On the Cognitive Linguistics of Emptiness

This essay applies an analytical method developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, especially as it occurs in the book Metaphors We Live By, originally published in 1981, with a revised edition 2003. I will also draw on their other published works, notably Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987). Lakoff and Johnson tell us that "cognitive metaphors" are ubiquitous in human language. These metaphors involve treating a target domain as if it were a member of the same category as the source domain. In these metaphors the source domain is usually some form of physical interaction that humans have with the objective world, and the target domain is some feature of cognition. In this way, cognitive metaphors are what enable us to think about the world in abstract terms. 

This is a modern form of philosophical analysis not available to the ancient world. So this type of analysis offers the possibility of new insights when applied to old discourses. This method has occasionally been applied to Buddhism in the past, though the application has been patchy and the methods involved have not become mainstream. In this essay, I am going to use the methods developed by Lakoff and Johnson to critique the abstract concept of "emptiness" as we mainly meet it in accounts of Buddhism. In this case, I'm not criticising any particular usage, but want to make some general points about the concept. 

Cognitive Metaphors

A metaphor involves treating one things as if it were another. In a series of five blog posts in 2016, I outline John Searle's account of social reality in which "as if" plays a major role (see Social Reality). In that account of social reality I noted that language is an institutional fact:

Language itself only works because of collective intentionality, i.e. we all agree that certain verbal sounds count as words; that certain words count as representing concepts; that certain combinations of words count as sentences, and so on. (Institutional Facts & Language: Social Reality. II).

What this means is that language relies on us all agreeing that a given word means what it means.  As Wittgenstein famously said, 

“For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (Wittgenstein 1967, section 43)

This is often abbreviated to "meaning is use". Individualism has a role to play in the evolution of language, especially where the individual is influential.  But, generally speaking, language relies on our collective agreement on what words mean (semantics) or do (pragmatics). Cognitive metaphors are no different; other people must understand our use of cognitive metaphors in order for us to communicate about abstractions. 

The metaphor relation is not arbitrary. It is not that anything can be anything. The relation requires that the target domain has some properties that make it a good candidate for metaphorical projection. I won't go more deeply into this since it involves invoking the image schema and explaining this is too involved for an essay like this one. The standard work on image schemas is still (as far as I know) Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind (1987). Suffice it to say that the target domain for the metaphor must be a good fit. 

For example, we may state a commonly used cognitive metaphor: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. (I use Lakoff and Johnson's convention of citing metaphors in small caps). In this metaphor, the source domain is our physical interactions with objects, while the target domain is a subjective experience of thought. If we accept the metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, then any operation we can physically perform on an object we can perform mentally on an idea. If I can grasp an object, then under this metaphor I can grasp an idea, as if it were an object. I can turn an idea over and look at it from another angle. I can look at an idea from different angles. If I have more than one idea, I can juggle them. I can throw an idea out, toss it around, and kick it into the long grass. Virtually anything I can physically do with an object finds a metaphorical application to an idea under the cognitive metaphor, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS.

A poor metaphor might be IDEAS ARE COWBOYS. Cowboys ride, bait, and subdue semi-wild animals for entertainment. It's not clear in what way an idea is like a cowboy. This metaphor is not intuitive. Another one might be FISH ARE BICYCLES. Note that these propositions are not forbidden by the rules of English grammar. Still, they don't make for obvious metaphorical usage. The metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS works because ideas have a limited scope, they can often expressible in a succinct way that makes each idea seem discreet from other ideas. Expressing the idea leads to a transfer of that discreet piece of knowledge to another person. It's not that an idea is an object, but that an idea is sufficiently like an object in specific ways. The similarity occurs at the level of "image schemas", which I'm trying to avoid for reasons of brevity. 

It may seem simplistic to labour the point, but I think it's worth saying that ideas are not real objects. In making the metaphor, we are not reifying the abstraction. Moreover, contrary to the prevailing view of humans amongst Buddhists, people are not easily fooled into reifying cognitive metaphors. It would be odd for a person to claim that ideas are objects in a substantial sense. We know this is not true. No one ever literally held an idea in the palm of their hand, for example. We know it's a metaphor and we intuitively deal with thousands of such metaphors every day. If we had to stop to analyse each one, abstract thought would not be possible.

Unlike a computing language I don't have to "declare" the metaphor before using it. We effortlessly decode hundreds and thousands of these cognitive metaphors on the fly without even noticing that we are doing it. When people are sitting around a table at a meeting and someone says, "we need to move on", and they change the subject rather than getting up and leaving the room, no one is surprised by this.

In this case, it is because we can form a cognitive metaphor: A CONVERSATION IS A JOURNEY. For example, we might be having a conversation and it "takes a turn" (perhaps a strange or unexpected turn, or a turn for the worse). Someone might wish to "return" to what was said earlier. If it's going badly, we might say "Let's start over". If the conservation was difficult but productive, we may say: "we got there in the end". When a conversation is at an impasse, we might say that we have to move on and leave the impasse unresolved. And a conversation may reach a natural conclusion: "let's stop there".

These cognitive metaphors are not incidental but rather they form an integral part of language use. The richness of our metaphorical use of language is part of what makes us human. Our ability to talk about one thing as if it were a member of a completely different class of thing is what distinguishes human communication from all other animals. Clearly, some animals and birds are capable of abstract thought to some extent. But they don't communicate in metaphors. We do. 

Once we get attuned to this idea of cognitive metaphors, we begin to see them everywhere. When I talk about typing on my keyboard (a physical act) and words appearing "on my screen" this is two cognitive metaphors: WORDS ARE OBJECTS and SCREENS ARE SURFACES. Of course the screen is literally a surface, but the words are not on it in a physical sense. I can't physically interact with words on a screen. Even on a touch screen that's not what is happening. Rather the patterns of light and dark created by pixels make words seem to appear on the screen, and electrical interactions between surface and finger help to create the illusion of physical interaction. At the end of the day there is dust and fingerprints on my screen, but no physical objects called "words". Still, all the verbs that can be used to describe interacting with objects on a surface, can now be applied to "words on a screen".

In order to get at the underlying metaphors involved in talking about emptiness in a Buddhist context, we have to consider the use of container metaphors.

Container Metaphors

A very common cognitive metaphor involves likening something to a container. For example, in English we have the metaphor: A BOOK IS A CONTAINER. A book can, for example, be filled with ideas (here again: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS). With this combination we make a complex source domain: putting objects into a container maps onto putting ideas or words into a book. We use the same verb in each case, but use it substantively on one hand and metaphorically on the other.

A very common metaphor in English is MIND IS A CONTAINER and more specifically, mind is a container of experiences. In this view, experience happens in the mind; experience is the content of the mind qua container of experiences. Interestingly, however, Indian Buddhists do not seem to have used a specific container metaphor that we take for granted: i.e. sensory experience is contained in the mind. In Buddhism, the mind (manas) is more like a translator that turns (physical) sensory experience into (mental) perception. An ancient Buddhist could not, for example, say something like "empty your mind" because this relies on the container metaphor and they did not conceive of the mind as a container or sensory experience as the content of the mind. They are more likely to use a surface metaphor for the mind, and to talk about sensory experience as a disturbance of that surface. They may also talk about a sensory event in terms of the sense organ being struck by the appearance of an object. Keeping in mind that "appearance" (rūpa) is to the eye as sound is to the ear.

Despite the fact that ancient Buddhists did not use the container metaphor for the mind, it is so ingrained in us as English speakers that it's almost impossible to not think of the mind as a container and sensory experience as the content. 

Given all this, what can we say about how to understand the term "emptiness" (Skt. śūnyatā)

Emptiness and Experience

The adjective "empty" and the abstract noun "emptiness" are part of the broader cognitive metaphor involving containers. There is no abstract "emptiness" in the absence of a container that could potentially contain something. Moverover, emptiness in the dictionary sense boils down to "the absence of content". "Emptiness" is defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary as "the state of containing nothing". Similarly Merriam-Webster defines emptiness as "containing nothing, not occupied or inhabited" and "lacking reality, substance, meaning, or value."

These definitions are curiously opposed to Buddhist definitions of "emptiness" which specifically state that it does not mean "void" or "nothingness". As one writer seeks to clarify:

"Emptiness is not complete nothingness; it doesn't mean that nothing exists at all. This would be a nihilistic view contrary to common sense." - Lewis Richmond.

In other words, in a Buddhist the concept "emptiness" does not mean emptiness, at least in any general sense. Rather it means, we are told, that things are not as they appear to us. It is the difference between appearance and reality. In which case, "emptiness" is obviously the wrong term for this concept. Still I want to press on and consider the cognitive metaphors that apply to our English word and circle back to the doctrinal mismatch.

Any given container—physical or metaphorical—may contain something or not, but to be a container it must potentially contain something. If a container contains anything, then it is not empty. If it contains nothing, it is empty. 

Note that this is unrelated to the expected content of the container. I drink my morning coffee from a teacup I like. The rest is in a thermos and stays hot. One could say that my cup is empty of tea, for example, but by being specific one falls down a rabbit hole. My cup may well be empty of tea, water, lime-juice, cooking oil, kerosene, and every other kind of liquid, but it presently is filled with coffee and thus my cup is not empty at all. This gives emptiness an important parameter. Emptiness tends to be an absolute: if my cup has any kind of content, then it is not empty. My cup is only empty when there is no liquid in it; i.e. when there is emptiness.

So far, so logical. But this is not how Buddhists, especially Mādhyamikas, use the termin practice. Mādhyamikas use the abstract noun "emptiness" in a concrete sense. The classic example is the statement "form is emptiness". This is a valid English sentence, but there is something wrong with it. Even when we take "form" to be "form in the abstract" (or matter generally as many Mādhyamikas do), this sentence is not logically valid because it is trying to equate two different levels of abstraction. "Form" here is generally taken to mean "phenomena". If the metaphor is FORMS ARE CONTAINERS then we might validly state that form is empty. 

There are several problems here. The first is that rūpa is (in English at least) not the container of experience, it is the content of experience (or part of it). Rūpa is to eye what sound is the ear. And note that this applies across the senses. Importantly, rūpa is to the eye as tangibles (spraśtavya) are to the body (kāya). Rūpa is on the wrong side of the equation to be equated with body, even metaphorically. In Chinese, rūpa is routinely translated as sè 色 "hue (from original meanings "form, appearance, complexion"); visual surface quality." (definition from Kroll). In Sanskrit, rūpa is typically a property of a surface reflecting light, it is not a metaphorical container. 

That said, there is no doubt that some modern Buddhists do take rūpa to mean "substance", "matter", or "body". We can see that this is incoherent even at face value since the word is neither defined that way nor used that way in ancient texts. Even the translation "form" misleads most English-speakers into thinking in substantive terms about rūpa. Rūpa means "appearance". Moreover, even if we invoke the container metaphor, it can't be applied to rūpa because rūpa is an element of experience, this is to say that rūpa is content. Ancient Buddhists preferred to see rūpa as a disturbance on the surface of the mind, but even in this metaphor, rūpa is not substantive.

