“Emptiness is described as the basis that makes everything possible”
-The Twelfth Tai Situpa Rinpoche, Awakening the Sleeping Buddha
“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”
-Pema Chodron
Buddhism makes people uncomfortable when it talks of emptiness. Most Western minds immediately go to “nothingness” as the equivalent, which I am learning is not accurate. Mingur Rinpoche has a fantastic chapter on emptiness in The Joy of Living. In it he makes my language geek happy by explaining the Tibetan words for emptiness – “tongpa-nyi”. He says Tongpa means empty, but only in the sense of something we can’t capture with our senses. His substitution is inconceivable or unnameable. Nyi, he says, has no particular meaning but when added to a word conveys a sense of “possibility”. Suddenly, instead of nihilism, we have an “unlimited potential for anything to change, appear, or disappear.” That is cool stuff.
We, as human beings, simply can’t conceive emptiness in that sense. Our minds are limited – they can only deal with so much – even with training. The assumptions we make and the perspectives we develop and yes, even the absolutes we live (and too often die) by, are simply our own constructions helping us navigate a reality that would otherwise overwhelm us. I’m not just talking about moral or ethical realms here, I also mean our physical reality. We are comforted by the thought that the chair we sit in and the floor we walk on are “solid” but science teaches us something else. The history of science itself demonstrates our understanding of the world is evolving. Quantum mechanics shows us things we didn’t dream of 100 years ago. We keep learning new and better ways to grasp how the world works – our knowledge shifts constantly like sand in a desert storm.
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
-Paul Simon
Sometimes we love a moment so much that it hurts to think about it ending, so we cling to it. We long to capture our present and preserve it, keep it from changing – like taking a picture. Sometimes it isn’t love that makes us grasp at a moment, but the fear of what might come next. We crave fixity, when everything around us is in flux.
Maybe I am alone in that need, but I don’t think so.
Regardless of the reason, I think much suffering comes from clinging to what is known, what is familiar, to who we are at any given time. Life feels so much more manageable when we have planned out what will happen and prevented the unexpected – when we are safe.
It doesn’t work that way, of course.
Life is change. Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is static. Stuff happens. We become who we are and who we will be through a process of beginnings and endings. Facing that reality can be so frightening, it’s no wonder we sometimes attempt to capture where we are under glass.
SUB PAE SAT THA
To all mankind who are friends at bad times,
at birth, at sickness and at death,
which will someday be happening to all of us
A VA RA HOON TU
We wish you to be in peace
Let us have no revenge to each other
AB PA YA PAJ CHA HOON TU
We wish you to be in peace
Let us not take advantage of each other
A NEE KA HOON TU
We wish you to be in peace
Let you have no pain in your body and heart
SU KEE AT TA NUNG PA RI HA RUN TU
We wish you to have comfort to your body
And hapiness to your hearts.
Take care of yourselves to be safe from all danger.
Data from the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, shows that many marriages are between people of different religious faiths. According to the survey, Buddhists and the religiously unaffiliated are the most likely to have a spouse or partner with a different religious background, while Mormons and Hindus are the least likely to marry or live with a partner outside their own faith.
[For more info on each religion's view of interfaith marriage, read the Wiki article.]
