From Tricycle:
How Empty is Emptiness?
Upasika Kee Nanayon
13 Twitter 137 Facebook 0 Email To open the door so that you can really see inside yourself isn’t easy, but it’s something you can train yourself to do. If you have the mindfulness enabling you to read yourself and understand yourself, that cuts through a lot of issues right there. Craving will have a hard time forming. In whatever guises it arises, you’ll get to read it, to know it, to extinguish it, to let it go. When you get to…To open the door so that you can really see inside yourself isn’t easy, but it’s something you can train yourself to do. If you have the mindfulness enabling you to read yourself and understand yourself, that cuts through a lot of issues right there. Craving will have a hard time forming. In whatever guises it arises, you’ll get to read it, to know it, to extinguish it, to let it go.
When you get to do these things, it doesn’t mean that you “get” anything, for actually once the mind is empty, that means it doesn’t gain anything at all. But to put it into words for those who haven’t experienced it: In what ways is emptiness empty? Does it mean that everything disappears or is annihilated? Actually, you should know that emptiness doesn’t mean that the mind is annihilated. All that’s annihilated is clinging and attachment. What you have to do is to see what emptiness is like as it actually appears and then not latch onto it. The nature of this emptiness is that it’s deathless within you - this emptiness of self - and yet the mind can still function, know, and read itself. Just don’t label it or latch onto it, that’s all.
There are many levels to emptiness, many types, but if it’s this or that type, then it’s not genuine emptiness, for it contains the intention trying to know what type of emptiness it is, what feature it has. This is something you have to look into deeply if you really want to know. If it’s superficial emptiness - the emptiness of the still mind, free from thought-formations about its objects or free from the external sense of self - that’s not genuine emptiness. Genuine emptiness lies deep, not on the level of mere stillness or concentration. The emptiness of the void is something very profound.
But because of the things we’ve studied and heard, we tend to label the emptiness of the still mind as the void - and so we label things wrongly in that emptiness.... Actually, it’s just ordinary stillness. We have to look more deeply in. No matter what you’ve encountered that you’ve heard about before, don’t get excited. Don’t label it as this or that level of attainment. Otherwise you’ll spoil everything. You reach the level where you should be able to keep your awareness steady, but once you label things, it stops right there - or else goes all out of control.
This labeling is attachment in action. It’s something very subtle, very refined. Whatever appears, it latches on. So you simply have to let the mind be empty without labeling it as anything, for the emptiness that lets go of preoccupations or is free from the influence of thought-formations is something you have to look further into. Don’t label it as this or that level, for to measure and compare things in this way blocks everything - and in particular, knowledge of how the mind changes.
So to start out, simply watch these things, simply be aware. If you get excited, it ruins everything. Instead of seeing things clear through, you don’t. You stop there and don’t go any further. For this reason, when you train the mind or contemplate the mind to the point of gaining clear realizations every now and then, regard them as simply things to observe.
Upasika Kee Nanayon (1901-1978) was a Thai lay nun and a poet who wrote under the name K. Khao-suan-luang. “How Empty Is Emptiness?” is excerpted from An Unentangled Knowing (Dhamma Dana Publications).
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