The second problem is that even if rūpa were a container we could go as far as saying that it is empty if it did not contain anything. We could not logically assert that it is "emptiness". If emptiness is the absence of content and rūpa is content, then the two are logical contraries. Despite a great deal of hand waving in modern Buddhist philosophy, "form is emptiness" simply does not make sense in English. But then it doesn't make any more sense to state this in Sanskrit; rūpameva śūnyatā is still equating two different levels of abstraction. This is an egregious wrong turn in Buddhist philosophy.

I might never have thought of this had I not discovered that the phrase was not originally rūpaṃ śūnyatā "form is emptiness", but rūpaṃ māyā "appearance is illusion" (Attwood 2017). This equation occurs in Aṣṭa and in a few places in Pañc as well. It is clearly translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva as 色不異幻、幻不異色，色即是幻、幻即是色。 (e.g. at T 223, 8.239c6-7). Here huàn 幻 translates māyā "illusion", though it originally meant "creation" or the creative power of the devas to keep the world in harmony (ṛta). Given the long history of Buddhists comparing sensory experience to an illusion this makes perfect sense. A classic example of this is the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta, which concludes with a well-known verse:

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ, vedanā bubbuḷūpamā /
Marīcikūpamā saññā, saṅkhārā kadalūpamā;
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ, desitādiccabandhunā (SN iii.142).

Appearance is like a ball of foam, valence like a bubble.
Recognition is like a mirage, volition like a plantain.
Discrimination is like an illusion. So Ādiccabandhu taught.

Here, Ādiccabandhu means the Buddha, but it is a distinctively Brahmin name completely unconnected to any of the standard myths of the Buddha. A similar verse occurs at the end of the Vajracchedikā, where the simile becomes a metaphor:

tārakā timiraṃ dīpo māyāvaśyāya budbudaḥ |
supinaṃ vidyud abhraṃ ca evaṃ draṣṭavya saṃskṛtam ||Vaj 22 || (Harrison and Watanabe 2006)

We should see the conditioned as a star, a kind of blindness, a lamp;
An illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble, a dream, a lightning flash, a cloud.

We also find the simile in Aṣṭa, “appearance is like an illusion” (māyopamaṃ rūpam. Vaidya 1960: 9). And this is all quite straightforward: experience and reality are not the same thing; different rules apply. 

There is a popular rhetorical strategy for dealing with "form is emptiness" amongst Buddhists which can be illustrated with a random example from the Tricycle website:

Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But, empty of what? The key word is empty. To be empty is to be empty of something.

If I am holding a cup of water and I ask you, “Is this cup empty?” you will say, “No, it is full of water.” But if I pour out the water and ask you again, you may say, “Yes, it is empty.” But, empty of what? Empty means empty of something. The cup cannot be empty of nothing. “Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what. My cup is empty of water, but it is not empty of air. To be empty is to be empty of something. This is quite a discovery. When Avalokita says that the five skandhas are equally empty, to help him be precise we must ask, “Mr. Avalokita, empty of what?”

What we see here is a fantastic distortion of reality, leading to a false conclusion. It is nonsensical for you to ask me what my cup is empty of, because to be empty in any sense, it has to be empty of everything. As I noted above, my cup could be and regularly is empty of tea (and all other liquids) but full of coffee: in which case my cup is not empty at all. The conclusion here—“Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what—is simply not true. This is a case of the tail wagging the dog. That is to say, we know what the answer had to be in order to legitimise Buddhist dogma on emptiness, and the question is phrased in such as way as to elicit only that answer. But in doing so, Buddhists blithely defy the conventions of language. 

We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" The question is meaningless and the answer is simply a restatement of a dogma that doesn't make any sense. The idea that "empty of what" is a natural question is either extraordinarily naive or disingenuous. Either way, Buddhists propagate this falsehood in all sincerity. 

This invalid method and false conclusion are often parlayed into an even worse question using the abstract noun: "emptiness of what?" Such a thing is not allowed under English grammar. Emptiness is emptiness. "Of what" is an entirely meaningless question because if the answer is not "everything", then the vessel is not empty at all. 

We do sometimes suggest that emptiness might have degrees.  For example, we may say that a cup may be half full or half empty. Still, it's only from the point of view of being half full that we can ask "of what?" The "of what?" question only applies to the content of the container. An empty container has no content; a half empty container is half empty of all content. Even if we say the glass is half empty, no one in their right mind asks "Half empty of what?". This is simply not how the container metaphor works. 

We can see that the cognitive linguistic perspective is a powerful method for understanding utterances. But it also highlights how dogmatic the Buddhist discourse on emptiness is. This kind of invalid logic is de rigueur for Buddhist philosophy and is almost never questioned or critiqued: either from within or without. Rather such views are carefully curated by Buddhists, in the sense of being framed as deep truths, discovered by visionaries and mystics, and accompanied by frenzied hand waving so that they can be presented as something they are not, i.e. true. This is what we expect of a religious philosophy or theology. There are axioms that cannot be questioned or the whole thing would fall apart. The fabric of Madhyamaka is held together with unquestioned, religiously inspired, axioms. 

The same argument holds for Sanskrit which has identical cognitive metaphors. In Sanskrit it is nonsensical to say rūpaṃ śūṇyatā, but it is sensible to say rūpaṃ māyā, and even better to say rūpaṃ māyopamaṃ "appearance is like an illusion"

So my, rather awkward conclusion is this: Buddhists don't seem to understand the concept of empty, let alone the concept of emptiness. If they did understand, the question "empty of what?" would never occur to them. Worse, Buddhists routinely insist that this flawed concept of emptiness is what makes sense of Prajñāpāramitā. Two wrongs don't make a right. 

In this case, how should we understand the word emptiness?

Making Sense of Emptiness

The key here is to note that the first use of śūnyatā as a technical term is to refer to the state of meditative concentration in which all sensory experience has ceased due to the withdrawal of attention from the senses. This state is called suññatāvihāra or śūnyatāsamādhi. Since sensory experience is dependent on attention (manasikāra), by practising non-attention (amanasikāra), one prevents sensory experience from arising and causes arisen sensory experience to cease. 

Here, sensory experience can be seen as the content of experience or, in Buddhist terms as a distortion of the (naturally) smooth surface of the mind. As such, sensory experience may be present or absent and even admit degrees of these. Hence, between ordinary waking awareness and emptiness there are numerous stages (āyatana) of increasingly attenuated sensory experience. But here, too, absence is absolute; the presence of an any sensory experience means that emptiness doesn't apply. This point is made repeatedly in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, for example. Emptiness in this case, is the complete absence of sensory experience. 

There are several Buddhist approaches to analysing the content of experience: a range of reductive ontologies into which experience is analysed. For example, the skandha-ontology, which focuses on the processes that give rise to experience, or the dhātu-ontology, which is focussed on the sense faculties and their objects. Mainstream Buddhism foregrounds this reductive, analytic approach of breaking experience down into simpler components in order to eliminate it as a source of absolute being. That complex objects disappear under analysis is not some great metaphysical truth, it is simply a consequence of methodological reductionism. 

If I dismantle my chariot, of course I no longer have a working chariot because I've just broken it on purpose. Who does that? Why would I want to dismantle a working chariot in the first place? And why would my destruction of the thing constitute proof that it never existed in the first place? This is the claim that many Buddhists make but, again, it is nonsensical.   

Prajñāpāramitā Buddhists, building on a tradition that is probably older than Buddhism itself, sought first to bring sensory experience to a halt. They didn't analyse sensory experience in any depth because the acme of their program was not an insight into sensory experience. What they sought, first and foremost, was an insight into death and rebirth. The whole fetish of emptiness was originally established on the analogy of emptiness with death. Mastery (vidyā) over sensory experience, in the form of the ability to voluntarily make it stop, equated to mastery over repeated death. This mastery was and is the driving force of Buddhism, even when it is buried in centuries of intellectual accretion. 

My current thinking is that the discovery of how to do this probably arose around the same time as major socio-political changes in India, reflected in, for example, the replacement of red and black pottery type by the painted grey ware style of pottery. Within a few centuries we see the emergence of walled city states which are stable for some 200-300 years before the Moriyan Dynasty of Magadha overwhelmed all the others, founding the first pan-Indian empire. One possible source of mind-training techniques that limit sensory experience is the "interiorisation" of Brahmanical rituals. In this development, some Brahmins began to perform their daily rituals in imagination rather than physically. This led to the discovery of radical changes in sensory experience, especially in the form of hallucinations due to sensory deprivation, and ultimately to the cessation and absence of sensory experience. By the time the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad was composed (in or around the Kingdom of Kosala) the correct performance of rituals was being linked to one's afterlife destination. Buddhists and Jains had similar ideas but focussed on actions more generally, with Buddhists refining this to just volitional actions. 

However it happened, it is apparent that in this milieu some religieux developed and shared the techniques that allowed them to bring sensory experience to a halt and to dwell in a state in which there is awareness but no content. Some Buddhists called this "emptiness" (śūnyatā). Other Buddhists called it "extinction"(nirvāṇa) and other names. This state is also known in modern times as "contentless awareness", "minimal phenomenal awareness", or "non-dual awareness". 

This is how I presently understand "emptiness" in Prajñāpāramitā.  I believe this is a better approach than anything based in later traditional interpretations based on the Madhyamaka telos (which sees Prajñāpāramitā merely as proto-Madhyamaka). 

Dharma as Container?

One of the key concepts in Madhyamaka is "the emptiness of dharmas". In this usage, dharmas have to be considered as metaphorical containers. The broader translation of dharmas as "phenomena" (as distinct from noumena; i.e. appearances rather than reality) seems to fit here, but what is the content of  a phenomenon? Is there really any phenomenon that is not sensory experience?

Nāgārjuna tells us that he expects that we will expect a dharma to have svabhāva in the sense of being autopoietic or self-creating. Nāgārjuna points out that this self-creating property of dharmas cannot exist in any changeable phenomenon. So far so good. The problem is that no one ever believed in self-creating dharmas. No one ever proposed this before Nāgārjuna. But he said that everyone believed it. Nāgārjuna appears to have lied about this. What puzzles me is that no one really cares about the lie. Many people seem to prefer this lie. 

The svabhāva of a dharma, according to Abhidharma lore, is the sui generis quality that gives us the ability to identify it. For example, it's important to all Buddhists to distinguish skillful (kuśala) motivations (cetanā) from unskillful (akuśala) ones. If I experience a moment of greed or generosity, I identify it as such by introspecting the content of the experience. The fact that I can identify an experience as motivated by greed or generosity doesn't imply anything like Nāgārjuna's autopoietic dharmas. As far as I can see, there is no way to even infer autopoietic dharmas from any early Buddhist doctrine. We have different kinds of experiences and these are identifiable by certain characteristics. No one disputes this, not even Nāgārjuna. 

