[Buddha-l] Re: Emptiness

[Jim Peavler]

Wonderful! Thank you for this and the reference.

So much depends upon a red wheel-barrow glazed with rain water beside  
the white chickens.  (I'm not the one who said that.)

  Emptiness, as an experience is, if I have experienced it, quite a  
terrifying state of mind to come out of the first time or two because  
I, at least, am completely disoriented. Or it may be my senility  
kicking in.

Back when I thought I was a Buddhist I thought too much.

Now I am trying to just see. Ain't that easy either.



On Oct 22, 2007, at 10:33 AM, Richard Hayes wrote:

> 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
>
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Jim Peavler
jmp at peavler.org