By Brad Warner
Words like emptiness and the void crop up with almost equal regularity when people talk about sex or Buddhism. They have very different meanings, depending on which of these subject matters is being addressed. But there is some common ground.
The Buddhist notion of emptiness has been largely misunderstood in the West for about as long as Buddhism has been studied here.
When scholars first came across Sanskrit words like sunyata and nirvana, they didn’t know quite what to make of them. Sunyata seemed to refer to “emptiness” or “the void,” and nirvana literally meant “extinction,” deriving from a word originally meaning “to put out a fire.”
Yet these two depressing-sounding ideas were held up as ideals in Buddhism. And to Western scholars at the time, that was just plain weird. At first these scholars were convinced that Buddhism must be something akin to nihilism. And yet the practicing Buddhists they encountered were so damned happy compared to the nihilists back home who were always so dour and miserable. Something was definitely amiss!
Actually, though, the Buddhist notion of emptiness refers to the world as it is when emptied of our preconceived notions, opinions, desires, and all the rest of the baggage we bring to any situation we encounter.
In more recent times several Buddhist thinkers have substituted the phrase “as-it-is-ness” for emptiness. Awkward as that is, it’s a lot closer to what Buddhists mean when they talk about sunyata or nirvana.
When words like emptiness and the void come up in terms of sex, they’re usually referring to a condition that the speaker seeks to fix with sex. We feel alone, unloved, unfulfilled, and we want someone to plug up the empty void in our lives with...well, with something, though we rarely have even the vaguest clue what that something might be. We think that if only we found that special someone, this aching sense of being incomplete would disappear and we would at long last be happy and whole.
Most of us who are in any way conversant with current ideas in psychology are well aware, at least intellectually, that we can never really be fulfilled by another person. But even if we know this in our heads, most of us still have a strong tendency to act as if we can or we should be fulfilled by other people, or by possessions or experiences.
For Buddhists the big stumbling block here is enlightenment. We, the few, the proud, the meditators, may be ready to accept that no significant other will fulfill us or that no amount of material possessions will ever satisfy. But a lot of us Buddhists still labor under the mistaken belief that there is an experience called enlightenment that will fulfill us once and for all, forever and ever. And we will live happily ever after.
Sorry to burst your bubble. Not even total and complete enlightenment will fulfill you. It didn’t work for Buddha, and it ain’t gonna work for you, no matter what the guy running the get-enlightenment-quick seminars tells you!
In perhaps his most famous piece of writing, Genjo Koan, or “The Realized Universe,” Dogen says, “When the Dharma has not yet satisfied the body and mind we feel already replete with Dharma. When the Dharma fills the body and mind we feel one side to be lacking.” In other words, the lack of fulfillment we feel is natural and normal. That’s true enlightenment. It’s when we feel fulfilled that we’re deluded.
By doing zazen practice we gradually begin to loosen our grip on the idea that we ought to be fulfilled.
We begin to see that our normal condition of feeling that something is missing in our lives isn’t really such a terrible thing. It’s just a feeling. No more and no less. We no longer desperately seek to shove something into that void. We can let it be just as it is and accept that it’s all right. It may be that we are here on this Earth to experience the awe and beauty of feeling forever incomplete.
If we can accept this lack of fulfillment as our natural condition, we can be totally free. We can accept good and bad equally. We can accept loneliness, and we can accept love. We no longer feel that things ought to be different from how they actually are. At the same time we do not complacently accept things that actually do need to be changed. We can understand that it is often our duty to change a situation.
In Each Moment Is the Universe, Dainin Katagiri Roshi says the reason we can’t ever be satisfied is that we live in the constant stream of time. Time is change. We want change. We couldn’t exist without it.
And yet we have the delusion that we don’t want change, that we want someone or something to create within us a feeling of permanent satisfaction. But not only will this never happen, we don’t really even want it to happen! Can you imagine how dull life would be if we felt constantly fulfilled?
The thing is, though, you can’t just intellectually understand this. Western philosophy as well as pop culture “common sense” often seem to say that it’s enough to get a handle on these things with your head. It’s not. Merely getting the idea of something doesn’t equate with truly accepting that idea.
This is why Buddhism is a philosophy of action. It’s a philosophy that you don’t just study with your head. You study it with your whole body. In zazen practice we come face-to-face with real emptiness and real lack of fulfillment without flinching or running away. By doing this again and again and again we gradually begin to truly understand these concepts not just with our minds, but with our bodies as well.
Then the void is no longer a scary place we need to avoid. It’s our natural and comfortable condition.
Excerpted from the book Sex, Sin, and Zen © 2010 by Brad Warner. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.
Brad Warner is a Zen priest, filmmaker, blogger, and Japanese monster-movie marketer. He’s the author of Hardcore Zen, Sit Down & Shut Up, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate and most recently Sex, Sin & Zen. His writing appears in media ranging from Tricycle and Shambhala Sun to Suicidegirls.com. Visit him online at www.hardcorezen.blogspot.com.