The World as Emptiness II, Part 4: The World as Void

Of course, the separate observer—the thinker of the thoughts—is an abstraction which we create out of memory. We think of the self—the ego, rather—as a repository of memories; a kind of safety deposit box, or record, or filing cabinet place, where all our experiences are stored. Now, that’s not a very good idea. It’s more that memory is a dynamic system, not a storage system. It’s a repitition of rhythms, and these rhythms are all part and parcel of the ongoing flow of present experience. In other words, first of all, how do you distinguish between something known now, and a memory? Actually, you don’t know anything at all until you remember it. Because if something happens that is purely instantaneous—if a light flashes, or, to be more accurate, if there is a flash, lasting only one millionth of a second, you probably wouldn’t experience it, because it wouldn’t give you enough time to remember it.

We say in customary speech, Well, it has to make an impression. So, in a way, all present knowledge is memory, because you look at something, and for a while the rods and cones in your retina respond to that, and they do their stuff—jiggle, jiggle, jiggle; it’s all vibration—and so as you look at things, they set up a series of echoes in your brain. And these echoes keep reverberating, because the brain is very complicated. First of all, everything you know is remembered, but there is a way in which we distinguish between seeing somebody here now, and the memory of having seen somebody else who’s not here now, but whom you did see in the past, and you know perfectly well, when you remember that other person’s face, it’s not an experience of the person being here. How is this? Because memory signals have a different cue attached to them than present-time signals. They come on a different kind of vibration. Sometimes, however, the wiring gets mixed up, and present experiences come to us with a memory cue attached to them, and then we have what is called a déjà vu experience: we’re quite sure we’ve experienced this thing before.

But the problem that we don’t see—don’t ordinarily recognize—is that, although memory is a series of signals with a special kind of cue attached to them so that we don’t confuse them with present experience, they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience; they are all part of this constantly flowing life process, and there is no separate witness standing aside from the process, watching it go by. You’re all involved in it. Now, accepting that, you see—going with that; although, at first, it sounds like the knell of doom—is, if you don’t clutch it anymore, splended. That’s why I said that death should be occasion for great celebration. That people should say Happy death! to you, and always surround death with joyous rites, because this is the opportunity for the greatest of all experiences, when you can finally let go because you know there’s nothing else to do.

There was a kamikaze pilot who escaped because his plane—that he was flying at an American aircraft carrier—went wrong, and he landed in the water instead of hitting the plane, so he survived. But he said afterwards that he had the most extraordinary state of exaltation. It wasn’t a kind of patriotic ecstasy. But the very thought that, in a moment, he would cease to exist—he would just be gone—for some mysterious reason that he couldn’t understand, made him feel absolutely like a god.

Well then, in Buddhist philosophy this sort of annihilation of oneself, this acceptance of change, is the doctrine of the world as the void. This doctrine did not emerge very clearly, very prominently, in Buddhism until quite a while after Gautama the Buddha had lived. We begin to find this, though, becoming prominent about the year 100 B.C., and by 200 A.D. it had reached its peak. And it was developed by the Mahāyāna Buddhists, and it is the doctrine of a whole class of literature which goes by this complex name: Prajñāpāramitā. Now, ‘prajna’ means wisdom. ‘Paramita,’ a crossing over, or going beyond. There is a small Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, a big Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, and then there’s a little short summary of the whole thing called the hṛdaya, or Heart Sutra, and that is recited by Buddhists all over Northern Asia, Tibet, China, and Japan, and it contains the saying, That which is void is precisely the world of form, that which is form is precisely the void. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, and so on, and it elaborates on this theme. It’s very short, but it’s always chanted at important Buddhist ceremonies. And so, it is supposed—by scholars of all kinds who have a missionary background—that the Buddhists are nihilists; that they teach that the world is really nothing, there isn’t anything, and that there seems to be something is purely an illusion. But, of course, this philosophy is much more subtle than that.

The main person who was responsible for developing and maturing this philosophy was Nagarjuna, and he lived about 200 A.D.—one of the most astonishing minds that the human race has ever produced. And the name of Nagarjuna’s school of thought is Madhyamaka, which means, really, the Doctrine of the Middle Way. But it’s sometimes also called the Doctrine of Emptiness, or Śūnyavāda, from the basic word śūnya, or sometimes śūnya has -ta added on the end, and that -ta means ‘-ness’—‘emptiness.’