tree, which was an outgrowth of a seed, which was nourished

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