The Confusion Around Emptiness

Emptiness (sunyata) is something many people today have become confused about. It has turned into something that misleads those searching for the spiritual path. A person arrives at emptiness because their clinging (upadana) becomes empty. It's only once someone's clinging is empty, and the mind, too, has accepted this, that emptiness begins to actually be felt.

Two Common Mistakes

Some people reach states of meditative absorption (samadhi) and, mistaking the quality of feeling nothing at all within that samadhi, wrongly identify it as emptiness. But that is simply the nature of samadhi; it is not emptiness. Another group builds an idea of emptiness in the mind after reading books about it, or hearing about it from someone. That is simply an emptiness constructed out of information.

What Real Emptiness Feels Like

Someone who has genuinely arrived at emptiness has a particular quality: they are continuously, effortlessly drawn toward emptiness. This happens spontaneously. Their non-continuity becomes an effortless nature, while continuity itself becomes an effort. Someone who has arrived at emptiness constantly finds themselves needing to reconstruct matters related to continuity. But someone who has merely fabricated emptiness through a samadhi state, or through constant talk and reading about emptiness, has no such nature.

For someone who has arrived at emptiness, even the mind gets released. It gets released precisely because the mind is understood. Without understanding, the mind cannot be released. Once the workings of the mind are understood, and within that understanding the very thing called "mind" no longer catches hold of that person, their understanding of the mind becomes complete. Whatever thought arises, they understand how it arose. Once a natural law is understood, they understand the manner in which that natural law was understood. At that point, the mind no longer catches hold of them. The mind ceases. With it, the sense-bases cease. And then there remains, for that person, nothing left to sustain continuity.

Samadhi is something constructed. The heart, too, is something we've constructed. What we need is not to construct further things within the heart; what's needed is to bring the very matter called "heart" to cessation. Many people instead spend effort constructing the heart.

Constructed States Versus True Cessation

People construct samadhi within the heart; they construct emptiness within the heart; they construct freedom, ease, comfort, one thing after another, all within the heart. In doing so, that person might indeed be residing within samadhi, within emptiness, within joy. But every one of these is simply another kind of clinging-based absorption they themselves have constructed.

In the emptiness spoken of within Buddha's teaching, one moves into emptiness precisely at the point of attaining the fruit (phala). One arrives at emptiness precisely by making that fruit one's aim. Opening one's eyes again afterward, one still finds oneself within cessation. It is by way of ceasing that one arrives at emptiness. If emptiness is taken as an endpoint, the path travelled in between can be regarded as cessation itself. One arrives at this state of emptiness quite naturally. That person needs to make an effort only to move out of emptiness: to reconstruct continuity for themselves. But that only happens once they have become an arahant, and at least five or six years have passed. Because it takes at least five or six years for their mind to actually be reconstructed relative to that fruit. Otherwise, even if someone becomes an arahant, it can take at least five or six years, sometimes longer, before the arahant-nature is actually felt.

Why Bodily Tendencies Can Persist

Even after becoming an arahant, if a young person's cycle related to sexuality has already been strongly activated, or if genetic and bodily factors have brought such a state to prominence, that person's sexual energy can continue operating in the same way as before. And so the sensitivity related to sexuality continues to operate as well.

There are other cases too. Some people have a strong fondness for food. What can happen in such circumstances is that, due to karmic tendency, they are simply very fond of eating. Even after becoming an arahant, the desire for food doesn't disappear all at once. For such a person, it may take five or even ten years for the nature of their mind to actually change.

In emptiness, continuity is constantly being released, much like something evaporating. Because of this, the heart moves into emptiness. Even though the heart has moved into emptiness, the mind can, based on the data it holds, remain settled in continuity for some time. That happens due to the mind's strength. But over time, these things too are released. It is within that release that emptiness begins to be felt more and more fully.