However, Nāgārjuna also assumes that to be real a dharma must have svabhāva in his autopoietic sense. This axiom is incoherent, but is blindly accepted by all and sundry; even Graham Priest, the academic logician, seems to fail to see this basic logical error in Nāgārjuna's argument. Since he can (trivially) prove that no dharma can be autopoietic, he then deduces that dharmas are not real, that they don't exist. But this definition of "real" is completely incoherent. Not only did Buddhists never use this definition of real, they weren't even interested in the question of the reality or unreality of dharmas. They were interested in the arising and ceasing of dharmas; especially in the light of a state in which all dharmas cease except for the asaṃskṛtadharma, i.e. emptiness. Emptiness is asaṃskṛta because it does not occur due to the presence of a condition but rather occurs when all conditions for sensory experience are absent. 

In order to square the circle, Nāgārjuna has to introduce the nonsense idea of a "relative truth", which is not true at all. The ultimate truth, in this view, is that dharmas don't exist, because they are not self-creating. I can see no good reason to take Nāgārjuna seriously as a philosopher or even, frankly, as a Buddhist. He seems to have entirely missed the point of Buddhism and has gone off on a tangent. And still, he is routinely cited as "the most important Buddhist philosopher". 

Conclusion

The term "emptiness" is generally used in an incoherent way by Buddhists, especially in statements containing the idea "emptiness of...". We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" let alone "emptiness of what?" because this is not how the container metaphor works. 

The idea that the proposition "form is emptiness" is meaningful now seems doubtful. Moreover, when we look at the kinds of post hoc arguments put forward to justify this proposition, they simply don't make sense. In addition, we know that it used to make sense when presented in the form: "appearance is an illusion." A sensory experience is like an illusion. I doubt anyone would argue with this.

It is also true that in the state called "emptiness" there are no dharmas because that state occurs only when all dharmas have ceased and no new dharmas are arising. This sense of the term is far more coherent than the general religious consensus that emptiness is reality. 

The incoherence reaches its apotheosis in Madhyamaka rhetoric about the emptiness of dharmas, by which Mādhyamikas mean that they think dharmas don't exist, since they tie existence to self-creation and it is trivial to show that dharmas cannot be self-creating. Nāgārjuna insists on an incoherent definition of what "real" means and uses that to argue that the concept of existence is incoherent. Prior to Nāgārjuna no one ever used this definition of real. Apart from his devotees, most Buddhists still don't use this definition. 

The standard ways we have of talking about this all seem to miss the point. Early Buddhists did not venture opinions on the existence or nonexistence of dharmas, except in the case of the sarvāsti doctrine. Even the Sarvāstivādins did not argue that the existence of dharmas was due to self-creation. The logic of sarvāsti is completely different but not difficult to follow. If a past dharma can be the cause of a present effect, then the doctrine of dependent arising itself says that it presently exists since imasmin sati, idaṃ hoti and imasmin asati, idaṃ na hoti. If the dharma doesn't exist now, then it cannot be a factor in the arising of a dharma in the present. This central argument is not even considered by Nāgārjuna, let alone refuted. 

The nature of dharmas is irrelevant in light of the fact that dharmas arise and cease, depending on where our attention goes. To say that dharmas lack svabhāva in Nāgārjuna's sense is trivial. To say that they have svabhāva in the Abhidharma sense is also trivial since we routinely recognise hundreds of different kinds of experience (for which we have thousands of words). The key to understanding Prajñāpāramitā lies in another direction entirely. The main point is that attention can be withdrawn from sensory experience. When we withdraw attention from sensory experience, it ceases, leaving us in a particular state characterised by some kind of basic awareness without any experiential content. That is, in a state of emptiness.

While it is not essential to my critique of Madhyamaka, it helps to understand the cognitive metaphors of emptiness and how cognitive metaphors function generally. This is so because "the emptiness of dharmas" is a cognitive metaphor: DHARMAS ARE CONTAINERS. But this is only true if dharmas exist and are capable of acting as metaphorical containers.

Still, it is only Madhyamakas who believe that in order to exist, to be real, a dharma must be self-creating. "Self-creation" is an odd choice for the content of that container. I can imagine a thing being self-creating, but I cannot imagining a thing containing self-creation. Self-creation doesn't fit the cognitive metaphor. 

So even if we could legitimately ask "empty of what?" the answer "empty of self-creation" is nonsense on several levels. For example, it would require us to relate to "self-creation" as content. To my mind this simply doesn't work. "Self-creation" is not a suitable target for the source domain of things we put in containers, except in the very broadest sense that IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. The idea of self-creation might be the content of a metaphorical container, the fact of self-creation cannot be.  

On the other hand, the emptiness of the mind, i.e. the concept of the absence of mental content in meditation, is not plagued by these inconsistencies and incoherences. In English it is natural to use the container metaphor for this. It is not so natural in scriptural languages, but, nevertheless, the absence of dharmas in meditation is the key concept here, not the absence of being self-creating. The whole idea of self-creating dharmas is a red herring. 

The metaphysical speculations that attract us as explanations for emptiness are largely based on prior indoctrination. In my reading, such speculations are absent from both early Buddhism and Prajñāpāramitā. This is not to say that metaphysics is generally absent from or irrelevant to Buddhism.  All ancient Buddhists believed in karma and rebirth, for example. These involve commitments to metaphysical views that we now know to be false, though few Buddhists will admit to this. 

The methods of cognitive linguistics are a powerful tool for thinking critically about Buddhist doctrines. That said, most existing applications of these methods have been in the service of tradition, i.e. used purely descriptively by scholars who have no interest in critiques of Buddhist philosophy. Whatever the reason for it, this side-stepping manoeuvre allows those people to continue evangelising for traditional Buddhism without ever confronting the inevitable antinomies between Iron Age or Medieval thought in India and present day science and philosophy. Many Buddhists seem attracted by the idea of subsuming all knowledge within Buddhism. This tends to involve a rather blasé form of dualism in which science is merely concerned with the "physical" and Buddhism is concerned something that we often see called "spiritual".

Unfortunately, this exceptionalist discourse appears to obscure and devalue the real contribution of Buddhists, i.e. the cultivation and exploration of states of contentless awareness. I see this as a lose-lose scenario. I see the neuroscience community studying this phenomenon and developing their own terminology for it, though at present we still see a proliferation of different terminologies. At some point, an objective account of the methods and consequences of meditation will eclipse the religious accounts. Those who insist on the religious accounts, with all their incoherence and misdirection, will be relegated out of the conversation and become irrelevant. I'd prefer to see experienced meditators staying in the game, but as long as they cling to outmoded forms of talking about emptiness, they will not be part of the conversation for much longer. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. (2017). "Form is (Not) Emptiness: The Enigma at the Heart of the Heart Sutra." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 13,52–80. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/issue/view/15/showToc.

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.

The Dogma: On Not Taking Nāgārjuna Seriously (Seriously!)

I wrote this for my Facebook group on Heart Sutra research. As I haven't posted anything here for a while I thought I'd repost it. 

In response to a post about the word tathatā, two people responded by rehearsing aspects of Madhyamaka dogma. I'm just going to call this the Dogma and people who promote the Dogma as Dogmatics. When people cite the Dogma they present it as a transcendent truth that brooks no contradiction, though it is also frequently (and unironically) presented as a series of contradictions.

I want to address anyone who takes the Dogma seriously by explaining why I don't take it or them seriously.

The Dogma is a body of religious rhetoric that emerges at a time when sectarian Buddhism was maturing. Mahāyāna Buddhism was still nascent but existed as an uncoordinated series of reforms centering, in my view, around the problem of the absent Buddha. Gautama sought his own liberation and left this world, leaving us to find our own way out. And later Buddhists found this narrative intolerable (even selfish), so they changed it in various ways, some of which are (in essence) what we now call Mahāyāna. 

The foundation of Dogma is principally associated with Nāgārjuna who is believed to be a real person that lived near the beginning of the first millennium of the Common Era. But Dogma has been augmented numerous times by commentators (right up to the present). Most scholars now question the orientation of Nāgārjuna. For example, it is apparent that in composing the Dogma, Nāgārjuna was not re-interpreting Prajñāpāramitā. When he cites scripture, he cites Sanskrit translations of early Buddhist texts. Some have questioned whether he would have identified as Mahāyāna at all. That said, in proposing the Dogma, Nāgārjuna was making a break with early Buddhist rhetoric.

The Dogma makes a number of erroneous assumptions that lead it to dubious conclusions: 1. that dependent arising is a theory of everything; 2. that experience is reality; 3 that existence must be permanent; 4. the experience of emptiness is reality. So let's take each of these in turn.

1. Dependent Arising

As hinted at above, dependent arising was never intended to be a theory of everything. Early Buddhists set out to explain how experience arises. Simple observation shows us that the dynamics of objects are not the same as the dynamics of experience. This is largely implicit in early Buddhist texts.

Somewhere along the line Buddhists began to apply dependent arising to everything. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I can easily imagine things that are physically impossible, that defy the laws of physics. I can imagine flying, for example. Not possible in reality, possible in imagination. Because the contents of our minds don't behave like real things, we conclude that they are like illusions. Note, early Buddhists did not conclude that the contents of our minds are unreal. One of Nāgārjuna's touchstone texts was a Sanskrit version of the Kaccācagotta Sutta. In this text, the Buddha tells the eponymous Kaccāna* that the world is generally divided into existent (attitā) and nonexistent (n'atthitā) but that in his [i.e. the Buddha's] view neither applies to "the world" (loka). Here, I think we must follow Sue Hamilton and others and take loka to be the "world of experience". The Buddha does not take experience to be either existent or nonexistent, rather experience is dependently arisen. And this is precisely the Buddha's "middle way" between extremes. 

* i.e. Kātyāyana: a younger member of the Kātya tribe, who are the descendants of the ṛṣi Kati. Kātya is an adjectival form meaning "of or related to Kati". The head of the Brahmin Kātya clan would be called Kātya, while younger male members of the clan would add the yuvan "youth" suffix, i.e. yāyana: hence Kātyayāyana or Maudgalyāyana. 

If we make dependent arising a theory of everything then contradictions ensue. We end up saying that things don't really exist because they are dependent on other things. But think about it. Why would anyone say something like this? What is is about dependency that makes an object unreal. Is a rock any less solid because is was formed by a process? No.

2. Experience versus Reality

Early Buddhists appear to have understood that sensory experience was different from reality. The Dogma, by contrast, refuses to make this distinction. In the Dogma, experience is a lesser form of reality. But experience is not reality. Experience is experience. Experience is what happens when a sentient subject encounters an object. Experience is subjective, that is to say that its mode of existence is subjective.

A good way of talking about it is Thomas Metzinger's use of the term "virtual". We don't have a self, we have a virtual self model, generated by the brain. As a virtual rather than a real thing, our sense of self has qualities and characteristics associated with subjectivity. For example, how we see ourselves is affected by mood. Our virtual model can be disrupted by drugs which do not change "reality", they change the way the brain generates our virtual self model.

