Emptiness

   When you stop and think about it, there isn't a thing in the universe that can say its existence is independent.  Matter-Energy is all that exists, and the distinctions we make among the objects of the universe are merely the convenience of language.  I'm now looking at a bamboo flute I keep on my desk.  The bamboo itself is dependent on previous generations of bamboo, a seed, soil, rain, and sun, and each of those is dependent on preexisting causes.  A person cut the bamboo with a knife whose steel was worked in a factory that someone planned and built.  One could go back and back listing all the contingencies that created this little flute by which I amuse myself from time to time.
    For convenience, we say the flute is a thing in and of itself, but the reflective mind knows better.  Its current form is caused by millions of earlier causes; there would be no flute without all these earlier events and conditions. We could presumably say that behind its form and our perceptions of the form and our knowledge of how to use the form there is no flute per se.  This object is a construct of the mind.  This is how we arrive at the knowledge of the emptiness of all things.
    Of course, you have to be careful where you say such a thing.  Someone will smack you over the head with a stick, and while you wince, they'll say, “Looks real to me.”  They don't get that the Buddha's teaching isn't that something is unreal but that it's empty of permanence.  They are not the same thing.  Obviously all the atoms and molecules are here and now joined up into a particular form that we can recognize and take advantage of.   Emptiness is that an object is not in and of itself.  It cannot exist by itself.  There is no Platonic “form” out there somewhere from which each object in the universe is a poor copy.
    Emptiness is central to what the Buddha taught us because until we can perceive that objects have no real nature from within themselves, we will not wake up from the dream of the mundane.  I remember a playful argument in college one day in which a friend of mine and I were out walking and saw that someone had taken an old wooden door and bolted it to a couple sawhorses.  I remarked to my friend what a big table it was, and my friend responded, “It's not a table. It's a door.”  You can imagine how this conversation went on and on about the nature of objects:  it's table because of its use, and it's a door because of how it was originally made.  This is how people become distracted from a true perception of the universe.  We look so closely at particulates that we no longer perceive the whole.
    Apart from the objects we encounter every day, there is also ourselves to take into account.  The eye that sees is not an eye all by itself.  Billions of contingent causes present us our current eye.  The same is true of all our other sense organs.  If any of the contingent causes had not occurred, there would be no sensation of sight, touch, taste, and so forth.   We all know about the proverbial tree falling in the woods without a soul to hear it.  Did it then make a sound?  There is a level of truth in this old philosophical exercise.  Without someone to sense sound, there is no sound.  Without someone to smell, there is no fragrance.  This is the principle of emptiness: everything in the universe is connected and inter-reliant.
    Recently I was thinking about my region of northeastern Michigan.  That part of the state was inhabited by Potowatomi settlements before the English and American settlers arrived.  On my desktop I have an old French map from the 18th century of the local places on the two peninsulas, and I recognized several modern place names but with very different spellings.  It occurred to me that these names were the only relics of these settlements.  The aboriginal inhabitants left no structures whatsoever as they were displaced.  When I was a child, they taught us in school about the loggers and French missionaries, but they never taught us about the aboriginal people.  They mentioned them but never taught us about them.  I always wondered about that and learned about them on my own.
    There was a thriving civilization of people in northern Michigan, yet there is no physical trace of them.  Europeans developed a need for permanence and built marvelous edifices of stone to last for centuries and millennia.  You can find houses in France that have had inhabitants for hundreds of years uninterrupted.  There are churches, abbeys, palaces, and forts that are a thousand years old.  But you do not find such things in Michigan despite the many centuries of native habitation.  So I asked myself why not.
    I believe it is because the local people recognized that permanence is impossible.  They didn't entertain the notion in philosophical musing; they understood it as real and incorporated it into their civilization.  Homes were for shelter from the elements and little else.  They were not meant to stand for ever as a challenge to Nature and Time.  What use are monuments when those for whom they are erected are gone and those who erect them will be gone soon themselves?  To live simply and allow the natural cycle of birth and death to continue unimpeded is a much greater monument to a civilization than piles of stone to the memory of people we never knew.
    Sometimes my mind wanders and wants me to play the game of permanence that my European ancestors passed down to me:  A fancy home of granite, my name on a bronze plaque, a monument in the town park.  Of course, it's just a game, and it's fun to play, but fortunately the wiser side of my mind always reminds me that even granite and bronze aren't really permanent.  Nothing is.  And I don't feel deprived because of it.  I feel a sense of propriety, that this is the way things are, and I'm plugged into it no different than any other life form.  It makes me feel connected, and that's comforting. 
    If you ask anyone if there is anything in the universe that is permanent, they'll probably say no.  It's part of some common sense that we all have inside us, but so many people don't like it and live as though it weren't true.  They prefer the dream. 
    Recently I remember responding to someone on Facebook with this comment:  Those who are asleep think the dream is real.  I heard that somewhere a long time ago but don't remember the circumstances.  However, it has stuck with me for a long time and is kind of my personal motto.  In the dream, we can do whatever we like and can guide the consequences to our favor.  In the dream, our loved ones are not gone, our mistakes are forgotten, and we always win at checkers.  But life in the dream isn't real, and when we wake up, that moment of realization contains different emotions.  We can be surprised or disappointed or something else depending on the nature of the dream.  Whatever the emotion, we still get up, get dressed and live our lives.
    Some people do live in miserable circumstances, and the dream world is so much better than the real world.  However, nothing is really ever accomplished in the dream.  It's an unproductive existence. What achievements have you earned in the dream?  What self-improvement have you attained in the dream?  Whose life have you bettered in the dream?  When we pretend that there is permanence and independent existence, it's a dream.  Our growth becomes stunted.  Our path becomes not a way forward but a circuit.