If there is no independent self, what is there? Buddhism teaches that nothing exists independently of anything else. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste or touch is connected to something else. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
John Donne’s Meditation XVII, published in 1624, includes the passage made famous by Ernest Hemmingway:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
Emptiness, in Buddhism, reaches a little deeper: the expression “because I am involved in mankind” indicates that Mr. Donne still saw himself as a part of mankind. Accordingly, the passing away of one person “diminishes me.”
He didn’t quite get it, but he was close. The Buddha in The Diamond Sutra said there is no independent self that can pass away or that can be diminished in any way. He asserted that we are not independent selves that have birth dates and that will some day have death dates.
Zen practitioners understand what the Buddha was saying. However, it’s nonsense to a deluded, untrained mind. Even to a practitioner of Zen, it makes sense only at the deepest levels of meditation, where delusion is lessened.
Ultimate liberation comes from the knowledge, not the belief, in the fact of emptiness, the interconnectedness of all things, the absence of independent entities, and the reality of our inherent Buddha nature. Our inherent Buddha nature is Awareness.
None of us has ever heard a bird sing. It is Unborn Hearing Awareness that hears. Nor have we ever seen a bird. It is Unborn Seeing Awareness that sees. And this unborn awareness just is; it is not a being. We exist in that awareness like scenes in a motion picture. Our ignorance has allowed us to convince ourselves that we have a self that we must protect for as long as we can. That is the wrong view of self, sakkaya ditthi.
Let’s consider a word like Book. That word, like any other word standing alone, means nothing. We had to learn as children that a book is a collection of pages secured together at their respective edges somehow and that upon those pages are words and possibly illustrations. But then, before that, we had to know what a page was, what paper is, and so on. Every word in a dictionary is defined by other words. Nothing stands alone.
Even the object identified by the word “book” is changing. My Kindle cost $79.00 and with it I read books having no pages bound together.
And that’s the way reality is. A dictionary is a great teacher of emptiness. Not a single word in it exists independently of the other words. Every single word is empty of an independent meaning and is therefore defined in terms of other words that are themselves defined in terms of other words and the regression is endless with no beginning. When a “new” word is coined, old words define it.
To fully understand, to fully experience emptiness, we have to practice Zen. That is the key to awakening. It has nothing to do with going to church and being entertained by a sermon. It has nothing to do with adopting a belief system.
Ironically, if we take the How To Practice Zen course with the ambition to become an authentic Zen practitioner, we won’t complete it. If our only goal is to wake up, to be free of self rather than to improve the self, we’ll make it. To state the matter more accurately, our inherent Buddha nature will reveal itself.
Looking for better mental and physical health? Better relationships? Want to win friends and influence people? Those may be some of the side effects of Zen practice but if Zen is practiced with those goals in mind, the practitioner is striving for self-improvement and therefore strengthening the ultimate delusion.
People say: “If Buddhism is all about giving up the self, count me out.” They are clinching a shiny new penny in their hand, unwilling to give it up. Untold, limitless riches appear when that penny is released. How foolish it is to insist on living in the dungeon of self!
Our bodies are mere mind objects and like all mind objects they go away. It’s awareness that doesn’t go away. The Buddha taught the middle way between annihilation of awareness when the body is annihilated and eternal, unchanging awareness. Awareness has no end because, like time, it has no beginning. But like everything else, it changes and is not a static thing. We never enter into a changeless heaven or nirvana because there is no independent self that can enter or leave anything. We are that which always is and always changes.