3. Existence

The Dogma has a perverse definition of "real". I understand that some people may want to undermine the Abhidharma approach by criticising the nature of categories of experience. The fact that such categories rely on the concept of svabhāva qua distinctive characteristic smacks of essentialism.

But there svabhāva is an epistemic term: it is how experience appears to us, not the thing in itself. Moreover, when we categorise dharmas, we are mainly concerned with thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

It is useful, for example, to distinguish the ethical character of a thought. Was is motivated by greed? Or by generosity? And by "useful" here I mean soteriological. This distinction is important for anyone wanting to live an ethical life, and if you believe in liberation from rebirth in saṃsāra then it is an essential concept to understand.

In arguing against perceived (but in fact nonexistent) essentialism in Abhidharma, the Dogma changes the meaning of svabhāva so that it definitely is essentialist. Now it means the sole condition for the existence of an object. And it is trivial to show that this entity cannot be real, since nothing can be the sole condition for its own existence. Everything is more complex than that.

So how does this trivialism take on such gravitas in the Dogma? It's partly because people who adopt the Dogma attribute their own definition of svabhāva to other people (who almost certainly never did held that view and definitely do not now). Having created the strawman, they triumphantly burn it down. But so what? No one believes it anyway.

4. Emptiness is reality.

The final point is that, in the Dogma, it is assumed that the absence of sensory experience is reality. And this is the heart of the matter. It is this assumption that leads to all of the others.

We all know, either first or second hand, that the cessation of sense experience without the loss of awareness is a profound and potentially life-changing experience. And it's fairly obvious that the techniques to bring experience to a halt were in widespread use in the Ganges valley by the time of the second urbanisation, from about the 6th Century BCE onwards. The new cities attracted Brahmin immigration from the West, too, which is another story.

We should not be too harsh on this point. The assertion--that lack of experience is reality--is one that is common in Indian religious thought. The cessation of sense experience was taken to be reality by Brahmins, Jaina, and Sāṃkhyakas as well as Bauddhikas.

But here's the thing. The cessation of experience is simply the cessation of experience, it is not reality. And this can be seen in how different religions interpret it as Brahman, ātman, puruṣa, jīva, pudgala,  advaita, śūnyatā, etc.

Conclusions

Perhaps the problem is the preternatural clarity of mind that accompanies cessation; the purity of a mind without content, is hyperreal. The very vividness of the state makes it seem more real than reality. Certainly it can be more attractive than reality. Because in that state all ones desires and discontents cease along with other kinds of thought.

Still, the conclusion that reality is the absence of sense experience is fundamental to the Dogma. And it allows Dogmatics a peculiar form of rhetoric which I sum up this way: everything the Dogmatic says is true, while everything the non-Dogmatic says is an illusion, a conceptual proliferation.

I've dealt with this rhetoric for more than 25 years now. At first it worked as expected on me. When I tried to ask certain types of questions that seemed natural to me, a Dogmatic would simply shut down the conversation by pointing out that my questions were based on conventional reality or illusions. The truth is the Dogma and anything else is simply and self-evidently false.

The choice with Dogmatics is either to accept the Dogma or be dismissed as a deluded pṛthagjāna.

However, I reject the framing of the discussion in Dogmatic terms. I see no reason to believe that the cessation of sense experience gives one insights into the nature of reality. One cannot know more by closing off all sources of knowledge about the thing one wishes to know, one can only know less.

I grant that one may discover something about the way that our minds create our virtual models of body, self, and world. And how we use these virtual models to navigate our way through a complex and ever-changing world, especially the social world. The social world deserves a much greater prominence in our thinking about Buddhism. But this is all the province of epistemology. And the result, in Buddhism, is always some kind of knowledge: an epistemic inquiry resulting in epistemic insights.

I'm not arguing within the Dogma framework because it is both false and perverse. Nāgārjuna is not someone I revere at all. I count him the worst philosopher in history, precisely because he does not examine his own assumptions, even when the result is nonsense or contradiction.

The biggest problem with the Dogma is that Dogmatics hold it to be a self-evident truth that not only resists external criticisms, but resists all criticism. It is Holy Writ that can never be challenged. Like Richard Feynman, I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned. But the thing is that we can answer many seemingly intractable questions if we only give up Dogma. Dogma is the greatest impediment. It is an extreme view, a wrong view.

The resolution of this issue is simply to make a distinction between metaphysics and epistemology and allow that Buddhism is principally concerned with the latter. Our conclusions about what we know, especially what we know about the cessation of sense experience, can be interpreted as metaphysics, but they need not be.

Religious dogmas now pose the greatest threat to the long-term survival of Buddhism. On the other hand, secular interest in "awareness without content" is now the subject of scientific scrutiny and is already beginning to escape from the religious chains in which it has been bound. Like the preliminary practices we put under the heading of "mindfulness" the practices that culminate in what we call "emptiness" are on the verge of escaping into the secular world. And that is something to celebrate.

Note: I've added a new tab at the top of the page where I'm going to keep a running bibliography of works that I think are relevant to the topic of secular emptiness. 

The Myths of Religion and Being Bauddha

No doubt there are innumerable definitions of religion from many different points of view. In 2015 I wrote an essay, The Complex Phenomenon of Religion (25 Sept 2015), mapping out some of the key ideas that I see as underlying religion and how they interrelate to create religion. The foundational ideas being: supernatural agency, morality, and ontological dualism. These ideas are intuitive to most people, or at least (to use Justin Barret's term), minimally counter-intuitive. I tried to show how each of these ideas entails others and thus starting from our intuitive conclusions about the world, we are drawn into a complex and self-confirming worldview. Morality or a just world entails an afterlife because the world of the living is patently unfair. An afterlife is itself intuitive for various reasons, but particularly made possible by ontological dualism, the idea that our soul or mind is distinct from our body. And this dualistic conclusion is intuitive to many people because of, for example, out-of-body experiences, and so on. All of the main features of religions, including Buddhism, emerge from various interactions amongst these basic intuitive conclusions and generalising from experience.

Another way to look at religion, is to see it as based on a series of interrelated myths. Myths are stories that express the values of a society in symbolic terms. A characteristic of many of these stories is that, as well as embodying our intuited conclusions about the world, they include minimally counter-intuitive elements that make them interesting and memorable. Figures like founders of religion are often essentially human, but capable of miracles or other superhuman feats for example. The main myths that I have identified are:

• The myth of a just world
• The myth of an afterlife
• The myth of paradise
• The myth of the golden age
• The myth of the immortal founder
• The myth of eternal truths

My project for the last few years has been focussed on demythologising and demystifying Buddhism. In short, I have attempted to show that these myths no longer make sense of Buddhism in the light of what we currently know and understand about the world we live in. As of yesterday (Thur, 11 Feb 2016) we live in a universe permeated by gravity waves and direct detection of black holes. Part of my project has been showing that the intuitive concepts that underlie religion are not true; that many of the ideas that seem intuitively right to us are, in fact, wrong. Unfortunately, many religieux struggle to understand science, especially those who write books and blogs about Buddhism and science. One of the problems for science communicators is that the new knowledge is frequently counter-intuitive, or at least quite difficult to understand (look at the comments section of any newspaper coverage of the LIGO announcement of gravity wave/blackhole detection. Very few lay people really understand Quantum Mechanics, for example, though it frequently (and almost inevitably erroneously) comes up as providing confirmation of Buddhist philosophies. This, combined with the weight of our established beliefs, means that many of us are reluctant to accept the new knowledge on face value, except in rare cases when it seems to confirm our beliefs (though in many cases the apparent confirmation amounts to wishful thinking). 

As time has gone on I have found more and more holes in the Buddhist account of the world, while at the same time finding the Buddhist account of experience more compelling. Buddhists get the world almost entirely wrong, but they get experience almost entirely right, and combine this with a number of techniques for exploring experience (though let's be clear there is nothing scientific about this exploration). The opinion about the world makes some people say that I am not really a Buddhist, since for them Buddhism is primarily about assenting to a set of dogmas; the latter opinion is for me the crux of the matter and why I am still a Buddhist. 

"Buddhism is about changing our fundamental values away from maximising experience towards dying to experience."

- Satyapriya

I was having a discussion with a friend and mentor recently and he mentioned one of his conclusions about what Buddhism is. He said, "Buddhism is about changing our fundamental values away from maximising experience towards dying to experience." I concur. The problem Buddhism sets out to solve is that we seek happiness without any clear idea of what happiness is or what might make us happy. And thus we go about it all wrong. The basic assumption of civilisation is that happiness is achieved through maximising pleasurable experience and minimising painful experience. And yet it has been clear for at least 2 millennia that this does not work. Part of the problem is civilisation itself. We evolved desires to motivate us to perform certain behaviours: desire motivates us to seek out food, after consuming it we experience satiation and sense of reward (so the behaviour is reinforced). Under modern conditions, finding food entails almost no effort; we always have access to food, and it is laden with sugar, salt, and fat. Since we don't eat to satiate hunger, but for pleasure instead, we seldom experience satiation and reward is connected to consumption itself. As a consequence more and more of us are fat and getting fatter. The desire for food, the reward of eating it, and the sense of satiation all seemed to be fundamentally warped by civilisation. The same can be said of sex, work, and almost every other facet of life. So Buddhism (at least originally) set out to disrupt these habitual responses leading to hyperstimulation through prolonged periods of withdrawing attention from sensory experience, and to discovering that there is life beyond the world of the senses.

We might contrast this with a Tantric approach to Buddhism. In the words of David Chapman: "It is the attitude of passionate and spacious engagement with this world. It is an ecstatic and agonizing love-affair with everyday reality." I'm intrigued by Chapman's writing about Tantric Buddhism (in this and a number of recent related blog posts) and his argument that perhaps Tantra would form a better basis for "lay Buddhism" than renunciation. On face value this is an intriguing proposition, since in fact even many dedicated people are not practising renunciation and the practised associated with it. I'm going to look into this; however, at present I'm not convinced that a turn toward experience is viable because most people are habitual hedonists (motivated by pleasure seeking). To my mind there is too much evidence from outside of Buddhism that supports the idea that our basic problem is seeing happiness in terms of pleasure. Arguing that an habitual hedonist will escape this trap by turning toward experience is a bit like arguing that an alcoholic can be cured of their addiction by turning to the bottle. Like many Tantrikas, I still think that renunciation and reordering of our relationship to experience is a prerequisite to turning towards experience.

A third possibility which interests me at the moment involves re-examining the context of addiction. In his book Chasing the Scream, journalist Johann Hari describes a new approach to addiction which focusses not on the chemical properties of the drug, or the character of the addict, but looks at the environment of the addict. People who are well embedded in a social context, who experience the love and support of friends and family, and who live in a conducive physical environment, do not, in most cases, get addicted. Most people (Hari suggests 90%) use recreational drugs without getting addicted, just as most people drink alcohol without becoming alcoholics. So why do only 10% become addicted? Hari argues that it is because of their social context, that people become addicted because they are isolated or alienated from a supportive social context. Alienation is, of course, a feature of modern urban life. With respect to intoxication with experience this would mean focussing not on experience itself, but taking an indirect to the addiction to sense pleasure by working on environmental factors that support addiction. As far as I know, no one has applied this kind of logic to the problem that Buddhists are trying to solve, though many of us are concerned with creating supportive contexts for practice (saṅgha). One of the issues that Hari seems not to deal with is the problem of people who may not be addicted, but who none-the-less make poor choices and decisions while influenced by drugs.

As interesting as these other approaches may be, this essay is going to continue to explore my main theme: turning away from experience qua source of happiness. 

When we sit down to meditate we may well still be seeking experience, or we may well still see mediation as focussed on experience. But the acme of meditation—emptiness—is an end to experience. From the Pāḷi Suññatā Suttas (MN 121, 122, see also SN 41.6) through into the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras there has been this powerful theme of practices in which we bring all experience to an end. We stop experiencing our body and the physical senses, and then we stop having mental experiences; and simply dwell in what remains. We do not experience ourselves as a self or the world as a world, or any distinction between the two. However, in this state of emptiness we continue to be and to be aware of being aware. This approach to emptiness, in which emptiness is more than simply a critique of experience or an ideal, but which is instantiated as the absence of experience seems very promising. My view is that the (earlier) Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras are attempts to put this experience of no experience (or perhaps an experience with no content) into words, to use metaphors and abstractions to explain what the absence of experience is like and what the consequences of it are like. But one cannot experience this absence of experience while seeking an experience. One must allow experience to die away, or as my friend put it, die to experience. And there is no doubt that this is far more difficult than it sounds. Many people find it terrifying because from one's first person perspective, one ceases to exist, or at least discovers that one's existence was always contingent and that when one stops paying attention to the conditions that underlie it, self stops arising.

I've written about this before in an essay from 2008 on communicating the Dharma. In two suttas from the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 45.11 and 45.12) the Buddha is describing spending time reflecting on his awakening. He says:

yena svāhaṃ, bhikkhave, vihārena paṭhamābhisambuddho viharāmi, tassa padesena vihāsiṃ

"I have been dwelling in the region in which I dwelt when I had newly realised awakening."

In the texts the Buddha talks about the various factors that condition (paccaya) sensations (vedanā).

So evaṃ pajānāmi... chandapaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; chandavūpasamapaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; vitakkapaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; vitakkavūpasamapaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; saññāpaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; saññāvūpasamapaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; chando ca avūpasanto hoti, vitakko ca avūpasanto hoti, saññā ca avūpasantā hoti, tappaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; chando ca vūpasanto hoti, vitakko ca vūpasanto hoti, saññā ca vūpasantā hoti, tappaccayāpi vedayitaṃ; appattassa pattiyā atthi āyāmaṃ, tasmimpi ṭhāne anuppatte tappaccayāpi vedayitan ti.

"I know this... the condition of desire is experienced, the condition of the suppression of desire is also experienced; the condition of thinking is experienced, the condition of suppression of thinking is also experienced; the condition of perception is experienced, the condition of the suppression of perception is also experienced. There is suppression of desire, and thinking, and perception and on that account there is experience. There is stretching out to attain the unattained, and in this also experience on account of the unattained."

I surmise that this experience with no content was probably also known to Brahmin meditators. They described it in Sanskrit as saccidānanda, i.e. being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ānanda). But they associated this state with Brahman, the absolute consciousness of the universe. Absolutes are problematic. Modern day Advaita Vedantins will still argue on the basis of belief in an absolute, that there is no free will. If there were free will it would undermine the absolute. Partly influenced by Sāṃkhya philosophy they see the world as māyā—a creation of mind—and as such it has only relative existence. In the absolute sense it does not exist, only Brahman exists. It's important to remember that existence in ancient India (including in Buddhism) was always associated with permanent, unchanging existence. Temporary, contingent, or mutable existence are all contradictions in terms. If something is temporary, contingent, or mutable then "existence" does not apply. And this in turn also seems to have influenced Buddhists who were trying to mitigate the turn to Realism in the Abhidharma project, giving rise to the idea of Two Truths (the word satya has strong ontological implications and can just as well be read as reality as truth). In Sāṃkhya thought there are two basic conditions: puruṣa which is passive, permanent, and real; and prakṛti which is active, impermanent, and unreal. The world of experience is prakṛti (literally "nature") and it is māyā, a creation of mind. It is not real. Buddhists called this pole of experience samvṛti-satya, usually translated as "relative-truth" though more literally saṃvṛti means closure or concealing (so it could mean "concealed reality"). Progress is made by rolling up manifestations of prakṛti and leaving only puruṣa as a passive observer. Buddhists called this paramārtha-satya or "ultimate-truth" (or "revealed reality"). Again the Sāṃkhya may well be informed by the experience of emptiness, but interpreted as a kind of absolute. Very few accounts of Indian philosophy tie it to experience and this is a catastrophic mistake which leads to confusion.

Where Buddhism is different from Sāṃkhyā, Vedanta, and Advaita Vedanta, at least some forms of Buddhism, is that it rejects the very idea of absolute existence (this is made explicit, for example in the Kaccānagotta Sutta, SN 12.15, extant in Chinese and Sanskrit versions, as well as quoted by Nāgārjuna and his commentators). Everything we experience arises and passes away and therefore cannot be absolute or related to an absolute. This is one reason why I have a problem with the Two Truths Doctrine. It appears to contravene this more fundamental Buddhist axiom. What Buddhists seem to believe, at least originally, was this state of no experience achieved temporarily in meditation could be made permanent in the afterlife. Nirvāṇa meant not being reborn, not being reborn meant possessing no sense faculties, therefore having no experience. Nothing comprehensible arises. Thus questions about what a Tathāgata experiences after death are avyākṛta "undetermined". As I've pointed out the Mahāyāna eventually rejected this as an ideal because by necessity a Buddha was uninvolved in our lives post-parinirvāṇa. They redefined the goals of Buddhism (See my alternate history of Mahāyāna).

This is an important role that the myths of religion play, i.e. as interpretive frameworks for experience. On the basis of apparently similar experiences, someone raised in a Vedantic tradition comes to very different conclusions to someone raised in a Buddhist tradition. The versions of religious myths we internalise form the basis of how we interpret the experiences we have as a result of doing religious exercises. And this seems to be the case even for people who have insights into the nature of experience - they see their experience as a confirmation of their belief system. In this sense, the intellectual context within which we practice is very important. We know that it is entirely possible to draw the wrong conclusions from individual experience. In fact it is probable that we will do this, all the time. We all do this with respect to pleasure for example. We enjoy it and so we unconsciously think more of it will lead us towards happiness. But it doesn't. 

Some of the received myths now seem counter-productive. The strong ontological dualism involved in the myths of an afterlife, for example, might lead one to think of one's mind as a more real and permanent phenomenon than is either true or helpful. Absolutes always seem to be a bar to further progress. Once one believes oneself to be in contact with an absolute then the motivation to change or make progress almost by necessity ceases. One can go no further than the absolute. The fact that an absolute ought to be, by it's very definition, out of the reach of the human organism is avoided by the narratives surrounding mysticism. To touch the absolute one has to have a mystical experience. In this we invoke a capacity for experience which is not related to our relative senses or mind - another twist in the story of ontological dualism. Something absolute must reside in us (an ātman in other words) which is able to appreciate and perceive the Absolute in the universe. This kind of talk ought to have no place in Buddhism, which rejects all absolutes, though it does appear and not simply in the Vedanta inspired Tathāgatagarbha, but in the most embarrassing places (Triratna Dharmacārins will know what I mean). We have to place all such dualisms in a basket labelled, "false conclusions and generalisations from experience" and move on.

Over the centuries different approaches to insight into the nature of experience have developed. Some schools emphasise the dangers in seeking emptiness through concentration techniques. These techniques produce bliss and rapture as early side-effects and these can be intoxicating in themselves. The argument is that spending a lot of time in dhyāna is analogous to weaning people off alcohol by giving them heroin, it's counter-productive. So some schools eschew the development of concentration and instead try to look directly at the arising and passing away of experience. There's no doubt that this can be an effective method, but it usually works best when the meditator has a good deal of concentration practice behind them, enabling them to have a relative stable and happy mind and not to simply get lost in habitual distraction without noticing it.

On the whole most Buddhists have found some balance between samatha and vipassanā approaches to meditation work best. Samatha stabilises the mind and gives us a sense of well-being that is not dependent on circumstances. And insight undermines our sense of self in relation to experience and our sense of a subject/object duality (though again I think the word "reality" is out of place in this discussion). Samatha enables us to pursue insight more effectively than a one-sided approach.

On the other hand how many Buddhists are seriously pursuing insight in this way? One in a thousand? What proportion of Buddhists are genuinely awakened people? A small handful at best? To die to experience goes against every instinct and to even get the point where we commit to doing so is rare. Most of us are still "doing research", as they say in AA. We're researching the possibility of achieving happiness through pleasurable experience, the way an alcoholic researches the possibility of happiness through drinking booze.

Someone who is not only willing to, but actively trying to die to experience and die to themselves may not really need all the myths and mumbo-jumbo. Emptiness, the experience of no experience, is it's own reward. Though observation suggests that insight doesn't liberate anyone from confirmation bias. On the other hand the rest of us are still wallowing in intoxication with the senses. We eat too much, drink too much, and stimulate our senses too much to ever attain the depths of concentration required except perhaps on long retreats (and even then our retreats are often quite indulgent). So we need to tell motivational stories based on the myths. The Pali Canon is full of stories of people seeing the light while the Buddha is telling an edifying story. They refer to it as gaining faith (saddhā) in the Tathāgata. Sometimes the stories are logical discourses on the progress one makes through rigorous practice culminating in liberation; sometimes the stories are motivational accounts of other practitioners who have done what needed to be done. And so on. But all of these stories reference the religious myths of Buddhism.

Any thoughtful person is dissatisfied with modern life. Civilisation is a two-edged sword. We benefit in so many ways from civilisation, but it also makes us sick by skewing our perceptions and our relationship to experience. Look around at the obesity epidemic, the drug and alcohol problems, the rising levels of mental health problems. The downsides of civilisation began to be apparent in India right around the time that the second urbanisation was getting going (ca 7th Century BCE). Civilisations in many places in the world gave rise to similar conditions it seems. Prophets began to pop up who basically criticised the pursuit of happiness through pleasurable experience. Some turned puritanical, urging us to spurn pleasure and torture ourselves as an alternative (early forms of Jainism fit this mould). Some responded with hedonism. Some regarded the whole world as an illusion which ought not to be taken seriously. Many variations of dissatisfaction were expressed as new sets of values; new variations on the religious myths.

It so happens that in India religious seekers had discovered meditative techniques which culminated in this state of emptiness and this powerfully informed their approach to religion. But emptiness is not easy and it never was a practical path for 99.9% of the population. Sub-optimal options had to emerge for those who bought into the rhetoric but who had already committed themselves to family, career, and ownership - i.e. to success in ordinary human terms of having a spouse, offspring, and material comfort that could be passed on to the next generation. And versions for the peasants who might aspire to having a family, but who would never be successful materially and whose families were locked into poverty by social conventions that ensured that the wealthy retained control of their wealth. Different versions of the Buddhist myths emerged to cater for people in different walks of life.

Conclusion

In this essay I've tried to show the role that our foundation myths play in Buddhism. However I've also tried to show how these myths are also a liability for Buddhism because they are based on false conclusions based on intuition. We certainly still need to employ our critical faculties, even with respect to the awakened, or especially with them as they most likely feel they have "direct confirmation" of their beliefs and are more firmly trapped in confirmation bias than most people. Most essentially, we need to be on guard against any form of absolute. We ought to insist that we are investigating experience and we are not investigating "reality", keeping in mind what these terms meant in the context of Buddhism in India. Statements about reality that are generalisation from meditative experience are untrustworthy, and probably wrong (no meditator ever predicted gravity waves for example). Where myths score highly is that they do sometimes communicate values more effectively than non-symbolic modes of story telling. Generally speaking, values need to be embodied and enacted to have meaning. We need to see what it is like for our values to inform how we live. Ideally our mentors will be doing that. 

I've argued that Buddhism seeks a change in our values system so that we move away from seeking happiness through experience and move towards what my friend has called "dying to experience". There's nothing in experience that will make us happy. We can usually be persuaded of the logic of this statement with a little nudging, but most of us are still committed to researching the possibility that it is wrong. Although some of the myths of Buddhism help to communicate this new system of values, many of them are unrelated to it. Legacy beliefs in an afterlife and a just world seem to be a hindrance to communicating these values.

~~oOo~~

Translating Pāḷi "Asuññataṃ"

Sāvatthī
(looking east)

My Pāḷi reading group is starting off this year by looking at the Cūḷasuññatasutta (MN 121). There's quite a lot of commentary on this text, a number of translations and commentaries, but even before we began to read the text we discovered a quandary in the word asuññataṃ, which only occurs in this sutta. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi (2001) translate the word as "non-voidness" but I don't think this makes sense.

As analogues of the Sanskrit adjective śūnya (empty) and the abstract noun from it śūnyatā (emptiness), we find the Pāḷi suñña and suññatā. However in addition, and in the title of the text no less, we find another Pāḷi form suññato or suññataṃ, which is not found in Sanskrit dictionaries, though some counterparts are found in Sanskrit Buddhist texts. This form is often glossed over in translations as "emptiness", presumably because it is so similar to the abstract noun that the translators don't notice the difference.

I begin writing this, it is not at all clear to me how asuññataṃ derives and how to translate it. In this essay I will survey the uses of the term suññato and try to establish how it ought to be translated in order to shed light on the word asuññataṃ. My sources are the Pāḷi Nikāyas and Aṭṭhakathās (or commentaries), the counterparts of the Cūḷasuññata preserved in Chinese《小空經》(MĀ 190) and Tibetan མདོ་ཆེན་པོ་སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་ཅེས་བྱ་བ། (D.291), plus a few Sanskrit fragments.  

The Cūḷasuññatasutta

The passage that alerted us to this problem comes early on in the text. In Pāli it goes:

Seyyathāpi, ānanda, ayaṃ migāramāt-upāsādo suñño hatthigavassa-vaḷavena, suñño jātarūpa-rajatena, suñño itthipurisa-sannipātena atthi c'ev'idaṃ asuññataṃ yadidaṃ – bhikkhusaṅghaṃ paṭicca ekattaṃ

Before attempting to translate this, let me break procedure by giving the gist of what it says. This is the first part of an analogy designed to illustrate a procedure for gradually emptying the mind of sense impressions and thoughts with the goal of attaining the suññatāsamādhi "integration of emptiness" or suññatāvihāra "abode of emptiness". These seem to be equivalent to saññāvedayitanirodhasamāpatti or "the attainment of the cessation of perceptions and sensations" and thus also with nibbāna. This very important and interesting state I describe as "consciousness without content". One is alive and aware, but there is no content to one's experience. The ancients had no concept of a resting state network in the brain, so they struggled to make sense of this state. I imagine, for example, that something similar gave rise to the Vedic idea that Brahman could described as saccidānanda or being (sat), consciousness (cit) and bliss (ānanda). Dwelling in the state of emptiness one experiences only being, consciousness and bliss. Those who write about this state tend to assert that it does get any better than this. 

In this illustration of the process, the Buddha and Ānanda are sitting having a discussion in a palace or perhaps on a terrace (upāsāda), in the eastern part of Sāvathī (which places it near the river that formed the eastern boundary of the old city). This palace formerly belonged to someone who is almost always known as Migāra's Mother (migāramātā). Her name was Visākhā and she was actually Migāra's wife (that story is outlined in the DOPN). In any case it appears that the palace is given over to the bhikkhusaṅgha for their use.

The Buddha points out that the things one would normally find in such a place, i.e. livestock, wealth, and people etc., are absent, but instead only the the bhikkhusaṅgha is present. Buddhaghosa points out in his commentary that this refers to the bhikkhus as a corporate entity, not to the individual bhikkhus. This example of the palace and the bhikkhus is an analogy for the ascetic meditating in the wilderness (arañña). The ascetic notices that their mind is empty of the sights and sounds of the village and its inhabitants, and all that is present is perceptions of the wilderness which have a sort of uniformity. The perturbations of the mind caused by village life are absent, and only the perturbations due to the wilderness are present.

The question is, how do we translate asuññataṃ and ekattaṃ? Some comments on how to translate ekattaṃ can be found in Schmithausen (1981: 233-4, n. 122). I concur with Schmithausen's argument for treating ekattaṃ not as Sanskrit ekatvā "oneness, unity", but as ekātman "having a single nature" or "uniform". Buddhaghosa seems also to agree with Schmithausen at MNA 4.151 in his gloss on bhikkhusaṅghaṃ paṭiccāti. In fact I take it to be an adverbial neuter. This essay will focus on asuññataṃ beginning by looking at the apparent source, suññato. 

Suññato

PED offers the following definition:

Suññata (adj.) [i. e. the abl. suññato used as adj. nom.] void, empty, devoid of lusts, evil dispositions, and karma, but especially of soul, ego.

Here "adj. nom." means "an adjective in the nominative". The -to suffix is one way to indicate the ablative case. PED argues that suññato is an ablative of suñña (empty) that has been treated as a masculine noun and declined accordingly. This would make asuññataṃ an adjective in the accusative, going presumably with bhikkhusaṅghaṃ, and/or ekattaṃ.

Also PED sv. suñña defines the word in its neuter form suññaṃ "abl. ˚to from the point of view of the 'Empty'". Suggesting that suññato can still have an ablative sense mean "from the point of view of someone dwelling in emptiness". As we will see below this is apparent in some contexts as the word usually occurs with a verb of seeing. 

The primary sense of the ablative is from where or when an action proceeds, sabbato āgacchanti "they came from all sides"; pāsādā oloketi "he looks out from the palace". Very often this relationship is conveyed in English with the preposition from. In the precepts we abstain from certain types of action, and the actions are in the ablative case, i.e. pisunāya vācāya veramanī "abstaining from speech which is slanderous". The concept of separation (as in "apart from") is also conveyed by the ablative case. It is also used to indicate cause or reason for an action, e.g. sīlato naṃ pasaṃsanti "they praise him for his virtue". And just to complicate matters the cases are somewhat flexible in Middle-Indic languages, so the ablative sometimes merges with and can be used to convey an instrumental sense (with, by, through).

But why is an ablative treated as a nominative? In order to try to understand how this might have come about let us begin with a survey the use of suññato in the Nikāyas. It doesn't occur that often, so we can be comprehensive.

Occurrences in the Nikāyas

DN iii.219 Aparepi tayo samādhī – suññato samādhi, animitto samādhi, appaṇihito samādhi.

Furthermore there are three samādhis: empty samādhi, signless samādhi and desireless samādhi.

This is from the Sangīti Sutta (DN 33) which is a long list of numerical lists. Walsh (486) translates suññato samādhi as "concentration on emptiness" (i.e. he appears to ignore the case endings). Now the three words here—suññato, animitto, appaṇihito—all appear to be the same form so we can usefully look at the other two to see if they shed light on the derivation. The etymology of nimitta is given by PED as uncertain, though possibly related to √mā 'measure'; but PED also tells us that the gender is neuter. Sv. nimitta in BHSD it is also neuter. But if nimitta is neuter then it should not form a nominative singular in -o, but in -aṃ. Is nimitto therefore another ablative in -to, possible from nimita (past participle) from ni√mā? I'm not sure.

If suññato and nimitto are ablatives then suññato samādhi might be "the samādhi [that comes] from [being] empty". Which is admittedly awkward.

By contrast paṇihita is very clearly a past participle from paṇidahati (pa+ni√dhā) "to put forth, put down to, apply, direct, intend; aspire to, long for, pray for." We can understand apaṇihita as a bahuvrīhi, "without longing", as opposed to a karmadhāraya "undesired". Unfortunately this breaks up the pattern. So it looks like each word, though superficially similar, might derive the -to ending via a different route.

A variation on this occurs at SN iv.360 in the Suññatasamādhi Sutta (SN 43:4):

Katamo ca, bhikkhave, asaṅkhatagāmimaggo? Suññato samādhi, animitto samādhi, appaṇihito samādhi.

And what, bhikkhus, is the path leading to the unconditioned? The empty samādhi, signless samādhi and desireless samādhi.

Here Bodhi (2000: 1373) translated suññato as "emptiness", i.e. as though he is translating the abstract noun suññatā. However, the feminine noun suññatā cannot take an -o ending, so something is wrong with this.

MN i.302 "Saññāvedayitanirodhasamāpattiyā vuṭṭhitaṃ panāyye, bhikkhuṃ kati phassā phusantī" ti? "Saññāvedayitanirodhasamāpattiyā vuṭṭhitaṃ kho, āvuso visākha, bhikkhuṃ tayo phassā phusanti – suññato phasso, animitto phasso, appaṇihito phasso"ti.

However, lady, rousing from the attainment of cessation of perceptions and sensations what feelings do those bhikkhus come into contact with? Friend Visākha, those bhikkhus come into contact with three sensations on rousing from the attainment of cessation of perception and experience, namely contact from/with that which is empty, contact from/with that which is signless, and contact from/with that which is desireless.

