Recently someone in our office watched What the bleep do we know?, there followed much mickey taking about the films concept that things don't really exist. I mentioned a Buddhist comment in relation to a discussion on emptiness, which says something like "if you try to argue that nothing exists then the person you are debating with may grab a hammer and hit you on the head", I may be getting a bit John Cleese there!
It left me wondering how I might explain the Buddhist concept of emptiness in an office discussion. Particularly difficult as I do not have a complete grasp of the topic myself. With this in mind I came up with the following, am I on the right lines?
We usually engage with the world as if each object existed in glorious isolation, independent of all around it. It is as if we believe an object just appears and disappears, totally independent. Obviously this may not be how we actually think, but it is certainly how we behave. We seem to forget that there is a continuous process of change that goes in to making a table, there is thought and aspiration, there is construction and decay. No table exists independent of all around, and neither do we.
Everything that exists is connected to and not independent from all other objects around it, this includes ourselves. Where this becomes crucial in Buddhist thinking is when we start to look at the causes of our happiness and suffering. We act as though we exist in complete independence of all around, that our happiness can be developed regardless of the condition of others. This cannot be, in Buddhism we must accept the happiness and suffering of all others as our own, and then we can make progress.
2 comments :
I think that is a good comment. I have difficulty when I mention that two of my sons are Buddhists. People immediately start talking about reincarnation and I have problems thinking of an idea for them to play with.
For reasons I can't remember we use the term rebirth!?
To use the same thinking as in the main piece, we can understand that the world does not end when we die, and did not start when we were born. We did not appear from nowhere and will not disappear in a puff of smoke. All we can be clear on is that a person named Joe Bloggs was born, lived and died. What Buddha determined was that there is a continuum, not only are we linked to those around but also to all before and all after. In particular our actions have consequences long after we die, and our life is subject to the consequences of actions that occurred long before we were born. This is simple cause and effect and is usually referred to as Karma.
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