Meditation and Emptiness

It's hard to figure out what you're emptying before you start meditation. Page 437 of DeBary and Bloom's Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume One illustrates emptiness within a Western context is something pessimistic and existential. *Buddhism instead follows that if all phenomenological events, or events based on sensual perception, are unreal, then the only reality is Emptiness (sunyata).

"The ultimate Emptiness was here and now, everywhere and all- embracing, and there was, in fact, no difference between the great Emptiness and and the phenomenal world (samsara).  Thus all beings were already participants of the Emptiness that was nirvana; they  were already Buddha if only the would realize it."  (DeBary and Bloom 437)

The sunflower also illustrates sunyata.  My apologizes for forgetting the source, but the logic goes like this:  What is a sunflower?  Is it the water that quenches it's thirst?  Is the the sun that gives it warmth?  Is it the nutrients?  These are all necessary, but insufficient conditions that define the sunflower.  The sunflower is all and none of these things at the same time.   Our personal sensory and mental frame that defines the existence of the sunflower in this particular way.  Emptiness is not the lacking of something or negative space, it's a state of non-being, lacking identity and context.

When I meditate, I imagine myself as a raindrop in a vast ocean.  My monkey mind loves to imagine itself rising to great heights and crashing to the earth.  But once I sink deep into the ocean, I encounter the great void of the great dark ocean.  It's that feeling of staring across the dark ocean at night.  A sudden visceral truth about nature puts me into shock, but I can't rationalize or explain this experience.

For the curious beginner, Australian Buddhist monk Ajahn Brahm gives a simple and light-hearted take on breathing meditation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCUQdIbfWwQ

Give it a try!  No purchase necessary!

Citation:

De, Bary William Theodore, Irene Bloom, Wing-tsit Chan, Joseph Adler, and Richard John Lufrano. Sources of Chinese Tradition. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print.

*If you want to be nit-picky this is from The Three-Treatise School.