This is from a discussion between Dhammadinā and her former husband, Visākha, in the Cūḷavedalla Sutta (MN 44). This is a very interesting passage about going into and emerging from cessation and the way that experience fades out and in. The question is literally "What contacts do they contact?" Phasso is in the masculine nominative singular. Here suññato as ablative case, perhaps overlapping with the instrumental may make sense and I've hedge my translation to indicate this. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi again translate suññato as the abstract "voidness" (2001: 400). This passage recurs at SN iv.294 where suññato is translated by Bodhi as "emptiness" 

MN i.435. So yadeva tattha hoti rūpagataṃ vedanāgataṃ saññāgataṃ saṅkhāragataṃ viññāṇagataṃ te dhamme aniccato dukkhato rogato gaṇḍato sallato aghato ābādhato parato palokato suññato anattato samanupassati.

One regards as impermanent, disappointing, a disease, a tumour, an arrow, a calamity, an affliction, as other, as disintegrating, as empty (suññato), and as unsubstantial anything that is connected with form (rūpagata), sensations, perceptions, volitions, and cognitions.

The ways that one should regard dhammas are all ablatives in -to. And the context suggests we read them as meaning "as". So that te dhamme suññato samanupassati should mean "he regards those dhammas as empty". Here suññato cannot be construed as the abstract "emptiness". An important point here is that the cognitive action is taking place in a state of jhāna.

Perhaps here we can take te dhamme aniccato samanupassati to mean "he regards these dhammas from the point of view of impermanence"? We might argue, for example, that if anicca was an adjective here, then it would take the plural, annice, to go with the noun dhamme in the plural. Therefore aniccato which is singular is not an adjective and is not describing the dhammas, but is indicating from whence the verb of seeing proceeds. Thus this could be see as an example of suññato having an ablative sense.

This passage is reflected in the Saṃyutta Nikāya. At SN iii.167 the question is asked to what dhammas a virtuous monk should pay attention. The answer is:

Sīlavatā... bhikkhunā pañcupādānakkhandhā aniccato... suññato yoniso manasi kātabbā.

A virtuous monk should pay attention to the five underlying apparatus of experience as impermanent... as empty... etc.

Again Bodhi reads the text as saying that the khandhas should be seen as impermanent... as "empty" (2000: 970). Here the word pañcupādānakkhandhā is a nominative plural and Bodhi is tacitly reading aniccato as a nominative singular and the sentence as a simple apposition. Note that here also the verb is one in which one regards or pays attention to the khandhas. Buddhaghosa glosses sattasuññataṭṭhena suññato (SNA 2.333) i.e. "with the meaning of 'empty of a being'".

There is a Sanskrit fragment that parallels this (Thanks to Dhīvan for pointing this out to me):

(ani)tyataḥ duḥkhataḥ śunyataḥ anāt[m]ato manasikarttavyāḥ. (Anālayo 2013: 11)

[Something]... should be attended to as empty etc.

This passage recurs at AN ii.128 and AN iv.423, where is is again associated with the cultivation of jhāna and AN ii.129 associated with the brahmavihāras. Here the one who does these practices has a pleasant rebirth that is not shared with worldings (Ayaṃ, bhikkhave, upapatti asādhāraṇā puthujjanehi.).

Finally the word occurs in the Suttanipata Sn 1119 (mentioned in the PED definition of suñña):

"Suññato lokaṃ avekkhassu, mogharāja sadā sato;
Attānudiṭṭhiṃ ūhacca, evaṃ maccutaro siyā;
Evaṃ lokaṃ avekkhantaṃ, maccurājā na passatī" ti.

View the world as empty, Mogharāja, always mindful;
Having destroyed self-vew, one may cross over death;
The King of Death does not see the one who views the world this way.

(My translation more or less follows K.R Norman here).

Norman was the leading authority on Middle-Indic languages and particularly in his translation of the Suttanipata paid close attention to the meaning of every word. So the fact that he reads suññato lokaṃ as "the world as empty" is significant. However, he does not discuss this choice in detail in his notes, but instead refers readers to E.J. Thomas (1951: 218) who simply says that suññata is an adjective meaning "void". Note that here lokaṃ is an accusative singular and the verb once again involves seeing. Here, as above, I'm inclined to take the ablative as representing a point of view. To me this suggests seeing the world from the point of view of the suññatavihāra (as in the PED definition cited above).

So the modern translators seem undecided on how to translate suññato. Depending on unknown factors, since it is never discussed, suññato can represent the abstract (though the morphology is all wrong for this) and be translated as "voidness, emptiness"; or it can represent the adjective and be translated as "void, empty", sometimes with the sense of "as empty". In combination with verbs of seeing it can be thought of as "from the empty point of view". In order to understand how ancient Theravāda commentators might have understood the word we can look at the glosses in the Aṭṭhakathās.

Commentarial glosses

DNA 3.1003. Maggasamādhi pana rāgādīhi suññatattā suññato, rāganimittādīnaṃ abhāvā animitto, rāgapaṇidhiādīnaṃ abhāvā appaṇihito ti

However the samādhi of the path is empty (suññato) because of the emptiness (suññatattā) of passion etc, is signless from the nonexistence of signs of passion etc, is desireless from the nonexistence of desire for passion etc.

Here the abstract noun suññatatta (suññatattā is the ablative of cause) is telling. It points quite strongly to Buddhaghosa constructing this sentence with suññato meaning "empty". The samādhi under discussion lacks rāga, dosa, and moha or attraction, aversion, and confusion and lacking these is said to be empty (suññato) giving it the quality of emptiness (suññatatta).

MNA 2.366/ SNA 3.97 suññato phassotiādayo saguṇenāpi ārammaṇenāpi kathetabbā. saguṇena tāva suññatā nāma phalasamāpatti, tāya sahajātaṃ phassaṃ sandhāya suññato phassoti vuttaṃ. animittāpaṇihitesupieseva nayo. Ārammaṇena pana nibbānaṃ rāgādīhi suññattā suññaṃ nāma, rāganimittādīnaṃ abhāvā animittaṃ, rāgadosamohappaṇidhīnaṃ abhāvā appaṇihitaṃ. Suññataṃ nibbānaṃ ārammaṇaṃ katvā uppannaphalasamāpattiyaṃ phasso suññato nāma. animittāpaṇihitesupi eseva nayo.

Taking up the phrase "empty contact" (suññato phasso), it should be explained according its own qualities (saguṇena) and according to its basis (ārammaṇa). According to its own qualities, it is the attainment of the fruit called “emptiness” (suññatā). Coinciding with that [emptiness], contact with reference to it, is called “contact that is empty”. Animitta and apaṇihita are inferred in the same way. 

However, according to its basis, nibbāna is named “empty” (suññaṃ), because of emptiness of attraction (rāga) etc; [named] signless because of the absence of signs of attraction etc, and desireless because of the absence of desire for attraction, aversion, and ignorance. Having made a case that nibbāna is emptiness, the attainment of the arisen fruit is called "contact that is empty". Animitta and apaṇihita are inferred in the same way.

This section of commentary is looking at MN i.302 mentioned above. The subject is what someone who has attained the cessation of perceptions and sensations comes into contact with when they rouse themselves (vuṭṭhitaṃ) from the attainment. For them contact is empty or absent. In Buddhaghosa's view their attainment is nibbāna and they don't experience the world the way ordinary people do any more. Contact for them is empty, signless and desireless. Here Buddhaghosa uses suñña and suññato synonymously and suññatā as a synonym for nibbāna. Again we see words like suññato and suññatā being used to indicate absence. 

A short gloss is found at MNA 3.146: nissattaṭṭhena suññato "with the meaning without a being (nissatta)." Another as ANA 2.334 sattasuññataṭṭhena suññato, "with the meaning of emptiness of a being", confirming that nissatta should be read as "without a being" rather than with PED "powerless". The sense here is that empty means the absence of a being (satta).

Buddhaghosa, then, is more consistent in treating suññato as synonymous with suñño, and both as meaning "empty of [something]" or that the object is absent.


Sanskrit Udānavarga

We've seen one fragment that uses the Sanskrit equivalent of suññato, i.e. śunyataḥ. Skilling (1981: 226) gives a more substantial example. He notices that in the Udānavarga (a Dharmapada text) there is a series of verses that are counterparts to the Pāli Dhammapada vs 277-279, whence the well known triplet sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā, sabbe saṅkhārā dukkhā, and sabbe dhammā anattā. Compare the Udānavarga (Uv 12. 5-8; first lines only) 

anityāṃ sarvasaṃskārāṃ prajñayā paśyate yadā... [5]
duḥkhāṃ sarvasaṃskārāṃ prajñayā paśyate yadā... [6]
śunyataḥ sarvasaṃskārāṃ prajñayā paśyate yadā... [7]
sarvadharmā anātmānaḥ prajñayā paśyate yadā... [8]|

When he sees with insight all constructs as impermanent...
When he sees with insight all constructs as disappointing...
When he sees with insight all constructs as empty...
When he sees with insight all experiences as insubstantial...

Compare the Dhp 277 where the first line is sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā ti yadā paññāya passati. Here "that which is seen" is given as a nominal sentence followed by the quotative particle. In Pāḷi sabba is a separate word, declined as a pronoun (nominative plural), whereas in Sanskrit sarva is undeclined and compounded with the noun it qualifies, though there is no change in meaning in this difference. In the Uv 12.5 and Uv 12.6, what is seen with insight, e.g. anityāṃ sarvasaṃskārāṃ, is in the accusative plural, making it the patient of the verb of seeing. Note that word order is not important here, so the fact that the two parts of the apposition, e.g. anityām and sarvasaṃskārāṃ are not the same order as in Pāḷi, i.e. saṅkhārā and aniccā is not significant. As Dhīvan pointed out in an email, in Bernard's edition of the Udānavarga on Sutta Central, Uv 12.6 begins duḥkhaṃ hi sarvasaṃskārāṃ with duḥkha in the singular. Dhīvan suggests that we treat this as nominal, as in the Pāḷi, "When one sees with wisdom all constructions indeed are disappointing...". However saṃskāra is masculine and the -āṃ ending is unequivocally accusative plural. So perhaps "When one sees with insight all the constructions that are indeed disappointing..."? 

Now in Uv 12.7 the Sanskrit word is śunyataḥ (with śūnyataḥ given as an alternate reading) = Pāḷi suññato. One way to explain the short u might be that this is a loan word from Middle Indic which has not been fully assimilated to Sanskrit morphology rules that demand a long ū i.e. śūnyataḥ. Despite grammatical problems with Uv 12.8 (see below) the general outline here seems to be that all constructs are identified with a series of qualities, particularly: impermanence, disappointment, and insubstantiality. So we expect 12.7 to fit this pattern. We expect śunyataḥ to be just like the other adjectives: anitya, duḥkha, anātman. But it isn't. Whichever case we take śunyataḥ to be, (ablative and nominative are possible) it simply does not fit the pattern because it is singular and the noun it is describing is plural (though cf. the Bernard Ed. of Uv 12.6 which is singular). Adjectives take the case, number and gender of the noun they describe; predicates have to at least be in the same case. To qualify sarvasaṃskārāṃ we expect śunyataṃ. It appears that something has gone wrong in adding this line to the text. 

