[Buddha-l] Re: Emptiness

[Richard Hayes]

On Sun, 2007-10-21 at 11:25 -0400, mc1 at aol.com wrote:

> But deep sleep is what? Sankara says Consciousness (with a tricky
> difference). His evidence is waking up with the memory of a good
> sleep. Thus memory = Consciousness. How might Madhayamika relate
> Emptiness to this model? 

Emptiness has no connection at all with the four-stage model of
Sankara's interpretation of the upanishads. Emptiness means nothing more
nor less than the fact of being conditioned. Seeing the emptiness of
something entails seeing that it is completely conditioned and therefore
is empty of any nature that it can call its own. The fourth stage that
the upanishads talk about is given as an example of something that is
unconditioned; but in Madhyamika Buddhism nothing is unconditioned.

Something you may be interested in looking at is Buddhist discussions of
how the consciousness continuum boots up again after a meditator has
been in the deep samadhi in which there is no awareness of either
subject or object. This is not a trivial problem for Buddhism, because
if everything is conditioned, what are the conditions that enable
consciousness to reboot after deep sleep? (The correct answer, of
course, is the body, but Buddhists, like Cartesian dualists, could not
abide the idea of consciousness being fully dependent on bodily events,
especially bodily events taking place outside the range of direct
subjective awareness.) A very good book on this dilemma, and Buddhist
attempts to solve it, is Paul Griffith's On Being Mindless.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico