The World as Emptiness II, Part 7: Thunderous Silence

So this doctrine of the void is really the basis of the whole Mahāyāna movement in Buddhism. It’s marvelous. The void is, of course, in Buddhist imagery, symbolized by a mirror, because a mirror has no color and yet reflects all colors. When this man I talked of, Huineng, said that you shouldn’t just try to cultivate a blank mind, what he said was this: the void—śūnyatā—is like space. Now, space contains everything—the mountains, the oceans, the stars, the good people and the bad people, the plants, the animals, everything. The mind in us—the true mind—is like that. You will find that when Buddhists use the word ‘mind’—they’ve several words for ‘mind,’ but I’m not going into the technicality at the moment—they mean ‘space.’ See, space is your mind. It’s very difficult for us to see that because we think we’re in space, and look out at it. There are various kinds of space. There’s visual space: distance. There is audible space: silence. There is temporal space: as we say, between times. There is musical space: so-called distance between intervals, or the intervals between tones, rather; quite a different kind of space than temporal or visual space. There’s tangible space. But all these spaces, you see, are the mind. They’re the dimensions of consciousness.

And so, this great space which every one of us apprehends from a slightly different point of view—in which the universe moves—this is the mind. So it’s represented by a mirror, because although the mirror has no color, it is for that reason able to receive all the different colors. Meister Eckhart said, In order to see color, my eye has to be free from color. So in the same way, in order not only to see, but also to hear, to think, to feel, you have to have an empty head. And the reason why you are not aware of your brain cells—you’re only aware of your brain cells if you get a tumor or something in the brain, when it gets sick—but in the ordinary way, you are totally unconscious of your brain cells; they’re void. And for that reason you see everything else.

So that’s the central principle of the Mahāyāna. And it works in such a way, you see, that it releases people from the notion that Buddhism is clinging to the void. This was very important when Buddhism went into China. The Chinese really dug this, because Chinese are a very practical people, and when they found these Hindu Buddhist monks trying to empty their minds and to sit perfectly still and not to engage in any family activities—they were celibates—Chinese thought they were crazy. Why do that? And so the Chinese reformed Buddhism, and they allowed Buddhist priests to marry. And in fact, what they especially enjoyed was a sūtra that came from India, in which a layman—who was a wealthy merchant called Vimalakīrti—out-argued all the other disciples of Buddha. And of course—you know, these are these dialectic arguments that are very, very intense things—if you win the argument, everybody else has to be your disciple. So Vimalakīrti, the layman, won the debate, even with Mañjuśrī, who is the bodhisattva of supreme wisdom. They all had, you see, a contest to define the void, and all of them gave their definitions. Finally, Mañjuśrī gave his, and Vimalakīrti was asked, then, for his definition, and he said nothing, and so he won the whole argument. The thunderous silence.