Lastly in 12.8 the grammar is mangled. Perhaps echoing the Middle-Indic syntax, here sarvadharmā anātmānaḥ are in the nominative plural (matching the Pāḷi equivalent sabbe dhammā anattā ti). In Sanskrit grammar this would make them the agents of the verb, which would be nonsense. Pāḷi avoids this by adding the quotative particle. The correct grammar, matching 12.5,6 would be sarvadharmāṃ anātmanaḥ. This error might be scribal - a missing anusvāra and an incorrectly lengthened vowel are certainly common scribal errors, but that they would make the exact mistakes in two consecutive words that would accurately change them to be the same (wrong) case seems unlikely.

Unfortunately this Sanskrit example does nothing to clarify the situation. Nor does Skilling add any comment on this point, indeed he talks as if the text has śūnyatā instead. The grammatical mistake in 12.8 makes us doubt the text. But clearly the person who added the verse at Uv 12.7 understood the sentence to be the same form as 12.5,6 and likely 12.8 as well (error notwithstanding). The only way I can see to make sense of this is to treat śūnyataḥ as indeclinable. It does not change case to match the noun because it cannot. But this is far from satisfactory because it conflicts with what we already know.

Having more or less exhausted the relevant Indic language sources, we can now turn to the versions of the Cūḷasuññata Sutta preserved in Chinese and Tibetan.


The Chinese Text

The Cūlasuññata Sutta has a counterpart in the Chinese Madhyamāgama, i.e. MĀ 190 《小空經》 The Lesser Emptiness Sūtra. The parallel passage in Chinese is:

阿難！如此鹿子母堂，空無象、馬、牛、羊、財物、穀米、奴婢，然有不空，唯比丘眾。(T1 737a9-10)

Ānanda, 阿難 it is like 如此 this palace 堂 of Migara’s 鹿子 mother 母，is empty 空無 of elephants 象、horses 馬、cattle 牛、sheep 羊、money 財物、rice grain 穀米、male and female slaves 奴婢，however 然 it is 有 non-empty 不空，of only 唯 the bhikṣu-saṃgha 比丘眾

The character for both empty and emptiness is 空, however we also see here the use of 空無 which can also just mean "empty, emptiness", but which might also mean "empty and without". Where our Pāli text has asuññataṃ the Chinese has 不空 which we would expect to mean "non-emptiness" and reflect Sanskrit aśūnyatā. But the lack of clear information on inflexions in Chinese leaves considerable room for doubt. Skilling notes that the Chinese and Tibetan versions are closer to each other than either is to the Pāḷi, so next (with a little help from my friends) we can now look at the last source on the list, the Tibetan version of the Cūḷasuññata Sutta.

The Tibetan Text

Amongst the very few Tibetan translations of Nikāya/Āgama texts are the two Śūnyatā texts (Skilling 1994, 1997; also Degé vol. 71: 250a.1-253b.2).  My thanks to Joy Vriens and Maitiu O'Ceileachair for help with understanding the Tibetan. The parallel passage in the Tibetan is (though see Skilling 1994 critical edition for variant readings):

kun dga' bo 'di lta ste | dper na ri-dags 'dzin gyi ma'i khaṅ bzaṅ 'di glaṅ-po-che daṅ | rta daṅ | ba laṅ daṅ | lug daṅ | bya gag daṅ | phag gis stoṅ ziṅ nor daṅ | 'bru daṅ | 'gron bu daṅ | gser gyis stoṅ la | bran daṅ | bran mo daṅ | las byed pa daṅ | zo śas 'tsho ba dag daṅ | skyes pa daṅ | bud-med-daṅ | khye'u daṅ | bu mo dag gis stoṅ yaṅ 'di na 'di lta ste | dge sloṅ gi dge 'dun kho na 'am | de las kha cig la brten nas mi  stoṅ pa yaṅ yod do || (Skilling 1994: 150)

Mṛgāra Mother's Mansion is empty of elephants, horses, cows, sheep, roosters, and pigs. It is empty of wealth, grain, money and gold. It is empty of man-servants and maid-servants, of workers and dependants, of men and women, of boys and girls. But with regard to one thing there is non-emptiness, that is, the community of monks alone. (Skilling 2007: 234)

Compare the translation of the last sentence found in Skilling (1997: 349) "there is still the assembly of monks, or whatever depends upon it, that is not absent".

Skilling explains, "here the Pāḷi has paṭicca ekattam, the Tibetan has kha cig la breten nas, suggesting *pratītya ekatyam, with the Buddhist Sanskrit ekatya [Pāḷi ekacca; "someone, anyone" BHSD] where one would rather expect ekatva—perhaps a wrong Sanskritisation" (1997: 349-350). This leave Skilling at a loss for a translation, but as I have already pointed out above, Schmithausen argues convincingly that Pāḷi ekattaṃ reflects Sanskrit ekātman which would I think would solve Skilling's problem. In a note (1997: 349, n.49) offers a tentative reconstruction of the Sanskrit 

dge sloṅ gi dge 'dum = bhikṣusaṃgha; kho na 'am = eva vā; de las kha cig = tato ekatyaṃ; la brten nas = pratītya; mi stoṅ pa = aśūnya; yaṅ = api (ca, tu); yod do = asti. 

i.e. asti ca eva [idaṃ] aśunyaṃ tato bhikṣusaṃgha pratītya ekatyaṃ. 

C.f. Pāḷi atthi c'ev'idaṃ asuññataṃ yadidaṃ – bhikkhusaṅghaṃ paṭicca ekattaṃ

Despite this, the Tibetan translator has evidently read an adjective here which he translates as mi stoṅ pa suggesting that his Sanskrit text had aśūnya at this point. Seemingly the unknown Sanskrit translator understood his text to be using an adjective. Unfortunately no Sanskrit ms. of this text survives to enable cross-checking. Sanskrit aśūnya would be consistent with the Chinese 不空.

The only thing we can take from this is a stronger sense that, contra Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi (2001) the abstract of "non-voidness" sense is not intended here. 

Discussion

Now I have to attempt to summarise a great deal of information that is often contradictory. Before looking at asuññataṃ we need to state again that suñña means "empty", and in this context something that is referred to as suñña is absent. So when the Buddha says to Ānanda, ayaṃ migāramātupāsādo suñño hatthigavassavaḷavena "this mansion of Migāra's Mother's is empty of elephants etc.", he means that there are no livestock present, no livestock to be seen. Contrarily if something is asuññata then we can take this to mean that something is not-absent or present. 

There seem two most likely ways to arrive at the morphological form asuññataṃ. Firstly we can take suññataṃ it as an accusative singular of the abstract noun suññatā. Various translators do treat suññato as "emptiness". But as some texts point out, the word suññatā in this context really applies only to the attainment of the goal, i.e. to nibbāna. In this view asuññatā would mean something like "presence" (an abstraction from "present"). However the abstract "presence" does not quite fit the context. 

Secondly we can derive suññataṃ from the ablative suññato. It seems that this word was originally combined with verbs meaning to see, i.e. √paś or consider i.e. manasi√kṛ with the sense of "as" - dhammā suññato passati "to see dhammas as empty" or "to see dhammas from the empty point of view" or a point of view that is empty of defilements or perhaps, according to Buddhaghosa, empty of a being. The word suññato was then lexicalised, that is to say it was treated as a word in its own right rather than a declined form, with the meaning "empty; absent" and treated as a nominative singular with an accusative singular in suññataṃ. (Which I admit is more or less what PED says, but now we know why it says that and that it is correct which is a bonus where the PED is concerned). The two derivations produce the same accusative singular, suññataṃ.

The etymological meaning of asuññataṃ would be "non-emptiness" or "not-empty" and as far as I know every translator has opted for something along these lines. However I suggest we can be a bit lazy about this kind of morphology in Pāli. We don't always think about what the word really means. A negated term often has a positive value and need not be slavishly translated as not-X or without-X. In this case asuññataṃ clearly refers to something present (in contrast to absent) or visible or something along these lines. To insist on using a word that preserves the Pāḷi morphology is no more sensible than preserving the Pāḷi syntax (a practice dubbed "Buddhist Hybrid English" by Theologian Paul Griffiths). I think we have to translate the word as "present" or "presence".

Coming back to the passage under consideration, the Buddha points out to Ānanda first what is absent and then what is present. What is present at the mansion are only bhikkhus, and because there are only bhikkhus they have a sort of uniformity (ekattaṃ = ekātman) when considered with respect to what one would expect to find in a mansion, including livestock, people, and wealth. As above I think we have to take ekattaṃ as an adverbial accusative.

However, as my friend Sarah has pointed out, idaṃ is a neuter pronoun. Later when asuññataṃ is replaced in the same sentence structure by the feminine noun in the nominative case darathamattā the associated pronoun changes to ayaṃ which is also feminine nominative. This suggests that the word asuññataṃ is a neuter nominative in this sentence and the only way we can think of this happening is if it is an adjective or adjectival compound that is forced to change gender to fit a noun or pronoun, i.e. a bahuvrīhi compound a-suññatā meaning "without emptiness". So, despite everything, idaṃ asuññataṃ must mean "this presence". 

Thus I would argue that our sentence ought to be translated this way:

Seyyathāpi, ānanda, ayaṃ migāramāt-upāsādo suñño hatthi-gavassa-vaḷavena, suñño jātarūpa-rajatena, suñño itthipurisa-sannipātena atthi c'ev'idaṃ asuññataṃ yadidaṃ – bhikkhusaṅghaṃ paṭicca ekattaṃ; evameva kho, ānanda, bhikkhu amanasikaritvā gāma-saññaṃ, amanasikaritvā manussa-saññaṃ, arañña-saññaṃ paṭicca manasi karoti ekattaṃ. 

Ānanda, just as livestock, wealth, and people are absent from this palace of Migāra's Mother and there is only this presence, uniformly dependent on the community of monks; just so, Ānanda, a monk doesn't pay attention to perception of the village, or people, but uniformly pays attention to the perception of the forest. 

Note that in the last phrase manasi karoti ekattaṃ the ekattaṃ naturally functions as an adverb of the main verb manasikaroti to mean "uniformly paying attention".

A few lines on, the bhikkhu who applies this practice comes to understand

Iti yañhi kho tattha na hoti tena taṃ suññaṃ samanupassati, yaṃ pana tattha avasiṭṭhaṃ hoti taṃ "santamidaṃ atthī"ti 

Thus, that which is not there (tattha na hoti) he perceives that as absent (suñña); however that which remains (avasiṭṭhaṃ) is there (tattha) and he knows "there is this present" (santamidaṃ attthi).

We can see the practice as like progressively applying a set of filters on experience, so that what we are aware of is gradually diminished until we are aware of nothing, or there is just absence. It's not that the world ceases to exist, but that we narrow our world of perception down until nothing is presenting itself to our conscious mind. Nothing disturbs the mind, nothing disturbs the deep equanimity of being in this state. And this, the texts tell us, is what Nibbāna is like.

~~oOo~~

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